This week, etonline. com and E! News showed a clip of Ellen DeGeneres breaking down during the opening monologue of her own chat show. She adopted a dog from a rescue agency, it didn't get along with her cats, so she gave it to her hairdresser's two little girls, but the agency found out and took the dog back.

Blowing into a handkerchief, Ellen said: "Today, I'm not capable of being funny when things are going so terribly wrong right now." (The agency has gotten death threats and the man who breeds the original "Lassie" collies says he supports Ellen. ) Okay, nobody died, and it's just a dog, but I felt for her.

American chat shows are masters of important things that don't matter. I watch clips of The View on ABC. com . . . the US allwoman coffee klatch, that is, not the RTE show. It's what UTV's Loose Women wishes it could be.

Around the table are veteran journalist Barbara Walters; comedienne Joy Behar, the grounded anti-Bushite; Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the Bush-loving former Survivor contestant; Sherry Shephard, a Biblethumping actress who isn't sure if the earth is flat; and Whoopi Goldberg, the big-name replacement for Rosie O'Donnell, who left in a blaze of controversy over her rants about Iraq.

This week, Hillary Clinton met the ladies. She was too 'on', telling Whoopi she was "so proud" of her that she'd quit smoking. Clinton rightly refused to respond to comments by Barack Obama's wife . . . who said that she was polarising . . . pulled out the suffragette card and also said she wanted to pull the troops out of Iraq as "responsibly" as possible, whatever that means.

She also scored a hit with the phrase "cowboy diplomacy". It wasn't terribly hard-hitting, but The View combines tough-talking 'hot topics' and sentiment. As such, it has become a touchstone in American media culture.

Back home, Podge and Rodge, a lecherous Statler & Waldorf, embody our meaner culture of schadenfreude. They had Maura Derrane, who is still flogging her plastic-surgery magazine. They played that clip of Pat Kenny giving her the hand and asked her about designer vaginas:

"Would you ever think about getting yourself some Burberry flaps?" Derrane was a good sport.

That's the beauty of and the problem with Podge and Rodge.

If you sit and take it, it's a winwin situation. It's a chat show with one gag. But if they help us maintain a more generous disposition in real life, their work on this earth is done.

Rather than fiddle with the TV aerial some more like Steptoe or prattle on about how Tubridy Tonight does its darnedest to ape the Jay Leno/David Letterman format, though less successfully than Friday Night With Jonathon Ross or Parkinson, I'd like to share a 1981 clip from NBC's The Tonight Show. By the way, The Late Late Show (1962) is not the world's longest-running chat show; that honour goes to Tonight (1954, if you include Steve Allen and Jack Paar's tenure). Anyway, the 1981 clip features Jimmy Stewart reading a poem about his dog Beau to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

Here's a condensed version: "There were nights when I'd feel his stare and I'd wake up and he'd be sitting there and I'd reach out to stroke his hair and sometimes I'd feel him sigh and I think I know the reason why / And now he's dead and there are nights when I think I feel him climb upon our bed and lie between us and I'd pat his head / And there are nights when I'd think I'd feel that stare and I reach out my hand to stroke his hair and he's not there / Oh how I wish that wasn't so, I'll always love a dog named Beau."

That clip, which I've watched many times, always leaves me with a lump in my throat and gives me hope. It reminds me why I like The View and don't dismiss Ellen's tears.

Jimmy and Ellen have the same heart. I watched the Ellen clip with three friends: two of us felt for the girls and the dog, the other two thought Ellen was unstable, manipulative or overreacting.

But kids live in a world where bonding with a pet dog is an important thing that does matter.

If I were her producer. I'd tell her it's OK to cry, baby. It shows raw courage and real life and that's what chat shows the world over should all be about.