This was a perfect way to wake Uncle Gaybo

The Late Late Show Gay Byrne Tribute RTÉ One, Tuesday Children Of The Troubles RTÉ One, Monday Dispatches: Puppet Masters Channel 4, Monday His Dark Materials, BBC1, Sunday

It was the greatest wake in Irish history, lacking only a crate of porter and plates piled high with ham sangers. The genius of the idea was to do it on Tuesday, the day after Gay Byrne died, rather than waiting until Friday. It would be fanciful to claim the nation was consumed with raw grief, because Gay was 85 and not a man taken in his prime, but there was a real sadness with a nostalgically melancholy twist of the sort reserved for a much-loved uncle.

That’s why we needed an immediate date for mourning, a chance for all of us to come together to celebrate a life lived to the full. In doing so, we were treated to one of the best Late Lates ever, funny, moving and, yes, sentimental, because sentimental is in our genes.

The highlight, it has to be said, was the appearance of Mike Murphy, whose looks bely his 78 years. Still as mischievous as ever, he told of his great emotion as he remembered Gay actually once buying him a drink, and brought the house down. What might have been sombre reflection was greatly leavened by the twinkly tales told by Mike, himself an important supporting pillar in the entertainment edifice erected by Gaybo.

The audience was a who’s who of RTÉ past and present and all of the stories reminded us just how good Gaybo was, but it was the clips from old shows that delivered the proof, as we relived highlights from his 37-odd years at the helm.

There was musical talent aplenty too in a superband comprised of the likes of Mary Black, Mike Hanrahan, Mary Coughlan, Sharon Shannon, Colm Wilkinson, Finbarr

Furey and so on. The Late Late Show Gay Byrne

Tribute ran 40 minutes over time. Like many an actual wake, we were still chatting on the front step long after we said the first goodbye, and if this Late Late had run for another hour, I doubt anyone would have cared. At the end of each show, in the green room, Gay Byrne always had a whiskey. I poured myself one as the show drew to a close and toasted him – in our fragmented media world, it is safe to say we truly never will see his like again.

In Children Of the Troubles, Joe Duffy and Derry journalist Freya McClements performed a great public service in reminding us of those aged 16 and younger who lost their lives to sectarian violence.

The first story told was that of Peter Watterson, randomly shot dead on a street corner in Belfast in 1969. His mother immediately moved with her surviving son to Dublin and Johnny Watterson was interviewed on the programme. I was staggered, because I’ve known him for 30 years (we worked together in the Sunday Tribune and he still writes about sport for the Irish Times) and I never knew of this monumental loss in his life.

I was on the verge of tears when he said: ‘I’ve forgotten what it was like to have a brother – you’d sort of like to remember.’ But while he might have forgotten the feeling of having a brother, he hadn’t forgotten Peter himself, and bravely told of their childhood heroes and the ordinary routines shattered by utterly futile killing.

Many more families told similar tales and you could see how such loss carries across generations. Who knows what these 186 children might have achieved? Their deaths still cast a shadow and this was a fitting way to return them to the fore and put flesh on cold statistics.

The much-anticipated Dispatches programme, Puppet Masters, promised much but delivered little of substance as it attempted to explain the influence of backroom boys Dominic Cummings and Seumas Milne on the British Conservative and Labour parties respectively. The big take was that Cummings is a disruptor (as if the lunacy of the Boris Johnson era wasn’t a glaring clue), while Milne’s scariest gift, it seems, is being able to shuffle into meetings unnoticed, a talent that saw him referred to as ‘feline’.

It’s good to hold unelected advisors to account, especially when they seem to be calling all the shots, but much more was expected of this programme and it patently failed to deliver.

More was expected too of His

Dark Materials, based on the book by Philip Pullman and, at a cost of €46m, the most expensive series ever made by the BBC (albeit jointly with America’s HBO channel).

I never read the book and found the adaptation just a little confusing, with a plot centred on child kidnapping and celestial cities hidden in the dust of the aurora borealis. Everyone in it had a daemon, an animal that was a physical manifestation of their souls, and the animated characters were a lot livelier than the human performers, especially James McAvoy, who seemed miscast. It all played out like a so-so episode of Doctor Who and I honestly can’t see myself bothering with any more of it.

As the Late Late in its heyday proved, you can often do a lot more with less.