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All the best interviews should make you feel like you’re earwigging a private conversation and that was the case here

Brendan O’Connor’s Time Out RTÉ One, Friday Celebrity Big Brother 3e, Thursday 1968: The Long March fRTÉ One, Tuesday 9-1-1 Sky Witness. Wednesday

There are times you look at chat show interviews, compressed into 10 minutes, and you realise the host has written down 20 questions and is determined to ask them all, regardless. The problem with that is you often feel they actually aren’t listening to the answers. There’s no ebb and flow of conversation, just a determination to get through before the next commercial break.

Though it often has been thought-provoking, Brendan O’Connor’s otherwise excellent

Cutting Edge is a case in point. With three panellists and a set number of segments – pet hates, topics of the day, and so on – it often feels rushed and, just as someone says something interesting, there’s an obligation to move on, or share the screen time. That’s why his new show, Brendan O’Connor’s

Time Out, is a breath of fresh air. Like Gay Byrne’s brilliant The Meaning Of Life, there only is one guest and, freed from the shackles of a ticking stopwatch, there also is time for everyone to breathe.

The best interviews should make you feel you’re eavesdropping on a private conversation, and that was the case when Brendan interviewed his first subject, Majella O’Donnell. Majella has been through the wars – a father she was never quite sure loved her (there was a starkly candid moment when she admitted she sometimes wished him dead), a cheating first husband, bouts of depression and the challenge of breast cancer.

Remarkably, she is resolutely positive, and clearly mad about her husband, Daniel. There was a lovely moment when she went head to head with Brendan, picking him up for occasionally slagging Daniel. Majella provoked is not a woman to mess with. It felt authentic, the sort of row we all get into after the pleasantries.

Time Out shows great promise. The next one is with the ubiquitous Michael Harding, who honestly bores me to tears with his bumpersticker philosophical musings, but if RTÉ manages to book bigger international guests (Chic’s Nile Rodgers is coming up later), this has the feel of a winning formula. That can’t be said of Celebrity Big

Brother, which started on 3e on Thursday night and now has the feel of a dog that needs to be put down. I waited two hours for Stormy Daniels, only to learn the adult movie star (for which read ‘porn’) had backed out. It must have been a nightmare for the producers, who invested heavily in a White House set, given Stormy’s connection with President Trump.

There was redemption with Kirstie Alley, the former Cheers star with a personality no house could contain. Sadly, she stood out like a sore thumb among the assorted numpties who joined her.

Other housemates include a former Love Island contestant, a reject from The Only Way Is Essex, a man who got wed to a woman he had never met before on Married

At First Sight, and the model who was kidnapped in Italy last year. As many commented, when she arrived in a car, the surprise was that she didn’t get out of the boot.

For three weeks we’ll have to follow Z-listers, so it’s probably just as well this is the last series. For all its faults, Love Island – 3e’s summer hit – felt fresher and set a new bar for reality TV. Sometimes, wannabes are a lot more interesting than watching has-beens.

In a summer that never really has taxed the intellect, it was a pleasure to fall upon 1968: The Long March, Miriam O’Callaghan’s compelling documentary on the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. There was perhaps little too much focus on the roots of the movement in the civil rights protests by African Americans in the United States (having paid for Miriam to go to Selma, they probably had to justify it) but it still was a stark reminder of the very recent past.

In one telling segment, a Catholic mother with a husband and children told how she was leapfrogged on the housing list by a 19-year-old Protestant girl who only was engaged. What did she do? She just went to the estate and squatted in a house until she got one of her own. Heroes don’t always wear capes, and in her own quiet way, Mary Teresa Goodfellow was one of them.

Also striking was how circumstance can change the entire direction of a person’s life. Bernadette Devlin had no intention of going along to a civil rights march, but was dragged to attend by friends. Overnight, she became a firebrand MP. There’s a lesson in that for repressive regimes everywhere.

Sky Witness launched 9-1-1, a new drama about first responders that has all the hallmarks of a hit. Created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, who also brought us Glee, it sprang out of the traps with an engrossing first episode that saw the fire crew and police deal with everything from a newborn baby flushed down a toilet to a suicide they couldn’t prevent.

Angela Bassett stars as a cop and brings her usual class to the party, and the large cast appear to have enough personal issues to balance the procedural aspect of the show with a bit of humanity too. It’s not often a pilot drags you in so completely, but for once, I’m hooked.