TV VIEW: All week, the sounds were so silent they were deafening. In the Dáil chambers, they were unfurling a list of sporting events which, unless the legal eagles ordain otherwise, will in the future be protected for terrestrial television and the sound was that of a stable door slamming shut after the horse has bolted.

And, on Wednesday night, those who had the luxury of watching Ireland's European Championship qualifier live on Sky Sports must have wondered if the satellite channel had got such a good deal after all. It made for horrible viewing. Maybe it was no bad thing that most of the nation's children were deprived of the opportunity of watching the game.

On Thursday night, however, the sound was not so much of dead men walking as that of people dancing on someone's grave. The Insight current affairs programme on UTV focused on a former racing driver who swapped the fast lane for time in a prison cell after his criminal activities caught up with him.

Earlier in the week, we'd been treated to a television profile of George Best, one of the best footballers of any generation, who reflected on life after a liver transplant. He looked gaunt and much older than his years, hardly surprising considering all the alcohol abuse his body has suffered. But it was a nice, gentle insight into the man as he is now. And, also, there was a programme devoted to the late Grand Prix driver James Hunt. Both programmes were intriguing and, yet, neither captured how things can go wrong for someone with the world at their feet as succinctly as the Insight programme - called "Racing to Destruction" - on Colin Lees.

Lees, we were told, was "an exceptional sportsman" who, as a former racing rival Arnie Black opined, had the talent to be a top international driver. Within Ireland and the UK, Lees was a champion racer.

On the UTV programme, there were snippets of Lees racing around the tight tarmac roads of the Phoenix Park before reporter Chris Moore informed us of how Lees' off-track activities were to send him crashing, of how his business "went into a spin from which it would never recover". We saw footage of Lees, a man who sold Irish wood-chip to Scandinavia, proudly opening a pulp mill in his native Magherafelt, Co Derry. In a clip, John Hume was telling us how it was the most important development of the century. With hindsight, Moore could tell us it was all pulp fiction.

Lees's business empire was to crumble. He got involved with a chain-smoking American - by the name of Derek Jones - who drove around Ballymena in an old Rolls Royce and who was wanted by the FBI because he was laundering money for two of New York's leading Mafia families.

The programme told of money that was transferred from banks in New York to Canada to Dublin to Ballymena and back to New York. Twenty different constabularies and customs posts in Ireland and the UK were pursuing Lees when, as Moore put it, his "machine seized up". Lees left debts of some £35 million and defrauded finance houses of £20 million. When the judge sentenced him, he talked of "a man of some intelligence who unfortunately chose to redirect it into crime". Lees, due to be released for jail next October, professed his innocence throughout his trial but was found guilty.

There was nothing criminal about RTÉ's coverage of the Heineken Cup rugby from Thomond Park on Saturday afternoon. Indeed, it's a sure sign winter is fast approaching when George Hook's face reappears on our screens and, in an attempt to make their coverage a little more cosy, RTÉ had analysts - Hook and injured player David Wallace and presenter Tom McGurk - outdoors in providing us with their pre-match predictions, half-time and post-match analysis and it worked really well.

The European club championship is a homely affair and especially so in Munster where, McGurk reminded us, the players are very much part of the community. Hook's face was contorted like someone enduring the worst atrocities of the French Revolution rather than assessing Munster's chances against the French side Perpignan. He was transfixed with the importance of scoring tries but also warned, if they lost, they "were effectively out of the European championship".

At half-time, McGurk believed Munster had "real serious problems on their hands" and Hook concurred, but believed that a back-to-basics policy would reap the right result. Hook said Munster would have to go back to how they played 40 years ago, to "a war of attrition" which, he warned, would be "not pretty". That's how it transpired, and Munster won; but Hook, still, wasn't entirely happy and believed some "home town refereeing" had also helped. Welcome back, George!