TOMMY McQUILLAN Who Tommy is, nobody seems to know, save to say that he's a friend of Bernard Dunne's. Dunne was fighting in what looked like a parish community centre in Roscommon, but which RTE claimed to be a sports hall a few miles north of Turin.

Before Dunne faced his Argentine opponent, McQuillan stepped into the ring, took the MC's microphone and unleashed an almighty racket. Jimmy Magee claimed that it was yodelling, but it sounded more like an air raid by some gulls on a cat sanctuary.

McQuillan, Magee intimated, is from Monaghan, where a lack of mountains appears to have mortally wounded his Alpine ambitions. Maybe it was the acoustics, but the cheer he got at the end was surely celebration of the conclusion rather than the act.

The whole fight was an odd broadcast. RTE had shown it live on their website earlier in the evening in what they claimed to be their first live sports webcast. During the latenight repeat on RTE Two, Magee's commentary was nearly drowned out by the unmistakable sound of a dial tone and somebody pressing numbers, making it sound more like a dodgy phone link to Bulgaria in the mid-'80s than cutting edge 21stcentury technology. For the record, Dunne won on points, the judges mercifully ignoring McQuillan's performance.

STEPHEN ALKIN The producer who insists on commentating, Alkin will forever be below George, Jimmy and Ger in the Premiership pecking order. He did manage to blag a trip to Spain midweek though, commentating on Barcelona v Benfica alongside Trevor Steven.

While TV3 lock Ronnie Whelan and some other poor unfortunate in a Ballymount cupboard to assess what happened in far-flung stadia, RTE splash out on the Aer Lingus tickets and make sure the viewers at home know it. It helps that players and managers seem to be obliged to speak to our lads now, ending the days of cutting in late to see ITV's Gabriel Clarke being intimidated by Alex Ferguson. Now we hear George Hamilton impressing Rafa Benitez with his Spanish pronunciations and Trevor Welch confusing Thierry Henry with his broken English.

Alkin managed to collar Henrik Larsson on Wednesday evening.

Larsson always comes across as a horizontally laid back kinda guy while always managing to say very little to the media beyond, "We hope we can win the next game." Alkin nodded and decided to change tack.

Saying that he HAD to ask the question, he asked the Barcelona striker whether he pined for Celtic and if he 'missed the haggis?'.

Larsson's eyes darted about for a moment, but satisfied that the guy seemed to be from an actual TV station, he gave the usual guff about Glasgow being "a place close to my heart".

Back in the studio, Bill O'Herlihy was chuckling heartily. "Do you miss the haggis Ray?" he asked Houghton.

"He does ask some strange questions, doesn't he?" Garth Crooks has yearned for that sort of constructive criticism.

EAMON DUNPHY Was sadly missing for Alkin's haggis moment on RTE but still manages to come up with the goods on his Newstalk breakfast programme. Filling time at the end of Friday morning's show, he read out a text asking why the guitar riff from 'Love Spreads' by The Stone Roses has been reclaimed by his show from his former employers, The Last Word on Today FM. A suddenly animated Dunphy claimed that in "a desperate attempt by a desperate show to take listeners from the excellent George Hook, they dropped the music, which is the equivalent of Alex Ferguson dropping Wayne Rooney. So we took it back." Not the biggest vote of confidence in his own show's content, but you know what these Roses fans are like.

HUGH CAHILL Staying with Newstalk, and their sports reporter Hugh Cahill, who popped up to do the sports bulletin during Orla Barry's show on Friday morning. Barry had been discussing the prevalence of porn in society and wondering if chaps who like it weren't on a slippery slope to sexual deviance. She claimed that in a survey of the male members of the office, only two out of 10 admitted to watching porn. Eoin, her studio guest, dismissed the statistics, not unreasonably suggesting that, "nothing good ever came out of telling a woman you watch porn".

Once Cahill had finished his bulletin, Barry leapt on him (figuratively of course). "Now Hugh, would you watch porn?" "Yep!" came the immediate reply. "And would you have a porn collection?" asked the almost incredulous presenter. "I would, well, not really a collection, there's one DVD that I watch.

Repeatedly." On the Air salutes Hugh, a fast talker and straight shooter.

Sorry, we'll leave that there, it can only get messy.