Each week in Show Me The Money (RTE1, Sun), the budgetary makeover series, Hobbs offers essentially the same advice to the fiscal wrecks who seek his guidance. He urges them to face up to their monetary problems, reduce their spending and, if possible, increase their earnings.
Last Sunday’s subjects were Tom and Tricia, a taxi driver and his part-time barmaid wife. Despite a reasonable joint income, the couple cannot make ends meet. Tom’s overheads are excessive, loans are accumulating and outstanding wedding bills absorb every spare cent.
After due consideration, Hobbs offered a solution to the couple’s woes. He urged them to face up to their monetary problems, reduce their spending and, if possible, increase their earnings.
Hobbs’s financial tips are commonsensical to the point of commonplace. Yet the most striking feature of Show Me The Money is the fact that his elementary suggestions are greeted like thunderbolts of divine revelation. Ultimately, of course, this has more to do with the ignorance of the pupils than the brilliance of the teacher.
Most of the series’ participants are pathetic innocents, the sort of people who smoke in bed then wonder why their house burns down. Spending borrowed money like drunken sailors, they are invariably shocked to discover that they have amassed battleship-sized credit hangovers.
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Whether they be badly overdrawn boys or ladies in the red, they all seem to share a childlike inability to grasp the consequences of their transactions. Hobbs acts as a remedial school of economics for these slow learners, leading them through the Ladybird book of market capitalism.
To an extent, this is what initially made Show Me The Money so entertaining. The programme was as much an audit of personal delusion and lifestyle folly as financial profligacy. At its best, it offered an enjoyable snoop into the lives of individuals who found it difficult to reconcile their net income with their often gross habits.
Unfortunately, the latest run feels tired, repetitive and trite. The sense of letdown is heightened because of the dramatic changes in the public expectations of Hobbs following his virtual canonisation on last summer’s Rip Off Republic.
Amid the preposterous hype surrounding that patchy and overheated polemical series, Hobbs was presented, not least by himself, as a crusading champion for the beleaguered consumer, the messiah of the shopping classes.
He took all too eagerly to his mediaassigned roles as government scourge, corporate watchdog and defender of the common man. Now that the wind has changed and he has returned to the calmer waters of Show Me The Money, he is stuck with this ludicrous pose.
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Hobbs’s heart just doesn’t seem to be in the day-job anymore. Having promised to lead a national consumer revolution, the messiah looks uncomfortable acting as a domestic bean-counter once again. Having clashed with ministers over economic policy, he glazes over when lecturing the likes of Tom about account keeping. Having dealt with high finance, he appears uninterested in small change.
There was altogether more bang for one’s buck in Arts Lives: Art For Sale (RTE1, Tue), a punchy consumer’s guide to the role played by the market and marketing in the development of the Irish visual arts, a sector currently experiencing a hot-property boom to rival that of the construction industry.
Wryly presented by Ann Marie Hourihane, the programme offered a rare public opportunity for artists to discuss their favourite private topic: dosh. We also heard from critics, collectors and gallery owners about the extent to which art investment has become a chic form of gambling.
In determining the monetary value of an individual work, it seems, the effrontery of the artist is more important than the excellence of the art. The only criterion is, explained Robert Ballagh, the artist: “Get as much as you can for the picture.”
Show me the money, indeed.