OFF AIR

÷MARTY Morrissey is a national treasure so why hide him away in disguise? Sorry, but I didn’t buy into the bearded punter Marty, left, dishing out hugs at the National Ploughing Championships. Or maybe the disguise was just too good. Ploughing on (ouch) but these puns are starting to grate. By the time we’d got to ‘The Lonesome Pine’, a piece on how the hot summer had played havoc with one man’s Christmas Tree growing business in Co. Wicklow I’d started to eat my own fist. ÷NOBODY had bothered to switch over from the Ploughing to the soccer (do I have to do everything?) so it was by accident that I caught Building Ireland, and it a repeat too. But that was me for the next half an hour. Now I know all about Roe’s old Windmill Tower in the Liberties, his whiskey, how ex-customs man Aeneas Coffey revolutionised whiskey-making, and the Great Whiskey Fire of 1875 when 13 people died of alcohol poisoning from drinking the burning whiskey running through the streets. ÷WITCHERY is a serious business which is why taking it too seriously makes it laughable. Give me a camp Vincent Price, an overblown Gandalf or bespectacled boy wizard Harry Potter and his pals any day over the earnest yuppie academics like Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer, right, of Sky’s new blockbuster A Discovery of Witches.