BB FANS

Throwing stones might not be such a bad idea after all. People who live in glasshouses have a duty to be entertaining. Having invited everybody to look at them, these shameless attention seekers should make sure they deliver a performance worth seeing.

Unfortunately this thought doesn’t appear to trouble the contestants on The Box (TV3, Mon-Sat), a relentlessly tedious reality game show in which players compete for cash prizes while living in a glass-walled cube located on Wolfe Tone Square in Dublin city centre.

The spectacle of cocky young folk making a public exhibition of themselves has never before seemed so dull.

The show’s producers are clearly keen students of Big Brother, but have apparently learnt all the wrong lessons from the Channel 4 reality series. Despite appearances to the contrary, The Box is barely a reality programme at all and looks more like an old-fashioned quiz show with pretensions.

Though stylishly staged, with an imaginatively slick use of lighting that creates the impression of a lavish budget, the venture is lacking in the sense of intimacy, spontaneity and narrative drive that distinguishes the best surveillance shows. All fancy wrapping and no gift, The Box is an empty package.

The programme’s most glaring weakness is structural — for the viewer, the glass walls work as a barrier rather than a window. The Big Brother house is a custom-built incubator for human drama, providing an atmosphere that’s simultaneously low-key and highly charged. Artfully constructed to replicate “normal” living conditions, while largely concealing the deeply abnormal presence of the TV cameras, the house lulls its residents into a false sense of security, gradually encouraging them to let their hair down.

The eponymous box, by contrast, is essentially an aquarium, a bright showcase for ***** fish. Apparently modelled on the lobby of a Travelodge hotel, the living quarters offer all the comforts of home except homeliness.

Constantly reminded of the fact they’re on display by the see-through walls and (very) small crowd of rubberneckers gathered outside, the contestants never relax or engage in ordinary interaction. There is consequently none of the sense of eavesdropping on real life that one expects from a functioning reality programme. The tiresomely conventional quiz show element is also a letdown — not least because in its promotional rhetoric and opening credits sequence, The Box presents itself as a fiendishly cruel endurance test.

With its prison camp rules and a wannabe dominatrix fulfilling the role of quiz mistress, the show clearly aspires to sadism chic. In actuality, however, the most punishing torments faced by the ill-informed contestants are questions about the identity of the minister for finance or the Ceann Comhairle.

The Box is anchored by Keith Duffy, the former Boyzone hip thruster and lip-syncher. Having surprised many by acquitting himself as an actor in Coronation Street, this is a step backwards as he appears more like a washed-up boy-band star than he has in years.

His attempts to outham Davina McCall are embarrassing. He shouts, dashes frantically about and shouts some more, to no discernible effect. His efforts at banter with the spectators, meanwhile, are uncomfortable, primarily because he frequently appears to be reading his ad-libs from cue cards.

Reduced to running out the clock by interrogating the contestants’ mothers about whether or not they’re rooting for their offspring, Duffy often looks like a man who has come to appreciate the dignity of his days as a prancing pop puppet. Not surprisingly, given the slapdash nature of The Box, the participants seem grumpy and resentful.

There’s a particularly mournful air to the morning-after chats with evictees on the breakfast show Ireland AM (TV3, Mon-Fri), the producers of which must be regretting the decision to turn their programme into a Box fanzine.

Even its usually undiscerning presenters seem openly disdainful of the enterprise. On Wednesday, Ray Shah — the Big Brother graduate turned showbusiness analyst — described The Box as “a celebration of intelligence”. Alan Hughes, his interviewer, laughed so hard he almost fell off the couch.

Tacky, vacuous and several years out of date, The Box has all the hallmarks of a production by Mike Hogan, the erstwhile publishing tycoon once famed for his ability to use tatty Irish versions of UK celebrity magazines as a licence to print money.

Hogan was the first entrepreneur profiled in Raging Bulls (RTE1, Tue), a pompously titled series about brash high-flyers who have noisily crashed to earth.

Produced by Liberty Films, this pacy, punchy documentary revealed more about the roots of Celtic tiger Ireland than any number of economic treatises or political dissertations.

Though the events chronicled took place only a few years ago, the story the programme told felt like a cautionary tale from a distant epoch, the high noon of a get-rich-quick era that was both frighteningly cynical and pitifully naive.

Hogan was a self-made man for whom the making and remaking never stopped. Growing up in his native Athy, he was known to one and all as Mick. When he moved to Dublin, he adopted what he regarded as the more urbane name of Mike. During a stint as a disc jockey on pirate radio, he became Mickey Joe.

Gradually, however, he settled on an identity that served his purposes best, that of the cosmopolitan bumpkin who plays dumb in the smoke and talks smart in the sticks. While affecting disinterest in politics, he cultivated the friendship of Charles Haughey, another master of self-invention.

Hogan began his wheeling and dealing as a schoolboy by selling sponsorship lines for the Dominican Fathers, the charity that paid the highest commission.

After a dizzying variety of abandoned careers, he returned to the business of selling lines when he became publisher of In Dublin, the listings magazine. By the age of 38 he owned 38 titles and could have used a rake to gather the amount of cash he was taking in.

It turned out, however, that much of this cash was being hand delivered by burly men with no necks: the pimps who advertised the services of their prostitutes through In Dublin. Hogan was accused of profiting from immoral earnings and hit with a huge tax bill. As his confidence crumbled, his publishing empire soon followed suit.

Bloodied but unbowed, Hogan has relocated to Jamaica, where he sells ring tones. He’s also working on a project that he believes will make his fortune. It’s a reality TV show.