Clever advance publicity for the Ryanair: Caught Napping programme suggested that it would be a disturbing expose that would make passengers consider carefully whether they would ever fly with Ryanair again. What viewers found out was that the airline's cabin crews are overworked and underpaid, and that Ryanair's central corporate policy appears to be to treat its customers like dirt. But none of this was particularly new or disturbing.

Nobody buys a Ryanair ticket because they admire the airline's standards of customer service. But as this column has argued many times in the past, there will come a day when Ryanair will realise that the reason it is Europe's fastest-growing and most profitable airline is not because of its management, its clever yield policies or its famous cost-cutting strategies, it is because of the money it earns from its customers.

We haven't reached that point yet, as Ryanair can still woo us with new destinations and cheap tickets, but logic suggests that if you regularly treat customers badly, it will eventually come back to haunt you.

Arguably, the Channel 4 programme did throw up a couple of worrying issues . . .

the fact that no-one seemed to care that a door mechanism was showing a faulty reading, for example . . . but these were subsumed into a general impression that, on this occasion, Channel 4 failed to deliver.

Perhaps if Channel 4 had not talked up the programme so much beforehand, viewers might have thought the show did make some interesting points.

Goodbody's aviation analyst Joe Gill perfectly summed up the reaction to the television documentary in a wry note for investors that he issued the morning after the programme was aired.

"Yesterday, we sent a small boy around the office with a hidden camera in his Blackberry. We can exclusively reveal here the following harrowing facts:

(1) in the rest room a disgruntled employee used expletives as he described his 2005 bonus and the manager who awarded same; (2) in the dealing room he found the remnants of a rasher sandwich on a Bloomberg keyboard, thereby endangering multimillioneuro trades in Irish equities; (3) outside the office a passing boot boy informed him all his managers were corrupt and a disgrace; and, most disturbingly, (4) an employee was found beating a Reuters screen indiscriminately with a research report."

Gill said that all the matters in question would be referred to the company's chief executive and that a Channel 4 documentary special, Goodbody, Caught Slapping, would also be commissioned.