Enjoy the show — just remember the little emperor had no clothes

DID you watch it last night, and are you hooked already? 'Haughey' is already promising to be the most successful documentary series ever produced by RTE, with the potential to attract the same kind of audience as a major drama.

And of course, the story has all the elements of drama a poor man's King Lear, perhaps, or maybe the sort of story to which justice could be done by Arthur Miller.

The key to any great drama is the central character, and we can already see in this series the powerful hold that Charles J Haughey had on many of the people he had around him. And indeed, you can see it in the interviews people refused to give as much as the ones that were given. The late Sean Doherty, for instance, went to his untimely death without ever publicly discussing, for the record, his relationship with Haughey. Those who knew Sean Doherty, however, are in no doubt that the relationship was one of the key features of his life.