Panic spreads quickly through the RTE canteen. "They're coming! They're coming!" shrieks Dave Fanning as he pushes and shoves Marian Finucane out of his way and starts a terrified stampede for the door.

"Oh my God! Oh my God!" wails a hyperventilating Kathryn Thomas, standing on the hands of a collapsed Ryan Tubridy, who's groaning a decade of the rosary in a heap with Myles Dungan and Maxi.

"AAAAIGH!" yells Caroline Morahan as she knocks Anne Doyle out of her escape path and bites a piece off Aengus McAnally's ear.

Then. Suddenly. There's silence. Not a bird can be heard. The air is sucked from the room. Philip Boucher Hayes turns, opens his mouth as if to speak, but simply points to a distant hill. The RTE board members have appeared on horseback, in full body armour, silhouetted in the evening sun.

The presenters begin screaming and yelling again.

But the board-members are silent, steely-eyed and carrying nets. They look to their leader for a signal. Cathal Goan, director general of RTE, sits straight-backed on his horse. His face is a grim death mask. Almost imperceptibly he nods. Then with a horrific war-cry the entire board of RTE ride down into the canteen. Horses snorting, their nets aloft. It's like a scene from Planet of the Apes as they cut through the terrified presenters. When the dust settles, two figures are slumped in the nets. The director general raises his right hand. It is enough.

It has been a good hunt.

And that, no doubt, is how RTE got otherwise dignified people like radio person John Creedon and weather-lady Evelyn Cusack to be on Fáilte Towers, a reality TV show in which bottom-rung celebrities try to run a hotel for a couple of weeks.

As for the other 'famous people' on display – glamour model Claire Tully, Eurovision losers Donna and Joe (for the purposes of this show Donna and Joe count as one full human celebrity), yer one from The Apprentice (Jennifer Maguire), and that R'n'B singer nobody's heard of (Luke Thomas) – they probably got onto it as part of some sort of Fás course.

As for Brian Dowling? Well, word on the street is that he's been living a sort of Truman Show-type existence since he won Big Brother. As far as he's concerned he's just got a new job in a hotel.

Anyway, Fáilte Towers isn't so much scraping the bottom of the televisual barrel, as it's finding there was a false bottom on the barrel all along, beneath which there was a secret room filled with poo.

In each episode, three of the celebrities are voted by the public to face the judges, Sammy Leslie of Castle Leslie, chef Derry Clarke and TV personality/hotelier Bibi Baskin. This trio decide who stays and who goes based on their 'work', but because the show is edited by monkeys, thus far they mainly make their decisions based on things we haven't actually seen.

Indeed, Fáilte Towers is defiantly, uniquely and impressively badly put together. There's jumpy edits, bizarre sound-level problems, disjointed storytelling, and no coherent narrative.

And there's also loads of repetition. Every dramatic episode is shown at least four times. Whether it's Brian Dowling cleaning a piss-filled urinal, Joe McCaul dropping a tray of potatoes, or Don Baker angrily jabbing his finger at Derry Clarke while repeatedly saying "are you calling me liar?", we're shown a flashforward of the event before it happens, then it's shown 'properly', then it's shown again in flashback, and finally it's presented as part of a montage when someone is jettisoned from the hotel.

They also show things bizarrely out of sequence. In Tuesday's episode, for example, Jennifer Maguire refers to cleaning up vomit earlier that day, but the incident seems to happen in the next episode. And unless RTE has managed to twist the laws of space and time, that's just plain lazy (who could blame them, sez you, the way they're hunted by those dirty apes in management).

Anyway, thus far the hotel has been visited by hen parties, nudists, room-wrecking wannabe rock-and-rollers, hotel inspectors and people from Kerry. But they're all just distractions. Everyone knows this show is really about self-righteous judges, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God presenters (Baz Ashmawy and Aidan Power), and famous people cleaning up vomit, sniping at one another and crying.

Fáilte Towers is, indeed, poo-tastic. I think Brian Dowling (who's been quite funny throughout) summed it up nicely when he said: "I think the s.h.i.t. [he spelled it out like that] is going to hit the le big fan. It's going to splatter. I am going to have shit on my face. Michelle is going to have shit on her face. Claire is going to be covered in shit, Donna's going to be covered in shit. So is Evelyn. We are all going to be covered in shit" (I'm sure someone in RTE is, as we speak, devising a programme called 'Poo Island' which takes this literally).

Richard Dawkins, the proselytising atheist, author and scientist is presenting a new series The Genius of Charles Darwin, and he would have loved Fáilte Towers, proving as it does, that intelligent design can't explain everything ("If there is a God then why does he let Fáilte Towers happen?" I might have asked my mother as a troubled child, if my life had been edited by the time-bending editors responsible for Fáilte Towers).

Anyway, amidst what is otherwise a very well-organised elucidation of the detail and discovery of Darwin's theory of evolution, Dawkins decides to go into an English secondary school to destroy the faith of some religious teenagers. What Dawkins doesn't seem to grasp that it might be possible to believe in evolution and an almighty deity. So the show finished with some poor teens pummelled into admitting that maybe there might be something in this evolution thing, while adding "I'll still say my prayers though," as if that was something to apologise for.

Now, Dawkins also talks to geologists, biologists, visits the Galapagos Islands, looks for fossils, and clearly explains how Darwin's big idea changed everything. But he can't stop himself demonstrating a total disinterest in other points of view – saying things like "no reasonable person could believe otherwise" or "evolution is a theory of life on earth far more wonderful and more moving than any religious theory of creation".

I'll keep watching, on the off-chance Dawkins arm-wrestles God into admitting he doesn't exist, or better still, announces what I'm sure he secretly thinks – "I, Richard Dawkins, created the universe. It was wet that Saturday and mother told me to go to my room and play with my trains..."

Stuart Carolan and Barry Murphy's romantic comedy Little White Lie wasn't quite fully evolved. Which is a shame, because much about it was really cool – the characterisation, the parodies of Irish TV and radio programmes ("so you found an earlobe in your cornflakes?" says a Joe Duffy-alike radio presenter), and some lovely dialogue.

Even the daft setup had potential – a struggling actor (Andrew Scott) pretending to be a psychiatrist to woo a children's television presenter (Elaine Cassidy). But it lacked sexual chemistry, so the will-she-won't-she, will-he-won't-he drama didn't really come off.

It was as if Carolan and Murphy got so involved in creating the detailed little world of their film that they didn't bother colouring in the core relationship.

Still, it was very funny, very watchable, and in its atypical depiction of Dublin and Dubliners, very refreshing. In fact, I'd love to see it expanded out into a fully-fledged drama series where the characters would have more time to develop. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the budget for such things is wrapped up in about 10 years of poo-farming at Fáilte Towers.