Dr Eva’s Great Escape on RTE One on Sunday night opened with a dire warning from the narrator: “Dr Eva Orsmond is leaving — no, don’t try to stop her!”

Why, I’d never dream of doing such a thing. I mean, the very idea! If the good doctor wants to depart this little country after 17 years as the scourge of the overweight and of anyone less blessed in the self-satisfaction department than she is, I certainly won’t be the one to stand in her way.

So, farewell, adieu, bon voyage, toodle-oo, don’t let the door hit you on the asterisks on the way out, etc, etc, etc. But there was a caveat, straight from the Ors’s mouth, as it were.

“I’m not gone,” Orsmond promised/threatened. “I hope Irish people don’t think they can relax. I’m still coming to check on them every three weeks.”

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Apparently, Orsmond and her South African husband, Wyatt, who separated for a time, thought their plan to buy a dilapidated hotel in the Algarve two years ago and convert it into a five-star health spa and weight-loss clinic was both a good commercial opportunity and a way of repairing their damaged relationship.

Fair enough. How they spend their money and time is entirely their business. But why would RTE think the rest of us want to watch a three-part series about it?

Judging from the Twitter response to the first instalment, which ranged from hostility to bafflement, quite a few viewers were asking the same question.

Dr Eva’s Great Escape is a queasy hybrid of reality show, ostentatious property porn, intimate confessional and self-administered marriage therapy.

If you can say one thing in its favour, it’s that Orsmond is marginally less self-regarding than in her previous outing, last year’s How to Live Better for Longer. That was basically two hours of her admiring herself in a mirror — although this mirror had a built-in camera lens.

At one point on Sunday night, the formidable Finnish fortress cracked a little as Orsmond got teary and wobbly-lipped when talking about leaving the Wicklow house where she and her husband had raised their two sons.

But any stirrings of empathy were quickly undermined by… well, everything else about the series. The whole enterprise is so witless, so bereft of any kind of self-awareness, so stunningly tone-deaf, it defies belief.

Wyatt blithely mentioned that they had a budget of about half-a-million to play around with for the renovation. “We’ll be spending about €20,000 a week,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

At a time when the housing and homelessness crises are worse than at any point in this country’s history, when rough sleepers are dying on our streets, and when a homeless man has just suffered life-changing injuries during a tent-clearing operation on the Grand Canal, it all felt horribly crass and out of touch.

Later on, Orsmond took a phone call from Ireland with some terrible news: they’d had a cash offer of €1.11m on the luxurious Wicklow pad, complete with swimming pool, they were leaving behind, but they’d have to wait six months get the money.

This meant Orsmond was forced to return to Ireland to work in the weight-loss clinics she owns. We should all have such problems.

The core weakness of the series, though, is its crushing tedium.

We see Orsmond dancing around an empty room, her and Wyatt bickering over buying knick-knacks, Wyatt and a builder bickering over foundations, and an interminable shot of the sons shifting pieces of wood.

The only thing that could have made it more boring was if Dermot Bannon had turned up. He didn’t, but the trailer for next week’s episode let us know his buddy Diarmuid Gavin will be.

Anyone who believes RTE is more devoted to pleasing a small clique of familiar presenters than to pleasing licence payers will have found ample evidence of it in this dud.

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