And now that the housing boom is finally over, David McWilliams has been proved right. We poor, misguided fools should have listened to him instead of being distracted by his foppish red hair and bedroom eyes. Chicken McLicken was right all along. The roof holding up the housing market has fallen down. (Well, it has sprung a few leaks anyway. ) It just took about 10 years, that's all. Ah, well. He has kept us entertained in the meantime.

McLicken hosts the three-part Generation Game. I haven't seen it, but I'm guessing cash-rich old folks, who are sitting on an Ovaltine tin full of equity, are going to wipe the Axminster with the debt-rich young desperados. I can feel their carpet burns from here.

Golden oldies, according to the RTE Guide, are 50-plus. The editor's name is Aoife Byrne should you want to write to her and complain. If I were 50-plus, I would.

RTE's new season takes its inspiration from the economy: the slowdown and the excess. If this were the original Generation Game, the conveyor belt would have highdefinition TVs, lines of cocaine (High Society, a documentary on the white stuff), computers (Web of Desire, hosted by Anna Nolan), toys with an unsafe level of lead from China (from where George Lee will be reporting) and a TV3 DVD box set of American imports.

Other programmes try to combine our insatiable gluttony with our fake social conscience.

Perfect to watch with one of those salty TV dinners featured on a previous episode of Corrigan Knows Food. With one Michelin star under his ample waistline, chef Richard Corrigan is back with The Corrigan Challenge. A bit like Jamie's School Dinners, except in places like homeless shelters and on trains. I'd say the former is cleaner than the latter.

Rachel Allen will be cooking up a storm too. (Mmmf I'm hungry too now! ) And how are we going to work off all of this excess? RTE has thought of that too. Gerry Ryan, of all people, presents Operation Transformation, an eightpart series "that puts six human guinea pigs under the eye of roving webcams and on the weighing scales". That's the RTE Guide's honest, if titillatingly brutal, description again.

But first, an SMS for Gerry Ryan: "Get ur own ass on ze weighing scales b4 hosting ziz show." Sure, these people participate willingly but having Ryan host this programme is like having a pre-presidential George W Bush host a travel show or Gerry Adams present a TV tribute to 1960s Flower Power. Yuck! I do not recommend this show if you're a recovering bulimic . . . or are already a fan of the show from which it draws its "inspiration", Living TV's The Biggest Loser.

Ryan Tubridy will be back on Tubridy Tonight. The "golden oldies" watch it on TV, while in the studio you have the Yoppies . . . Young People of Ireland. (That's me coming over all David McLicken on you by trying out a clever acronym of my ownf it's fun, try it! ) It's on Friday night, so the other 99.99% of Yoppies are out getting hammered. Despite its pretensions to the contrary, like Kenny Live, this is a housewives' favourite.

Tubridy's house band, The Camembert Quartet, are hip and groovy if you think big hair is back and you use words like "hip" and "groovy". This show is a bridgeand-tunnel version of cool. I mean, even the skyscrapers in the graphics are an anachronism. What city are these guys living in? They should have a silhouette of a Georgian mile and a big red square office block in the middle instead.

That I would recognise.

Among the line-up of economists, chefs and would-be diet mongers, we're missing someone here: Eddie Hobbs Inc.

He has had a virtual monopoly on the Rip-Off Republic with his TV shows. With his magazine and books, he continues to make loadsamoney off the back of the fact that the rest of us are being scammed, but he has not been invited back to Montrose for the new season. In his place, we have Joe Duffy.

The RTE Guide is priceless: "Joe Duffy, champion of the plain people of Ireland, shows us the money in the consumer show." Plain people of Ireland? That's you, my pretties! Yes, you, who have called into Liveline and opened your heart to the nation about your grandmother on a hospital bed. So, put down your plain phone and crawl back under your plain rock in your plain housing estate, no doubt built on not-so plain flood plains, too.

And wait. Doesn't Eddie Hobbs show us the money? How's that for a kick in the molars? I don't care what debt-collection agency you're from, that's gotta hurt. But I speak too soon. RTE says there are more programme ideas with Hobbs in development for after Christmas.

Joe's show is called Highly Recommended: bargain hunters pitted against an expert. A bit like the BBC's Bargain Hunt really . . . except in the ad breaks on RTE they'll sell you a ton of stuff you don't need.

Over on TG4, there's more spending on Paisean Faisean, where the Jehovah's Witness presenter Aoife Ni Thuairisg was allegedly not comfortable with gay contestants. The fourth season returns with new presenters (hurrah! ).

Mairead Ni Chuaig and Blathnaid Ni Chonnchada. The guys have 600 to buy an outfit for the girl or . . . this season if we gays eat up all our greens . . . the guy. Believe you me: many, many gays need makeovers.

Back on RTE, boybands are the only celebrities who don't have a sell-by date, mostly because they are genuine international celebrities: people know who they are in Liverpool and Milton Keynes.

Shane Lynch from Boyzone managed to land a reality TV gig about the run-up to his marriage with Sheena White, not on TV3 like you might expect but on RTE One. It's called Shane Lynch: A Boyz Own Wedding. Get it? You like? You like?

For its part, TV3 has the second season of Lorraine Keane's Xpose, and more fly-on-the-wall diaries in the style of last year's Diary of a Debutante: Diary of a Groom, Beauty Queen and Wannabe. It seems a bit of an oddball selection but I guess nobody said it had to make sense.

Sinead O'Carroll, formerly of B*witched, is the new host of the makeover show Inside & Out. TV3 must have Joe Duffy's demographic.

TV3, which launched its new schedule on Thursday, scored its biggest coup for the new season:

broadcasting all of Ireland's Rugby World Cup games as well as the opening tournament game (France versus Argentina), two quarter-finals, both semi-finals and the final. And, hark, there is a tentative move towards investigative reporting. Crime reporter Paul Williams will tell the story of the Criminal Assets Bureau in The Bureau.

But, carping aside, RTE is producing a welcome 3,500 hours of home-produced content this year and 30 hours of documentaries, six new Irish dramas, including Eden, a feature-length adaptation of Eugene O'Brien's play about an Irish couple living in an English town in the midlands whose marriage is on the rocks, and Prosperity, Mark O'Halloran's four much-anticipated films about life on the edges of this boomtown.

RTE is giving mouth-to-mouth to The Clinic, bringing back Podge & Rodge, Seoige & O'Shea, with a live audience (woo-hoo! ), The Late Late Show, with a new set (yee-ha! ) and The Panel, where overgrown schoolboys huddle behind the bike shed to see who has the biggest sense of humour. Oh, and Barry Murphy and Stuart Carolan's new feature-length dramedy is called No Laughing Matter. Let's hope it doesn't live up to its name.