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Blind Date TV3 player, until November 8, episode 1 If you missed last Sunday’s opening episode, here’s your chance to catch up with host Al Porter (left) and Dionne from Cork as she chooses between Gary from Kilkenny, David from Dublin and Keith from Kildare (who impersonates Keith Flint from The Prodigy in his spare time); followed by Gary from Tallaght, who gets to pick between Jennifer from Meath, Niamh from Leixlip and Ciara from Blanchardstown for a date. This is purest cringe TV, a shameless romp through terrible puns, ghastly one-liners and general groan-inducing awfulness. The double-entendres are weak and about as smutty as one of those old-style seaside postcards, and the sexual tension is a predictable nil.

TV3 clearly hasn’t set out to reinvent the wheel — if anything, this is a pale imitation of the Cilla Black original — but it might just be what we all end up talking about. Hardy Bucks RTE Player, season 1-3 This started life in 2008 as a series of very rough and ready YouTube videos, created by Chris Torduff and Martin Maloney, about the fictional Castletown in Co Mayo, and featuring a cast of loveable losers, eejits, small-time drug dealers and local hard men played, for the most part, by the creators’ own relatives and friends. Together, they make their way through the challenges

and adventures of smalltown rural life.

Since then, it has notched up an astonishing three million hits on YouTube and some 40,000 fans on Facebook. Via the RTE Storyland series, Hardy Bucks made its way to TV, where it ran to three seasons and demonstrated that, despite its lack of obvious sophistication, the humour was both clever and relatable. The aimlessness and claustrophobia of small-town life are perfectly captured here, but with affection — and the characters, for all their faults, are likeable.

The Hardy Bucks Movie was released in February 2013, and got to number 1 at the box office in its opening weekend.