The first episode began with Cooper's Michael McDowell setting off from his home for an interview with Pat Kenny in RTE.

Cooper does McDowell really well . . . he gets the croak in the voice just right, and the exchange between McDowell and his foreign nanny perfectly captured the justice minister's tetchiness and intolerance. 'McDowell's' best line . . . "I'm a Ronseal politician; I do exactly what it says on the tin" . . .

wasn't a Stembridge original, which was the point of it of course, and hopefully its very utterance in this context will render it redundant as an ingratiating political soundbite.

Once McDowell got to RTE studios, many more characters were introduced; from this point whatever satirical head of steam the show had built up was diffused as it descended into amusing if slightly pointless tomfoolery. A very contrived plotline served only to facilitate Cooper's rogue's gallery of media personalities, and while these bits of the show were still very funny (I loved the Kevin Myers and Fintan O'Toole takeoffs), there just wasn't anything that couldn't have slotted comfortably into an instalment of Apres Match. On the whole though, there was enough here to whet the appetite for the rest of the series . . .

but then I was already looking forward to the season when I saw those gun-toting 'Willie O'Dea' publicity pictures.

The problem with watching impressions shows is that for about an hour afterwards it's hard to watch anything else on TV without thinking that everyone is doing impressions. On episode one of fly-on-the-wall series This Is David Gest, I kept thinking I was watching Rafael Benitez . . . or perhaps the DUP's Nigel Dodds . . .

doing an impression of Michael Jackson, and even if I had been, it wouldn't have out-weirded anything that the real David Gest said or did during this programme.

Gest, you'll remember, is the exhusband of Liza Minelli, and it was on the basis of his wedding photos to Minelli that everyone had him pegged as an oddball. Unfairly pegged, as lots of people were then to think, as over the course of an appearance on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here he actually came across as a pretty decent skin.

Now resident in London's Grosvenor Hotel, and trying to make an even bigger name for himself in the UK, he's back to being an oddball, if quite a sympathetic oddball, for reasons hard to explain. Suffice it to say that at any moment you expected him to climb up a tree and start asking around if anyone had seen his childhood. He also spent a lot of the time shattering the illusion that you were an invisible observer on his barmy life; he constantly sniped at the camera crew for encroaching too far, and as a result the programme actually felt more 'real' and was more enjoyable than most of its kind.

Wince-inducing, eye-opening reality was the currency of another fly-on-the-wall series on RTE One. A few weeks ago, an episode of the hospital drama 3lbs had a scene in it in which a brain surgeon performed an operation about an hour afterwards it's hard to watch anything else on TV without thinking that everyone is doing impressions. On episode one of fly-on-the-wall series This Is David Gest, I kept thinking I was watching Rafael Benitez . . . or perhaps the DUP's Nigel Dodds . . .

doing an impression of Michael Jackson, and even if I had been, it wouldn't have out-weirded anything that the real David Gest said or did during this programme.

Gest, you'll remember, is the exhusband of Liza Minelli, and it was on the basis of his wedding photos to Minelli that everyone had him pegged as an oddball. Unfairly pegged, as lots of people were then to think, as over the course of an appearance on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here he actually came across as a pretty decent skin.

Now resident in London's Grosvenor Hotel, and trying to make an even bigger name for himself in the UK, he's back to being an oddball, if quite a sympathetic oddball, for reasons hard to explain. Suffice it to say that at any moment you expected him to climb up a tree and start asking around if anyone had seen his childhood. He also spent a lot of the time shattering the illusion that you were an invisible observer on his barmy life; he constantly sniped at the camera crew for encroaching too far, and as a result the programme actually felt more 'real' and was more enjoyable than most of its kind.

Wince-inducing, eye-opening reality was the currency of another fly-on-the-wall series on RTE One. A few weeks ago, an episode of the hospital drama 3lbs had a scene in it in which a brain surgeon performed an operation on someone's open head while the patient was awake. It seemed fantastical, like something out of a sci-fi drama. Yet exactly the same procedure was performed for real on Surgeons, in what must have been some of the most remarkable scenes ever seen on Irish TV.

Also remarkable in its own way was the extent to which the two neurosurgeons on view here . . .

Charlie Marks of Cork University Hospital and Ciaran Bolger of Beaumont . . . confounded your expectations of how a surgeon might behave in person. To make another comparison with another TV show, the new (very funny) Harry Enfield series has a sketch in it featuring a couple of pompous, culture-snob surgeons.

At the risk of sounding like a snob myself, Bolger was as ordinaryseeming a bloke as you could hope to meet, sounding like your local friendly postman, while Marks . . .who spoke melancholically about the operations that haunt him . . .defied the stereotype of the icy, detached medical technician.

Bolger also spoke of the frustrations of working as one of just nine neurosurgeons within an under-funded system that still runs on antiquated equipment and ancient computers prone to crashing mid-operation.

Yet despite these antagonistic forces, and the realisation on the part of the viewer that these people we entrust with our lives are only human, there were the patients . . . back on their feet within days of some of the most traumatic operations anyone might have to face . . . to attest to the brilliance and devotion of these superheroes of society.

Reviewed The State Of Us Sunday, RTE One This Is David Gest Sunday, UTV Surgeons Monday, RTE One