Profile: Did you ask for Anna Nolan? Did you call RTÉ and demand that she be given several series? Did you plague the station with letters and e-mails insisting that she present lots of programmes, all on the same day if possible?
Did you further beg RTÉ to put her on the radio too? Did you decide she was the future of Irish broadcasting and that there can never, ever be enough of Anna Nolan on RTÉ.
No? Well somebody in there thinks you did. Suddenly, she is everywhere. This week you could watch her for 90 minutes a day on The Afternoon Show and for another 90 minutes in the morning if you wanted to catch yesterday's repeat. You could tune in to her for an hour each morning as she sat in for Marian Finucane on RTÉ Radio 1. She would also have been seen chasing down extreme Australian misogynists in the latest episode of her series Anna in Wonderland if it hadn't been pulled from the schedules.
RTÉ, it turns out, took the "strategic view" that they wanted to establish her as a daytime television host and that an evening show would conflict with that. Besides, it added, it was concerned about "overkill". So, they've given us a rest from Anna Nolan. One day's rest. She begins another new series, Is Anyone Out There?, tomorrow night.
Five years ago, Nolan was one of the original contestants in Britain's Big Brother. She appeared on television every evening for most of a summer. Her banal domestic adventures could be watched live on the web for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for nine weeks. She ate her dinner on live television. She showered naked in front of millions of viewers. She was at the centre of a media phenomenon that changed the face of television. Yet she seems never to have been so over-exposed as she is right now.
Someone in RTÉ has decided that what you want, right now and more than anything else, are programmes presented by or featuring Anna Nolan. It began a couple of years ago with Ask Anna, in which - armed with only a full research team and intense empathy - she helped people confront their phobias. But over the past year she has become the grouting in the schedules. She has been a reporter on Would You Believe, presented a series on moral dilemmas Drawing The Line, was a guest chef in The Restaurant, fronted a True Lives documentary, co-hosts The Afternoon Show, and has trotted across the globe for Anna in Wonderland.
This week she made her radio debut, but one can't help but wonder if she had previously been kept from that wing of Montrose for fear that she might bump into Carrie Crowley in the corridor. Moe than Sean Moncrieff or Bibi Baskin, for example, Crowley has been considered the perfect example of how RTÉ can strip mine a talent. Until now.
In media shorthand, 34-year-old Nolan is the 'lesbian ex-nun' who shot to fame by being runner-up in the first series of Big Brother. Growing up in Rialto, one of seven children, she joined a Loreto convent after school. "There was no huge revelation in wanting to enter," she has said, although she has also told a story in which, aged 18 and unsure of what do with her life, she asked for God for sign before opening a bible to read the line "I am calling you".
She was a novice for two-and-a-half years, during which time she first became aware of her sexuality when she began to have crushes on fellow nuns. She was so unhappy, she has said, that it even led to the loss of a couple of teeth and some of her hair. She left Dublin in 1992, doing a degree in music and musical instrument technology at London Guildhall, but then drifted through a few slacker jobs. At the time she applied for Big Brother in 2000 she was working in a skateboard shop and says she went for the show so as to give her life a kick. "It's so appealing, being on television 24 hours a day," Anna told The Observer when it was all over. "People say it was sick, it was like an attraction to something perverse, and maybe that's why I did it. But at the end of the day, the reasons why people were saying not to do it - you're a lesbian and that means you might get some bad press - didn't seem to me to be reasons to pull out. I thought I should just be a bit ballsy about it." During that series she came across as smart and funny; somehow managing to retain some mystery even under the brightest of spotlights. There was always the sense that she would stand somewhat apart from her fellow contestants both inside and outside the house, and so it was. She became a gay icon as well a contemporary symbol of emigrant Irish; designer Julien Macdonald asked her to model his clothes on the catwalk; the BBC gave her a television series.
Almost five years on, however, her profile in Britain is now limited to the annual 'where are they now?' features which precede each summer's series of the reality TV series that made her name. She featured in agony aunt show Closure, alongside Big Brother host Davina McCall, and made Anna in Wonderland but the BBC didn't take the series from the backwaters of its digital channels.
In Ireland, though, her fleeting fame (followed by flickering celebrity) was always likely to carry much more cache. Here, there is not so much a pool of celebrity as a shrunken pond. All the same, she can be an engaging presence on screen; the unfilled gaps in her teeth suggesting a relaxed ego and she has an obvious rapport with the public. She may not be the future of broadcasting, but she could hope to be at least a fraction of it. For RTÉ, ever on the look-out for new talent, she was worth a punt. And since that, she has developed a reputation for being highly professional and easy to work with. She is praised her for being self-aware and intelligent.
This week may have done little to add to that impression. There were some unforeseen challenges this week, such as how Nolan found herself making disapproving comments about her brother-in-law, The Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers. But the smaller hurdles proved tougher to clear. She struggled with words, bumbled names. While interviewing a Jehovah's Witness she was asked by him if she knew who Jehovah was. "I believe that Jehovah is the person who . erm ... I'm not entirely sure now," she finally admitted. "I'm bluffing actually." It was tempting to shout clues at the radio. Bearded guy! Lives in the clouds! But that certainly shouldn't have been necessary given that she is a reporter on the station's religious flagship series Would You Believe and Is Anyone Out There, part of that strand, finds Nolan examining the religious faith of the nation.
Arriving into Would You Believe she was considered just the person to fill the God-shaped hole in the schedules. And to fill any other hole in the schedules while she's at it. After RTÉ seemed to have considered every female television personality in the land as host of The Afternoon Show it plumped for Nolan alongside Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, and Sheana Keane as the right mix for the daily diet of hair makeovers, soap chats and psychic pets.
Too often, though, Nolan has often looked deeply uncomfortable. The only sound to be heard louder than the coffee morning wittering is the sound of Nolan's career being stretched too far. Within RTÉ there is an acknowledgment that The Afternoon Show is deeply flawed. One wonders if it is as perceptive about how it is using its star.
The Nolan File
Who is she?
TV reality show contestant turned TV presenter.
Why is she in the news?
Even Gerry Ryan might balk at such ubiquity on RTE.
Most appealing characteristic
She comes across as genuinely natural and engaging when out and about with the public.
Least appealing characteristic
Standing in for Marian Finucane this week, she confirmed that she doesn't really have a voice for radio.
Most likely to say
"Next on RTE: more of me!"
Least likely to say
"No".