Then we had the Catholic church. There were pictures of the pope in every farmhouse.

But that one turned very sour. At one point it looked like we might get the Haughey family as a soap opera - it had a plot that made Dallas look tame - but the Haughey soap opera proved too expensive, both emotionally and financially.

The Dáil hardly counts, does it, when it takes so many commercial breaks and is anyway so boring even when all the housemates are present that it's hard to tell if the show is actually rolling or not. The Dáil could probably use a Newcastle-accented voiceover, and perhaps a jacuzzi. Or maybe not.

Irish millionaires do not seem very extrovert, except in their spending. It would be nice to have a very rich family to follow, preferably with some pretty daughters whose clothes we could criticise, but so far our millionaires have resolutely refused to play ball.

The Irish celebrity circuit is hard graft really, both for the journalists who create it and the public who consume it. There's not very much life in it. So we have to import our soap operas now, as we import everything else. Another country decides who is interesting; which is a sort of colonialism on the telly.

Obviously the most amusing thing on television at the moment is the mobile phone which advertises Celebrity Big Brother - particularly when he is hopping out of Harley Street with a bandage round his little telephone head, having just had celebrity plastic surgery. But after the Celebrity Big Brother - the phone works for one of the show's sponsors - the most amusing thing on television at the moment is Russell Brand.

Russell Brand presents Big Brother's Big Mouth. Russell Brand is to television presenting what Einstein was to physics. He has brought it to another level. He has refreshed it and made its possibilities seem endless. He makes other presenters his own age - for example Dermot O'Leary, who presents Big Brother's Little Brother, very well - look like Parkinson on a slow day.

The Friday before last, Russell Brand was on the phone to John McCririck, that miserable old racing tipster who made so many of our nights hell two years ago. "There he goes, " said Russell Brand when the interview was over. "The finest damn misogynist this country has ever produced." No-one else seemed to find this as funny as I did - but it made my weekend.

Even those of us who are not watching Celebrity Big Brother - and quite a lot of us are just watching Russell, whose unenviable job it is to make the whole tired circus interesting - are a bit worried about what it is doing to modern Britain. Celebrity Big Brother seems to have replaced the royal family - but not the Royle Family - in the hearts of that nation. I mean, who can care about Kate Middleton, really, when you have Jade stalking the land?

Kate may be about to become engaged to Prince William, but Jade has plans to start working in the theatre.

Kate may be photographed coming out of a nightclub (see this week's Hello! ) and she may be photographed coming out of her house (although the Palace seems to have put a stop to that) but Jade has been sleeping with her boyfriend on live television, and in front of her mum (poor Jackiey, it was a terrible mistake to evict her).

But as Britain moves from the old soap opera to the new, surely - as a nation - we have to sit down and ask ourselves why we have no enduring soap opera of our own. It is a cultural deficiency and it's time it was addressed.