TO the din of Paul Wonderful and the Glam Tarts belting out the show's signature tune, Sean Moncrieff shook hands with members of the audience before doing a little shuffle to his seat. Then, in trademark outsize David Letterman suit, Moncrieff pulled funny faces to camera and launched into a string of incestuous Pat Kenny, Gay Byrne and Twink jokes.
The shuffle, the suit, the seat, the smirks and the sassy band are staples of comedy chat shows. They are props and mannerisms which define the genre and set the mood. They signal to you that a presenter with "attitude" - a wiseguy, a wit, a wag - has arrived. In following the format, Good Grief Moncrieff! (despite its pushy exclamation mark) announced its conservatism. Structurally, there was nothing new here. It was a full scale lift from Letterman with an eye on Clive Anderson. The focus, therefore, fell on the wiseguy's attitude. This wasn't very wise for it left the new guy with too much to bear.
Anyway, the wiseguy's first guest was tough guy American actor, Chris Penn, the former brother in law of Madonna. Penn seemed strangely ill at ease, as though the presenter's understandable nervousness had transmitted itself to him. An experienced actor, protecting a tough guy persona, is not an ideal foil for a rookies wiseguy, and an ill at ease tough guy is certainly not going to be the butt of very many jokes.
At one point - after the arrival of guest number two, Pauline McLynn - the conversation had switched to sewage. "Do you have sewage in America?" Moncrieff asked: Penn, before going on to answer his own question by remarking that, of course they had, seeing that his guest had "acted ink some of it". Oops, this sort of gratuitous, Irish pub wit did not impress the tough guy. A fusion of embarrassment rippled through the studio, causing low moans in the audience, a red face for the presenter and a dismissive "It's your show", putdown from Penn.
Still, the mood lifted when Penn agreed to sing. Tough guys don't dance, but this tough guy belted out some theatrically agonised blues with great gusto. A shambles was stalled. Sadly, the next item featured a visit to the Blind Date Ball in the Burlington Hotel where Madge, Geraldine and Sandra were about to meet Damian, Kevin and Fachtna.
One of the blokes, whose mother thought he was too short, said that she had "great bone structure". It would be hard to concoct a more ossifying chat up line and harder still to understand why people allow themselves to be humiliated like this. These blind date efforts seem to be the emotional equivalent of the Roman Colosseum, offering a kind of vulgar voyeurism and vicarious viciousness in direct proportion to the hard neck of the victims.
PR guru Max Clifford was the next guest. David Mellor has called Clifford "a sleazeball" and Clifford has retorted that Mellor is merely "a serial shagger". Such is the discourse of our age. Recently, Clifford handled O. J. Simpson's British gig, which was the cue for Moncrieff to make a few O. J. jokes "now that he's single". Mr Simpson, would, I suppose, make a striking catch at the Blind Date Ball, what with his great bone structure and diamondhard neck.
Ultimately, these presenter centred, comedy chat shows are about a lot of hard neck but not hard jokes. Therein was Moncrieff's problem. He likes satire with a bit of bite - and RTE certainly needs such comedy - but there's a softness and a chumminess about the chat show format which won't bear humour that's too pugnacious. If the guests don't give as good as they get, they look like whipping boys; if they do, the wiseguy doesn't look anything special.
However, these are early days for Moncrieff and his show. But the sort of juvenile, let's be shocking attitude of The End must be forgotten. When bantering Paul Wonderful (a la Letterman's band leader, Paul Schaffer) butted in to ask Keith Floyd about "preparing human flesh" for cooking, nobody laughed. It's not because breaking a taboo can't be funny. It's just that it can't be funny when it's merely gratuitous.
It was clear that a great deal of enthusiasm had been injected into Good Grief Moncrieff! It's more cheap talk TV for RTE, of course, and there is a rawness about it which experience could yet eliminate. But too much is being asked of Sean Moncrieff. To feed himself and his ambition, he could hardly have turned down this opportunity. Perhaps less straining to be funny would help - bad jokes being worse than no jokes at all. There is still time to make this show work - but, being fair to everybody - it's going to be an uphill struggle.
IN contrast, David Letterman's The Late Show is firmly established as a world leader in this genre. But its tortuous bonhomie, Letterman's messianic belief in himself and the designer breeziness of his guests are regularly hideous. Oh, it's very slick, in a Max Clifford sort of way, but it is entirely dependent upon the viewer's acceptance of an unctuous Hello! magazine style contract between the stars and the audience.
