In between a series of dodgy interviews on RTÉ's pre-recorded trial run of Brendan O'Connor's The Saturday Night Show, and Wednesday night's news broadcasting of a hoax video of a meteor, there was also another clanger in the state broadcaster's schedule last week – Charlie Bird's American Year which detailed the lonely life of the RTÉ reporter in America.

Admittedly, RTÉ didn't have as bad a week as TV3,which mysteriously pulled one of its flagship programmes, Xposé, on Tuesday night due to "technical issues".

But Charlie Bird's American Year was worse than that, because it showed up the very things that are wrong with RTÉ itself. The programme was an astounding admission of the incompetence of Bird and of the news executives who sent him over there. One wonders how they ever let it go to air. Clearly it wasn't humiliating enough to have Bird trek around the Arctic in a luminous onesie.

For anyone who thought Bird was the hardened hack meeting deep throats in car parks, running around sniffing out stories and getting top notch interviews, it was a rude awakening to observe what he is really like (or at least how he came across) – a man used to the cotton-wooling of Montrose, obsessed with his own brand and completely at a loss in even vaguely unfamiliar territory, as if a cosy apartment in DC was Tora Bora.

It's not all his fault, of course. Bird should have never got the job. One can only imagine how angry RTÉ's young, hardworking newshounds were the day they realised that Bird was going to be chilling in DC for the next few years. That must have been infuriating.

Not that RTÉ seems to push its reporters. I remember someone in the newsroom telling me that most of the established staff who had been knocking around Donnybrook for years would crawl into the foetal position if asked to do anything above their minuscule workload. RTÉ is a victim of its size – it is over-staffed to the point it can lob a chunk of employees out on a two-year paid career break and no one will notice. And like all established institutions, it suffers from a severe lack of whip-cracking. The low work ethic and civil service attitude to working at the station is evident when you look at the traffic jams onto Nutley Lane at 5pm on the dot as everyone scarpers lest they be asked do a smidgen more.

There's also an astounding arrogance at work that ensures its top brass get paid ridiculously inflated amounts even though there is practically no compet­ition that could even attempt to poach a 'personality' from the station with higher wages.

That arrogance bleeds into the Charlie Bird documentary. RTÉ assumes that we care enough about its staff to watch a documentary about someone who should just be doing their job. RTÉ is, or course, an expert at self-promotion. The bulk of its chatshow guests tend to be RTÉ employees plugging their careers or new programmes. RTÉ's excuse for this is that it can't help it if most of the well-known people in the country work for it, which is rubbish, as well as lazy. Anytime a new schedule is announced, it's pretty much the same old RTÉ bingo: pick a staff member, attach a dumb pun to the programme title, throw in a ripped-off concept, and there you go – prime-time TV.

It's not easy making good TV and it might seem like I'm taking cheap shots here, but the reality is that RTÉ is easy to slag because so much of its output is rubbish.

RTÉ is decent at buying programmes, even if it does knock a lot of them towards the bedtime end of the schedule – most recently we had Mad Men, and let's not forget Lost, the final season of which premiered last week frighteningly close to the US broadcast date, which is a coup. But most of the time it sacrifices providing content of any depth, which it has a duty to do under its remit as state broadcaster, in an effort to chase ratings. Hence the lack of intelligent programming in place of Gerry Ryan mugging for the camera or some eejit comedian cracking gags that aren't lofty enough for a five-year-old.

Of course, all this ends with Bird coming home because working away from comfy RTÉ was too tough for him. Who will take his place? Please let it be someone eager. And no, we don't want to see how they do the job, we just want them to do it. After all, we're paying for it.

umullally@tribune.ie