And now for something completely indifferent

This week's television was a mixture of uncontained excitement, mammoth feats and
mind-numbing boredom, writes Dermot Bolger

The Oscars are coming to your screens shortly with US television executives terrified that their new comedian presenter will go crazy altogether and say something original. Or that some guests will have died of boredom before they get through the 7,531 categories that already exist.

Far be it for me to further disturb their sleep by suggesting another category. But should they invent one for Best Continuous Use of a Single Phrase. Ireland surely has a shoo-in victor in young Kelly from Ringaskiddy who along with her mother won not one but two cars on The Late Late Show.

For Kelly alone it was worth staying up to watch the show's repeat at midnight on Monday (RTÉ 1) and hear her continually repeat the immortal phrase, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God" like a mantra amidst the sort of excitement normally reserved for the independence celebrations of smaller African nations. Many future stars have begun their television careers with one line, but few have ever made such good use of it. The giving away of cars rarely makes for exciting television but Kelly and her mother were a great double act, pulsating with tension, fear and excitement. It made for great live television and fair play and congratulations to them.

However not even Kelly's enthusiasm and animation could have made Time Commanders: Horse Sense (BBC 2, Sunday, 6.45pm) exciting. The following night on Comedy Connections (BBC 1, Monday, 11.05pm) one of the Monty Python team described the BBC in the early 1970s as a retirement home for former RAF officers and the golden age of television executives – there simply weren't any. Television executives exist now and it is terrifying to think that one (or even a cluster) of them imagined that Time Commanders would make for interesting television.

The concept packages history as a video game, inviting teams of video gamers into the studio to test their knowledge of military strategy as they re-fight the battle of Troy from over 3,000 years ago.

The graphics on the games bear such an uncanny resemblance to the opening titles on RTÉ's The Premiership that you expect John Giles to provide the analysis. However it is left to host Richard Hammond to try and inject some excitement into proceedings as teams of earnest men play with their computers. Television studios being hot, they did at least have to remove their anoraks. But it looked like the only thing to generate real excitement in the studio would have been a power failure.

If Time Commanders showed how to make history boring, then The Seven Wonders of the Industrial Age (BBC 2, Sunday 9.45am), despite its singularly unpromising title, was a good example of how a drama documentary can bring the past alive. In this case it was the construction of the gigantic Hoover Dam, brought in by Frank "Hurry Up" Crowe two years and two months ahead of schedule, but at the cost of 107 men in the extraordinary rush to pour and dry tons of concrete. It was simple, effective television that captured the frenzied atmosphere of an enterprise that was never tried on such a scale before.

As I write, detectives are attempting to unravel a complex money-laundering operation. Its labyrinthine complexity may only be matched by the trail of late 1960s television shows that eventually brought together the six comic geniuses who wrote Monty Python's Flying Circus. The aforementioned Comedy Connections attempted to trace the evolution of Messers Cleese and Co from trying to temporarily avoid real jobs after university (Cleese imagined he would eventually become a solicitor). They moved from writing sketches for The Frost Report, to working on a myriad of projects from At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Sets to The Complete and Utter History of Britain before the BBC let them loose together at an off-peak hour, without paying much heed to what they were doing.

Python has been boiled down to a handful of famous sketches but perhaps their greatest achievement was that the moment they felt that they were losing their edge of originality they simply stopped.

Irish television executives are haunted by the possible catastrophe that we might one day win the Eurovision Song Contest again. So far You're A Star (RTÉ1, Sunday) has proved a safe antidote to such a financial meltdown.

However, there is still the danger that somebody of originality and talent might slip through the process. Perhaps this is why this week they resorted to the tactic of making every act sing a banal Elvis song, with one of the few contestants to show spunk and distinctiveness being voted off. Germaine Greer received 40 grand for the indignity of appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. One hopes that Dave Fanning is being similarly rewarded.