Good guy Giggs home and dry with image unstained

TV View: Those of you who reminisce wistfully about the seminal Wanderly Wagon and yearn for the days when such low-budget simplicity…

TV View: Those of you who reminisce wistfully about the seminal Wanderly Wagon and yearn for the days when such low-budget simplicity made it onto our screens should see Sky One's Celebrity Snatch.

Budgetwise it makes Wanderly Wagon look like a cross between Pearl Harbour and Lord of the Rings, and in terms of intellectual rigour it makes Wanderly Wagon look like a series on the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Little wonder we love it so.

Budget isn't everything, of course; there are some things money can't buy. Just ask Roman Abramovich. What we can say for Celebrity Snatch, though, is that it taught us a salutary lesson on Friday, namely that some professional footballers are nice. No, seriously.

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The gist of the programme is that celebrities get set up in awkward situations, their mortification is filmed with hidden cameras, and then we're encouraged to go: "ha, ha, ha, ha." It's ground-breaking - in the same way that TV's Naughtiest Blunders is ground-breaking.

So, Ryan Giggs walks into his apartment-block car-park and is confronted by a man pushing an elderly granny in a wheelchair who tells our Giggsie he's locked his keys in his car and asks could Giggsie look after Granny while he goes looking for his spare set.

Are you following this? So, Giggsie says, "Eh, yeah," the man disappears, and then Granny tells Giggsie she needs to go to the toilet, urgently. Giggsie's eyes widen with fright, like those times goal-scoring opportunities fall to his right foot. "You could do it in the corner," he says, pointing behind his car.

Alas, too late. "I think I'm after having an accident," says Granny, shaking her skirt, "I couldn't hold it any more."

Luckily Granny's fairly chilled about it, but ashen-faced Giggsie is close to fainting. Granny tries to put him at ease.

"What do you work at, love?" she asks.

"I play football," he says, "for Manchester United."

"Oh, you must be very busy?"

"Eh, yeah," he replies.

"But not that busy, 'cos you're out of the Champions League and you made a bags of the Premiership," she could have said, but grannies are never that nasty.

Briefly, then, the "grandson" comes back, Granny tells him about her accident, and he asks Giggsie if Granny can sit in the back seat of his shiny new sports car, so she can keep warm while he sets off again looking for his keys. Giggsie says: "Eh, yeah."

"It's very good of you to let me sit in your lovely car with a wet skirt on me," she says.

"Eh, that's okay," says Giggsie, bottom lip quivering.

And that was it. Cutting-edge telly. They finally put Giggsie out of his misery, explaining Paul Ince had set him up. Giggsie said he'd get his own back, but we fear for any incontinent granny who attempts to sit in the back of Incie's Porsche 911 Turbo.

Almost as much as we feared for the food critics who judged The Restaurant's celebrity chef last week.

"Well, chicken's chicken, isn't it," said Penny Plunkett, upon tasting a dish of chicken with asparagus stuffing and seasonal vegetables. Paulo Tullio agreed, in a slightly disdainful manner.

"I'm going to singe his eyebrows," said a peeved Jason McAteer, wielding a blow torch back in the kitchen. "Chicken's chicken? No, chicken's duck, innit! Of course chicken's chicken."

It was, then, all threatening to kick off in the kitchens of the RTÉ show that puts a chef's hat on celebrities, asks them to do unspeakable things to food and hopes the three resident critics will approve.

Jason made, among other things, fish cakes with green-pea puree, langoustines with scrambled egg, beetroot-and-coconut soup, smoked haddock paupiettes with new potatoes, banana and vanilla cheesecake and treacle sponge with butterscotch sauce.

Tom Doorley alleged Jason had committed "haddock abuse", a verdict that left the chef "gutted". In the end, though, Jason was awarded four stars, largely because his apple crumble was sensational and his soup delectable. "Eeeeeh, I'm made up," he beamed.

Next stop, surely, for Jason is a 67-minute video, to be shown in London's National Portrait Gallery, of him fast asleep. David Beckham, of course, has beaten him to it, starring, as he does, in Sam Taylor-Wood's, um, work, entitled David, a reference to Michelangelo's "sculptural depiction of male perfection".

They discussed the video on Friday's Late Review. Yep, they did. "It exudes this classical sense of self, but that's also helped by the title - if it was christened Kevin it wouldn't have that Renaissance quality," said Linda Williams.

"Indeed," we said, while Kilbane and Keegan got busy consulting their lawyers.

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan is a sports writer with The Irish Times