I'm at the end of me tether. There's been three of these Prosperity shows, bang, bang, bang, and each one is more depressin' the other.

In the first one, Stacey got preggers at 17. In the other one, Gavin, who's 14, got bet-down in school, though, I'll tell you this, he could be a mad yoke too if you got on the wrong side of him. This week, Georgie, who's 42, drinks himself stupi'.

And I'm sittin' here, 'n anyways, stuck in front of the Telly Savalas like a spare tool gone out of fashion. They're wreckin' me buzz.

And me havin' worked all day! I'll bleedin' head butt someone I will.

Apostrophes aside, Mark O'Halloran's Prosperity is a valuable timepiece of Dublin 2007:

angry little so-and-sos on the street barely out of their teens, barking at women because they're black or look like they scare easily; defaced council flats set against polished office buildings; dazed-and-confused alcoholics like Georgie (Gary Egan) crossing the Millennium Bridge;

the unemployed spending their dole on scratch cards and "40 Blue". I live here too. I see girls in video stores, buying tokens for sun beds in the next room. Skin cancer, lung cancer, alcoholism and scratch cards. Like, enough already!

Lenny Abrahamson's direction is stylish, but too heavy handed. I see the big Lotto finger pointing when Georgie walks out of the corner store, where there's an Asian shop assistant who's trying his best to deal with the stream of rundown lost souls, and the shop is called Harry's. Yes, I notice Georgie walking past Fresh in Smithfield, the old and new, the past imperfect and future conditional. I get it! He is lost in a city that is busy selling couscous and sundried tomatoes and Georgie can't even qualify for the dole because he refurbishes furniture . . . not a skill, apparently . . . and he Quentin Fottrell doesn't like Fas.

And poor Ger Ryan, in a cameo, looks like her best days were never behind her, let alone ahead of her. Will somebody please give this woman a role where she can wear a bit of make-up? A woman in pink pajamas meets Georgie outside the dole office. "You're supposed to sign on every six months, " she says. "Now how am I supposed to remember that?" Yes, it's wellwritten and its execution is, like the Belle Eire it harpoons, slick.

But I yearn for a series with one through plot. Next week: "Pala (31) an African immigrant, separated from her child, finds her hunger for human contact becoming increasingly desperate." Jesus, Mary and St Joseph. I know how she feels.

Like I said, if it's not one thing it's another. RTE did it again.

They screened David McWilliams' opus The Generation Game, which ties in nicely with the Northern Rock hysteria, at the same time as Prosperity. How many weeks do they have two long-awaited programmes that are basically dealing with two sides of the same coin?

McWilliams says we've all been on the lash the last 10 years, a Botox Nation of Billy Bunkers, cash-rich over-50 Jagger generation who sold their garden to developers, live off the income and play golf, while us debt-rich younger guns are about to get flushed down the crapper.

I love a good scare at bedtime.

And there were plenty of "money" shots here, showing McWilliams in front of skyscrapers in China and in ghost towns in Uruguay. Uruguay, with its beef exports at the start of the last century, crashed and burned.

Yes, corruption in Ireland led to bad planning. But we were coping with a massive infrastructure deficit and house prices were playing catch-up. True, we are America's bitch and reliant on their billions of dollars of investment. But we're never truly happy until we're truly miserable, especially when we have someone to blame, preferably someone other than ourselves.

Torn may or may not be using the McCanns' story as a cheap marketing tool. Four-year-old Alice disappears from a beach.

Ten years later, to the day, her mother Sarah (Holly Aird) sees a girl who looks like her. She chases her and gets arrested. Her husband David (Adam Kotz) believes their daughter drowned.

A policewoman (Poppy Miller) goes to the flat where the mysterious girl lives and bumps into her. It's her birthday. On this day of all days? Is it her? You betcha.

This has a touch of the Judith Krantzes, but the heartfelt performances save what is either an exploitative drama or, given the extremely bad timing, an exploitative broadcast. Either way, I'm in dire need of a laugh track.