OKAY, so you finally get your own chat show with your pick of guests – albeit within an RTÉ budget of €4.50 – but the drawback is that you also have rampant egos . . . to the point where, if egotism was an Olympic sport, you’d be a dead cert for a gold medal.

So, presented with both a carte blanche and a dilemma, who do you pick, for this, your debut on the couch? Would you go for sporting heroes, stars of stage and screen (in this case, and with budgetary constraints, that would be members of Fair City’s cast) or something completely radical?

How about guests that would probably cost around the price of a few free pints; how about three lads you went to school with who can talk with some authority about your favourite subject – yourself?

Because that’s what Tommy and Hector decided would be the best way to entertain the masses with their car crash of a chat show, shot at the Radisson in Galway before a less than enthusiastic audience.

Three fellas from school who would tell the nation that Tommy and Hector were always this funny, but also intelligent pupils who might well have been brain surgeons or nuclear scientists if comedy hadn’t been their first calling.

Hector has mastered the interviewing style of an RUC constable, just shouting at guests in some sort of exaggerated Naaaavan accent – but then again here’s a man who could happily spend the night interviewing himself.

First guest was ‘controversial’ Kerry footballer Paul Galvin, dressed like some sort of mad man from a John B Keane drama – check shirt buttoned to the neck and skin tight jeans that Russell Brand would baulk at.

The only minutely interesting aspects of a terribly stilted few minutes of chat was that Galvin is in fact an Irish teacher and he has a substantial number of religious tattoos.

It didn’t get any more interesting with Maria Doyle Kennedy and a hugely uncomfortable few minutes with Kevin Myers was only saved by Tommy Tiernan’s observations on eight years of life on the dole in Galway, spent training a cat to play snap and claiming disability for that same moggie named Sean – the eight of the best years of his life.

Tiernan was certainly more up to the task than Hector, but Ryan Tubridy can rest easy on his laurels for the foreseeable future.

We’re like Judge and Mr Crow, exclaimed Tommy; the over 40s Jedward says Hector – and that’s about the most revealing insight he offered all night.

“If I could be catapulted back to any time . . .” says a wistful Hector at one stage, and suddenly we've woken up with the shared hope that he’s departing this era – but it's only to suggest that he’d like to have lived in the time of Henry the Eighth – he’s not alone in wishing for that.

This was below standard chat, split with a sort of cross-eyed Alias Smith and Jones where the two lads gave their views on the world. They even had a bizarre competition called the Accent Wheel of Fortune, where contestants were required to offer a sentence or two in the accent of the county or country on which they landed.

Naturally that wasn’t funny enough on its own, so our intrepid hosts had to put someone else on top of the contestant as though this was Rag Week and hilarious all at once.

Tommy and Hector’s Craic House needed a lot more crack than this – possibly crack cocaine for the audience and electric shock treatment for the viewers to keep them awake to the bitter end.