Last week, over a mid-morning nosebag, a headline in The Daily Beast caught the eye.
"Fake news," I cried, causing my butler, Grieves, to drop a silver tureen of Beluga. "Listen up G, can you believe this poppycock? It says here that 26 of the wealthiest panjandrums on the planet own more than the poorest 50% of everyone.
If this is true, how come we haven't seen inside their homes already? No Grieves, the truth of the matter is that the 26 wealthiest have all the money, the rest of the world just watches them on TV." Grieves, God bless his uneducated soul, did not even parry my feint. I suppose he knew that I knew whereof I spoke.
As an avid fan of reality TV, I'd seen the inside of more palaces than Donald Trump's mighty mane. Over the years, this included stopping by MTV's cribs, marvelling at the transformation of Daniel and Majella's rural mansion and following Eamonn and his fragrant wife Ruth as they cavorted with 'the other half', as they put it, in that land latterly known as Great Brexit.
Now I hear that next month, a well-known local architect has a nose about the incredible homes of the well-heeled in Sydney, Sweden and Mayfair.
Seeing how the other one per cent lives is the gold standard of reality TV, the reason we watch shows that may or may not be called Made in Chelsea, Lifestyles of the Disgustingly Rich and Unfathomably Famous and Check Out My Outrageously Vulgar House With The Talking Toilet (I once had a talking toilet but when it started to offer unasked for advice I pulled the plug).
Some call these shows aspirational, others suggest that they are educational but these people work in PR and are paid to make such outlandish claims. But most who do watch are invariably compelled to laugh and cry and carve a voodoo doll so they can stick pins in it. This is the telly of the squinting windows. where the great unwatched get to have a gander at another world and for a half hour or so to imagine they are a person like me.
I wonder if my trusty Grieves ever watches these magnificently baroque shows but as our relationship is wholly fictional, I fear that conversation would be a one-way street. Instead, I have the conversations with the voices in my head, the ones that keep asking, in a strangely sing-a-long timbre, if I've ever been to me. To which I casually counter: why would I ever do that? Everyone knows that if it's not on TV it isn't real anyway.
Dermot Bannon's Incredible Homes is on RTÉ One from February 10.
