Bones, thrones and new balls please, the best of TV 2014

 Des O'Driscoll rounds up the top 10 talking points of TV this year.

1. We like proper endings: There’s an online conspiracy theory that water charges were only introduced so Amber wouldn’t feature at the top of the year’s hate lists. But we haven’t forgotten, or forgiven.

The four-part series in January started well, and its tale about the fall-out from the mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl stirred an avalanche of social media comment. But then came the final episode and the revelation that there would be no revelation about who dunnit. Cue national apoplexy and a general feeling we’d been conned.

2. The golden age continues: The word ‘McConnaissance’ entered the popular lexicon in 2014 on the back of Matthew McConaughey’s coming of age as one of the great actors of his generation. Much of this was down to his superb turn in this year’s best TV show, True Detective, where he starred as a maverick policeman alongside Woody Harrelson.

3. Top of the morning to you, Daenerys: Despite some great individual scenes and the crowd-pleasing deaths of arch-villains King Joffrey and his grandfather Tywin Lannister, Game of Thrones didn’t quite hit the heights of the previous three seasons. And, despite a series that has incest, magical dragons and ghostly walkers, the most unsettling aspect of this year’s show was the newly-Oirished accent of Aidan Gillen’s character Littlefinger.

4. I’ve a bone to pick with Nidgey: Irish television’s greatest ever character was never going to settle down and go into banking, and was always going to expire with his trainers on. So the inevitable happened.

Series five of Love/Hate wasn’t flawless, but it was quite gripping and still provided more water-cooler moments than any other show. The main quibble was that viewers were left scratching their heads at the finale. Was it really the end? Not even RTÉ or the show’s creator Stuart Carolan seemed to know. It took a statement from Tom Vaughan Lawlor, the actor who plays Nidge, to confirm that his character was no more.

5. There’s no such thing as ‘objectivity’ when reporting on a massacre of children: In July, Jon Snow of Channel 4 provoked debate when he broke ranks from his reporting on the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, and appealed for an end to the violence on both sides.

Among the images he said he couldn’t get out of his head was that of a swollen-eyed 2½-year-old, badly injured and in deep shock after injuries sustained from a missile attack by an Israeli F16 plane. It was just one of many heartbreaking images that peppered daily news reports. By the end of the onslaught, about 2,200 Gazans had been killed, 519 of them children.

6. The honey shot lives on: It was a hugely entertaining World Cup that gave us magical goals from RVP and James Rodriguez, a headline-grabbing chomp by Luis Suarez and a 7-1 defeat of the hosts by eventual winners Germany. In terms of coverage, camera angles, slow motions, etc, it was also the best World Cup ever, with at least 37 cameras at each game. Unfortunately, some match directors seemed to be using about 36 of those to scan the crowd for shots of prettywomen.

7. New balls please: It isn’t just ‘honey shots’ that are past their sell-by date in soccer coverage. At the end of Germany v Republic of Ireland in October, we saw why the RTÉ panel has long been in need of a shake-up.

John O’Shea scores his sensational last-gasp equaliser against the world champions. As the entire nation jumps around with joy, we cut back to the studio where Giles, Dunphy and Brady are flopped in their all-too-common posture, dour and lifeless. The increasing use of other studio guests such as Richie Sadlier is most welcome.

8. Sisters are doing it for themselves: The preview blurb for Connected had many of us cringing at the thought of a show of YouTube-like selfie videos. How wrong we were. The slick editing and other professional touches on the material from the six participants, allied to the women’s willingness to open up about their lives, made for a really engaging series. Break-out star of the show was Cork-based sex worker Kate McGrew.

The American woman has become an articulate spokesperson for the corner of the prostitution industry occupied by middle-class people who enter the trade by choice, rather than the more common routes we hear about of addiction, poverty and modern slavery.

9. Gay who? Ryan Tubridy isn’t the best interviewer in the world, and is still battling a Late Late Show format where the programme is too long, and a world where talkshow guests just aren’t as interesting as they used to be.

But cometh the Toy Show, cometh the man. Tubridy again did a superb job on what must be a nightmare episode to keep on track. Even the talented kids and boundless charm of Ed Sheeran couldn’t deflect from the true star of the show.

10. Unkindest cut of all: Another successful show that might have foundered at the pitching stage is Gogglebox, the TV programme about people watching TV programmes. Described as a mix of Harry Hill and The Royle Family, the Channel 4 creation will get an Irish version in 2015 courtesy of TV3.

As well as a roundup of the week’s viewing, the USP of the show is the empathy it creates from the viewer to the participants’ reactions to what they’re watching. Nowhere was this more striking than the gasps at an episode of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild that was filmed in Namibia. We watched the willing presenter partake in the local practice of cutting open the scrotum of live sheep and then removing the testicles with his teeth. Happy new year.