Irate George goes where only golden eagles dare

TV View: On Saturday an irate George Hook, wearing a black armband and black tie in "mourning for the death of the Heineken Cup on terrestrial television", kind of intimated that Sky Sports wouldn't know Irish rugby from Japanese baseball.

We thought this was harsh, until Sky's Graham Simmons told Brian O'Driscoll, after Leinster's rather splendid triumph over Bath yesterday, that "they'll be singing Cockles and Mussels in Limerick right now".

Granted, Munster were, we're sure, quite appreciative of Leinster's efforts, efforts that ensured they'd be home-based for the quarter-finals, but cripes, they'd never be that grateful.

So perhaps George had a point.

To say he was angry about the issue would be incorrect. He was enooooormously livid. We can only hope he was out hill-walking yesterday when, at the end of the Leinster game, Miles Harrison declared: "All four of those quarter-finals, you'd want to be at any of them - and you can be at them all with Sky Sports." Oooh.

The only thing that almost cheered George up was Munster's performance, with which he was mildly impressed.

"You can forget Paul McGinley, you can forget Peter Canavan, you can forget Roy Keane, this is where it happens," he swooned.

"Message to Hollywood: bring back Steven Spielberg, bring back Cecil B DeMille, these are the only men who can do justice to what we've seen this afternoon. This is unbelievable."

"It's absolutely bloody amaaaaaazing," he might have said, but he reserved that tribute for the golden eagle he bumped into in RTÉ's Wild Trials earlier in the week, a series in which a bunch of celebrities have to track down and photograph a wild Irish animal.

For what seemed like quite a long time, of the eternity kind, George hid in a teeny, camouflaged tent in Donegal's Glenveagh Park, in freezing cold and pouring rain, waiting for the eagle to pounce on the leg of a deer left for him in the tree opposite George's hideaway.

To be honest, it's hard to know who got the bigger fright when their eyes finally met, George or the eagle. "Holy shit, THERE HE IS," said the eagle.

No, no, that was George's response, just before the shock resulted in him dropping his camera, which is never a good thing to happen on a photo shoot that may last just the two seconds.

But he rescued the situation, retrieved his camera and snapped a series of very lovely pictures. It was a successful exercise, then, but having told us how au fait he was with wildlife activities, we expected no less.

"I have an enooooormous interest in the outdoors," he'd said, "Lansdowne Road, Thomond Park, Musgrave Park . . ."

Incidentally, George's chief adviser was Mike Brown, a wildlife photographer.

"They're really lazy birds," he said of the golden eagle, "they have one objective: to feed, and then to go on and breed, and in their spare time they do very little." And we thought the chimpanzee was man's closest relation.

Any way, we enjoyed Wild Trials enooooormously, a gem of a piece, filmed in a sumptuously stunning manner.

And we also enjoyed The Dubs - the Story of a Season, the ****ing fly-on-the-****ing-wall docu-****ing-mentary about the ****ing Dubs and their ****ing 2005 campaign.

We were, though, a bit puzzled by the outcry over the industrial language used by the cast, most notably Dublin coach Paul Caffrey.

There must have been three dozen women from Clontarf on Joe Duffy's Liveline expressing their dismay.

Two questions.

(1) What did they expect? "Rightie-o chappies, let's go out there and give a jolly good show"?

(2) Why, when there was a warning immediately before the programme about the nature of the language contained within, did these people not switch channels? Do they set out to be offended? Yep, that's what we reckon too.

And why, when we're on a question-asking roll, did Steve Staunton choose Bobby Robson as his "international football consultant"?

Pat Dolan, a guest on Setanta's marathon coverage of Staunton's press conference last Monday, came up with an explanation that, to be honest, we hadn't considered before.

"Well," he said, "maybe it's this thing that people are attracted by the smell from their armpits, that sort of chemistry."

Bernard O'Byrne, sitting beside Pat, looked as puzzled as we felt, but he composed himself sufficiently to give his view of the partnership. "This is a car crash that's going to happen," he said. Optimism, we love it.

And Staunton displayed plenty of it on his Late Late Show appearance on Friday night.

"You're a novice at this game, the media will set traps for you," Pat Kenny warned him, just before sort of trapping Steve into saying "never say never" in relation to the prospects of Roy Keane playing for his Irish team.

What Steve, we half-suspect, meant to say was: "never EVER".

These two sets of armpits, we reckon, just don't have that sort of chemistry.