Hi °C | Lo °C TV3 LAUNCHES its autumn schedule this week, which will see the channel doing two things.
It will unveil an eclectic array of shows, featuring Ireland's most popular soap, most popular talent show, our only daytime TV, and reality TV shows that will have us all talking.
As well as this, it will not ask the Irish taxpayer to fund it, as it doesn't receive a cent of licence fee revenue.
One would have thought that this would be a cause for celebration. So how sad it was to read three separate newspapers articles this weekend, all of them having a pop at TV3.
One story rejoiced in the claim that staff were being asked to bring their own stationery to work, or even steal it from hotels, as the station did not want to supply them with biros as part of cost-cutting measures.
Elsewhere, The Sunday Times' TV critic Liam Fay was having a go at Midday, his predictably pompous and lazy diatribe culminating in a description of the show as "evincing the mental age of a dim-witted infant."
And finally, Will Hanafin decided to watch TV3 for an entire week, and his conclusions were as sneering as they were predictable.
He criticised TV3 for indulging in "old fashioned sexism" by suggesting that, on Ireland AM, Mark Cagney gets to do 'manly' topics like banking and politics, while Sinead Desmond is reduced to "watching some chef separating his couscous."
Not only is this a laughably inaccurate summation about the show, it is also an appalling slur on Desmond, a highly-skilled journalist herself, with an impressive knowledge of current affairs.
Not content with wrongly accusing TV3 of being sexist, our intrepid critic then indulges in some good old-fashioned sexism himself, suggesting that the all-female panel show Midday is "a convincing argument against the proposition that if women were in charge, the world would be a better place."
If you want to understand the remarkable job that TV3 does, consider the following.
RTE, despite being flush with licence fee money, can't afford even one daytime show, never mind three. And they use this money to outbid TV3 for shows like Mad Men, which they then air at midnight, suggesting that the national broadcaster is more interested in preventing TV3 from having the show than they are in their own viewers being able to watch it.
The ultimate irony is that there is only one TV-related thing in Ireland that is cheap, predictable and panders to the lowest common denominator.
It's not TV3. It's the critics who slag offTV3.
