It was Pussy Riot on The Saturday Night Show which was the final straw. Over the last couple of years, there has been a string of car-crash interviews on Irish TV shows when things go badly and inevitably wrong. You know the list as well as I do. Every single chat show host has had one (or a dozen, in some cases), a moment when the interview goes off the rails and proves impssible to get back on track. Sometimes, it’s down to the host, but other times, it’s down to the fact that that interviewee should simply never have met that interviewer on that occasion.

In some ways, Gay Byrne is to blame for this sorry state of affairs where you get heavyweight interviews on entertainment shows. Byrne was the long-running host of The Late, Late Show and a belief took hold during and after his tenure that it was possible to cover all bases on a two hour late-night weekend TV show.

This implied that you could have lightweight material (interviews with actors and authors plugging their wares) as well as more meaty, heavyweight topics (debates about the state of the nation and the like) on the same show in front of the same audience. It was an approach which demonstrated that audiences were smart, intelligent and savvy enough to sit there and take it all in. It was an approach which also assumed that the presenter had the skills to cover all those bases too.

The problem is that we are looking back with rose-tinted glasses because Byrne also had his share of misses. There were many (many) times when The Late, Late Show under Byrne was as dull as ditchwater – not every single show was TV gold. But hindsight is a wonderful thing and it means that the Late, Late Show blend of light topics, heavy subjects, viewer competitions and one-for-everyone-in-the-audience giveaways has become the norm for primetime chat shows here. That it’s near impossible for any presenter to be up to that job is neither here nor there – just look across the water and pitch some serious topic into the Jonathan Ross or Graham Norton menu and see what would happen.

Enter Pussy Riot, whose appearance with Brendan O’Connor on The Saturday Night Show was a perfect car-crash. Here were two Russians who didn’t speak any English answering questions which were translated by a third party, while everyone waited for everyone else to catch up. It’s what happens in many interviews when there’s a language barrier but not usually on live primetime Saturday night TV. The fact that the questions weren’t great in the first place is an important reason why the interview didn’t work, but not as important as the fact that it just didn’t look or seem great.

Here was a bit of a coup – you won’t find Pussy Riot (yet, anyway) on the TV show circuit – but it looked and sounded like a mess. The smart thing to do would have been to pre-record the interview and either subtitle it or provide voiceovers. But this is a Saturday night chat show so that wouldn’t do at all. Instead, we had the sight of two women probably wondering what the hell was going on, a complete missed opportunity and all-round waste of everyone’s – Pussy Riot, O’Connor, TV crew, viewers – time.

TV is stuck in a rut and no-one behind the cameras appears to have the gumption or desire to change this state of affairs. Be it “balanced” debates or the inability to give an interview the time to breath and develop, TV has developed a stock of cliches which is driving viewers away. Remember that line above about smart, intelligent and savvy viewers above? The problem is that many TV makers are just not prepared to accept that those very same smart, intelligent and savvy viewers might want something other than what they have at the moment. Or that they have the wherewithall to stick with a topic for more than a few minites. Or if they want to hear Pussy Riot, that they’ll be happy with a voiceover or subtitles as long as the questions are good.

Between current affairs shows which are so devoted to giving everyone equal billing that the meat of the notion gets lost in the timekeeping to the belief that a serious interview can be entertainmentised, TV makers stick rigidly and conservatively to templates which have been in use for decades. The notion that such templates never worked to begin with is ignored. Worse, the rush to come up with new templates means even more conservatism and me-too strokes. TV shows which have the time to allow a story to unfold or an issue to be properly investigated are so rare that we’re amazed when we see them on our screens.

Of course, there are arguments against all of the above. The chief one is that the primetime entertainment shows are the right places for those big setpiece interviews and debates because they attract such a large audience to begin with. But that argument is knocked for six when you get a car-crash interview like Pussy Riot which leaves the audience cringing rather than engaged.

Like every single area of the media landscape, TV is also experiencing change in how it engages with and makes money from its audience. Like its media peers, TV is faced with a raft of different optios and the trick is to work out whether to spread your bets or go all in on red. But unlike so many other areas, the bigger issues, the bigger problems, appear to be ignored. TV’s real leap forward too will come when someone decides to junk the templates and formats which haven’t quite served it as well as everyone thinks and tries something new. A subtitled interview on a Saturday night entertainment show might be a small step forward. Certainly, it would have been better than this