RTÉ's Kitchen Hero is our enemy.

Humanity has always sought to make gods of men. The fear of inferiority has manifested itself as human glorification, that we might offer up a man as a living retort to the cosmic powers unknown to us. We have celebrated men, deemed them heroes and immortalized them in stone and song, all in the name of proving that we, as a creation, are worthy of the ears of whatever gods we have chosen to submit to. That is the true folly of man, our building an Orpheus so that we might win a moment of our master's lamentation when we are gone. Though each hero we birth serves only as a spoonful of morphine for the barbed cruelty of existence, our mediocrity, our humanness. It is a morphine for leprosy.

The latest attempt at gilding a mortal comes in the form of a young Irish chef and television personality; Donal Skehan. And he must be torn from the cross before he makes beslubbering fools of us all.

In case you aren't familiar with him, Donal Skehan is essentially the man your girlfriend and mother wish you could be. He has charisma and the voice of an angel, an Adonis smile, is a poet in the kitchen and exudes the kind of despicable cherubic lure that would have a packed bingo hall erupt in a collective "Ah, would ya lookit!". Most importantly, he has his own television program. How are we typical menfolk supposed to stumble clumsily and sedated through life while there are people like this out there...succeeding. The fucking bastard.

The harbinger of a dark age.

Imagine you're reclining comfortably on the couch with your lady friend, taking in some evening television and communicating some subtle bodily messages. You mean to get you some. What's this? She's swept up the remote control and has switched on RTÉ One, the television station of the elderly and heinously boring. However, it's not the depressing bell toll of the angelus she's after. It is the adorable chirp and assuring smile of a pop star chef that she so desires, and she means to enact all of her darkest fantasies with him in her twisted imagination. Before you can say "What?", she's already writhing on the floor in an orgasmic seizure, speaking in tongues and contorting her body into impossible shapes. You've lost her, friend. The only silver lining in this scenario is that you now know how to make a tropical fish salad. Serves only one.

Now you're in the pub with some of your mates. You're all chugging back heartily the only thing that makes sense in this cesspool of a town, and you can already taste the greasy nacho burger you'll greedily masticate later on while leaning against a bin and zealously urging your friend to listen to the new Arctic Monkeys album through mouthfuls of slop. What's this? That wrinkled old barman has just switched the telly over to RTÉ One, the television station of the dying and dead. However, it's not the emotionally devoid mannequin drama of Fair City he's after. He means to kneel at the altar of the Kitchen Hero. Before you know it, the barman, as well as all of your mates, have regressed back to a boneless primordial state, foaming at their mouths and going to war on their penises as though frantically pulling leeches from between their legs. You are the only one left standing in this pub which was once your heart, home and sanctuary. Now it is a sick temple of perversion. 

This is the world we may very well be living in if the Kitchen Hero is allowed to attain further success. A dystopian future policed by man-sized Moroccan chickpea burgers and ruled tyrannically by an angel faced Nero.

Make the most of now, my friends, for there are clouds on the horizon.