Then there is the matter of Letterman's suits. He lounges around in a buttoned up, double breasted business suit, which has twice as much material as necessary in its trousers. Maybe this has got to do with America being the land of plenty and all that, but it makes Letterman look like a golf club guy acting goofy. He plays air guitar and air drums and laughs at all his own jokes, hitting the back of one hand into the palm of the other.
He usually tries out a repeating gag too. On Thursday, it was a couple of lines from a B. B. King song and, to be fair, it was amusing the first five times. But Letterman persisted to the point where even the joke that the joke was dead was beyond a joke. Like a dog with a bone, he wouldn't let go, even when it was clear to him that he was irritating his audience. So, he tried to make this irritating of his audience into the joke. But it flopped, flogged beyond resurrection.
Still, for the most part, Letterman knows what he's doing. That's why they pay him an obscene amount of money. His first guest, though - Sarah Jessica Parker - with a rock chick's big hair and figure hugging denim jeans, was almost beyond endurance. Where do these people get such overweening self confidence? Fair enough, showbusiness is no place for shrinking violets, but some sort of accommodation between real worth and self worth is, surely, not too much to ask.
Ms Parker adopted the smug giddy pose. She pulled her legs under her behind and wriggled continuously on the seat. The performance looked like a full aerobics session. She ran her fingers through her hair to the point where sane people must have been screaming for a shears, and generally sought to portray herself as ditzy and coquettish and... brace yourself... fun. It wasn't quite criminal, but as an exhibition of self love in public, it was thoroughly irritating.
But this is the sort of rubbish that Letterman viewers want. It's Noo Yawk, lit's a glitzy kinda town and all that. But, crucially, it's pure PR. Every remark that it threatens to bite is immediately neutralised by another which reminds you that this is all codology. In that respect, it is not satire, eulogy with a few jokes thrown in.
Such a formula would never work in Ireland, where, thankfully, a sense of proportion, often yuppily dismissed as begrdgery, has not been totally lost.
OVERALL, it has been the weakest week of the year on television - if you discount the football. The warm weather and bright nights are antithetical to TV anyway, but Euro 96 has had its moments. With Ireland not in contention, the festival moods of 1988, 1990 and 1994 are just memories. But this time there's England to talk about. Of the talking heads on view, Ruud Gullit, playing in midfield for the BBC, is the pick of the bunch.
Now that the English team appears to have hit a vein of form - and good luck to them - there is the dreadful prospect of a renewed outbreak of a disease which had been thought to be eliminated. BSE (Bragging Soccerati of England) poisoned many television viewers back in the 1970s and only a concerted losing sequence by the national team brought the plague under control.
It is obvious now, though, that conditions are ripe for a fresh outbreak. If England can beat Spain this afternoon, they will have made the semi finals. If their players are good enough, they deserve all credit. But nobody will deserve the chauvinism of the English pundits and commentators. Packing the team with Dutchman Gullit and a Scotsman, Alan Hansen, shows that the BBC has, in fairness, taken precautions. But the Jimmy Hill strain of BSE remains, like a David Letterman guest, utterly resistant to any sense of proportion.
It hasn't been a good tournament for pundits anyway. Bob Wilson, as presenter/playmaker for ITV, mistimes most of his passes, interrupting play when he should keep out of it. Des Lynam is just a little too silky on the BBC and Bill O'Herlihy clearly prefers the old two man (well, one man and Eamon Dunphy) panel to the current three and four man formations. Still, BBC and RTE are preferable to ITV, which bought knowledge (Alex Ferguson, Kevin Keegan, John Barnes and Jack Charlton) but neglected to consider performance.
FINALLY, Minors With A Mission. As magazine programmes for young people go, this one has the required zest. With a pop music backing and a snappy pace, it is competent and lively. I'm not so sure, though, that there was any need to show us such detail of an operation to neuter a female cat. All pink and gutty, the cat's entrails were not ideal teatime viewing. And the scalpel and the stitching ... there's far too much medicine on TV these times.
That aside, the other segments of the programme generally had the light touch required. Dermot Barrett, the 11 year old brother of traveller Frank, who will box for Ireland in the Olympics in Atlanta, was quite a star. In outsize singlet and shorts as baggy as David Letterman's trousers, Dermot looked the part as he jogged to the Rocky theme tune.
Back at base, we saw him training in the container his Olympian brother uses. The addition of the intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana was as over the top as Paul Wonderful and the Glam Tarts. But you can get away with Kleenex-ad style hyperbole in programmes for kids. A cooler approach works better when you re presenting a prime time chat show. Best not build in the exclamation marks. Relax and the viewers will supply them as appropriate.