Appropriately enough, Martin was fired from You're A Star during Say No To Ageism week. The former Eurovision winner is now 60, and apparently the You're A Star team consider her too old to judge struggling singer-songwriters. The gossip goes that Martin is to be replaced by 34-year-old Amanda Brunker, who will no doubt bring youth and beauty as her two biggest attractions to the show.

I'm not a TV producer, so I don't know why the well endowed former Miss Ireland winner is better qualified to judge the hopes and dreams of literally dozens of wannabe pop stars than a 60 year old.

From what I remember of the last series (when I, ahem, accidentally switched to it before the nine o'clock news was due on and promptly lost the remote) all the judges seemed as bad as each other.

All they did was shout out one laboured, trite catchphrase after another. They all had about as much life and personality as a wooden plank . . . or to give him his full name, Keith Duffy. There was no Simon Cowell-esque scowl and no Sharon Osbournestyle craziness that rescues the incalculable monotony of these shows. So if all the judges were uniformly useless, why did Martin have to walk the Duffy? Was it really because she was too old? Was there a bust-up back stage? Were they clearing the way for Louis Walsh's reintroduction? Or had it just taken so long to apply her pre-stage make-up that she had finally become more trouble than her mediocre presence was worth?

Arguably, she was the best known of all the judges on the show. Ask anyone if they remember her Eurovision win and you'll be treated to a chorus of 'Why Me?' belted out at full volume. She had that campy zeitgeist edge, it had almost become ironically cool to watch her again; had she played up to it a bit more, maybe by hosting the Alternative Miss Ireland awards or presenting Telly Bingo, she could have become Ireland's very own Lulu.

By taking herself so seriously, Martin could have been the architect of her own downfall. Maybe none of us would have noticed her age had she not tried to hide it so well with layers and layers of make-up.