IF Channel 6 does nothing else during its tenure on your TV, it will at least be remembered for a show which put the music video back in the spotlight. As music TV becomes less and less about "music" and more and more about creating TV "stars", the new station deserves applause for realising that it should actually be the other way around.

Every night around midnight, Channel 6 has a show called Night Shift. It plays videos. That's the pitch, all three words of it. OK, it has a presenter called Michelle Doherty, but she operates in a fairly revolutionary way for Irish music TV presenters. Doherty simply stands in front of a backdrop and tells you what the next video is going to be. We've grown accustomed to dreadful hosts on Irish music TV shows trying to be too cool for school, so this may take some getting used to.

Instead of articulating some post-modern theory involving only words of more than three syllables or talking about a night on the town with some nonentity or other, Doherty just says that a video from Arctic Monkeys or Korn or Director will be up after the next ad break. It's all you need to know. Simple, effective and pretty neat.

Of course, there's nothing new about a TV show that simply plays music videos mixed with occasional interviews and features. It used to be the norm. Indeed, there have been a ton of shows that have done pretty much the same over the years on Irish stations. But if you look at the current TV schedules, music programming of this ilk has become conspicuous by its absence.

Blame The Osbournes. Indeed, every half-baked idea for a reality TV show involving some musician or other that has come out of MTV's development hell can also shoulder the blame for music TV's current malaise.

This state of affairs has also had a dreadful effect on the Viacom subsidiary, because it is now best known for a string of increasingly dire, bland and clueless shows featuring dire, bland and clueless personalities and concepts.

Of course, MTV is quite welcome to go down this or any other road it decides to follow. But the knock-on effect on how every other station commissions its music programming is most unwelcome. Instead of simply concentrating on what's supposed to be the talent, commissioning editors have become obsessed about audience participation, personalities, reality-TV aspects, celebrities and creating all manner of synthetic drama.

It's why most stations now spend their entertainment euros on rubbish like You're a Star, Celebrity You're a Star, Drinking You're a Star (it's on the way) and Non-National You're a Star (ditto). Those charged with commissioning music shows want so many additional bells and whistles that they've forgotten the whole point of the show in the first place - the music and the people playing the music.

Even stations that came up with interesting ideas haven't had the cop-on to see what they had on their hands. TV3, for example, was responsible for the worst music TV show ever foisted on the Irish viewing public (The Sound Room), but it also aired such winners as Dynamite TV (which did away with the whole pretence of a presenter) and Music 3 (a presenter-less show with music videos). Nowadays, TV3's music programming seems to consist solely of Lorraine Keane doing interviews for the news.

Night Shift shows that you can strike a balance. Sure, viewers can text in to select which one of four videos they would like to see next, but that's the extent of their contribution. The rest is down to the music. And, aside from the show's puzzling desire to play a lot of Humanzi and the equally pointless Red Organ Serpent Sound, the show gets this right too.

Thanks to Channel 6, after a long absence, the "I'll just wait to see what video they'll play next" line is back in vogue in Discotheque's front room.