Text messages the highlight of Holmes debut

As any great showman or clown knows - and Paul Holmes is most certainly the former, sometimes the latter - audience participation is an imperfect art.

Putting aside any first-performance glitches on his new, eponymous show on Prime, he discovered its chief imperfection rather early last night: you can be unceremoniously and entirely upstaged.

Holmes' Paul Holmes began with a stunt. He planted a tree on One Tree Hill, and how he huffed and puffed! I thought he might blow the thing down.

Then he launched into a frankly disjointed, often embarrassing, chat with Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.

Finally, after sidekick Alison Mau gave a demonstration in utter toadying during her "interview" with Cherie Blair (where was the question on how much she's being paid?), he closed with a belated and frankly boring chat with the overexposed Jonah Lomu.

Between all this he invited, he cajoled - lordy he almost seemed to beg - his audience to phone in, email or text him. How the man needs the crowd to roar.

The result was an utterly mad, mostly utterly barmy, rush of a half hour. And in the end - and Holmes may well be pleased by this - it was his audience rather than the "Three Million Dollar Man" that seemed the star.

Said one text-sender during the interview with Tamaki: "You should get Brian 2 bless the tree."

Asked a caller during the same segment: "It looks like [Brian's] clothes are more expensive than yours."

Said another: "Does God bless bigots?"

During the nauseatingly obsequious Cherie Blair "interview" a text asked: "Has Cherie borrowed Brian's jacket?" It was riveting. It was laughable. I found myself wanting more. Not from the showman or his sidekick, but of the texts along the bottom of the screen and the wild, angry, random lunacy from the callers out there in "New Nutterland".

Is this the cutting edge of current affairs? I think not. But it is the best circus to arrive in this town since, well, Cirque du Soleil.

And through all this the showman did what he always does. He bellowed, he interrupted, he talked up a complete gale of random questions and strange commentary.

God knows what the audience will make of it. But they already seem in the market for something more than his former sidekick Susan Wood.

TV One's Close Up - against expectation - began losing ground before Holmes even returned from Siberia to take up residency in Albania. Something in the order of 9 per cent of Close Up's total audience melted into the woods in the past two weeks.

But more importantly, 31 per cent of its target audience of 25- to 54-year-olds have done a vanishing act. Close Up is now offering lurid and sensationalist tabloid rubbish.

The question is do they want Holmes' crazy talk-radio with pictures?

"Thank you for giving us a go," Holmes announced at the show's start, before declaring: "We want you to take part in this programme."

And so they did. And so, those were our nutters last night.