A cat only has nine lives, but when it comes to RTE chat shows, Craig Doyle must be well into double figures – and abject failure only seems to spur him on to greater depths.

We’ve had Tonight with Craig Doyle, where he went head to head with Brendan O’Connor and Gerry Ryan in the battle for a permanent Saturday night slot, and – on the basis that Gerry got the permanent gig and then died so Brendan got it instead – we can only presume he was correctly deemed to have finished third of three.

That might knock a lesser ego but, bolstered by an obligatory appearance on every ad break on every terrestrial and digital channel known to man, he came back with his cheesy grim all over The Social. In fairness, by then, he should have been on the social, because this made the Tonight programme look like the Oscars.

Loosely based around the notion of a social network with the suggestion that he simply looked up Facebook before each show and invited in three friends, he’d have been better served if he had three mannequins sitting across from him so he could spend half an hour talking to and about himself.

It proved one thing for certain – friends on Facebook are not real friends, because he didn’t appear to know anything about any of them when they arrived on the set. Not that it mattered, because Craig will always be happy as a skylark once Craig is in the room.

And now, every Tuesday and Thursday night on RTE 2, we have Craig Doyle Live, which sort of falls between his previous efforts in that it is a chat show but with a budget that wouldn’t pay for the tea lady on his previous run.

This time he seems to have one guest and two panellists; week one saw Louis Walsh reveal some ‘exclusive X-Factor news’ – as in “I think I’ll be back; I think Garry will be back; I think Tulisa will be back, and Dermot is definitely back, but no one is contracted yet” – before regurgitating the ‘Colin Farrell could have been in my boy band’ story.
 

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.