At a time when media gurus argue about the need for dumbing down, a merry band of radio listeners may have proved that audiences are smarter than some think. Whereas in the UK, TV chat-show host Vanessa Feltz was forced to admit her researchers employed actors to play real people, Ireland's real people were last week discovered to have played a virtuoso acting role of their own.
Mere days after The Irish Times ran a feature on victim radio, The Gerry Ryan Show itself became the victim of a prank. The irony was cherished not least by the broadcasters it mocked. Three weeks into a drip-drip story about the appalling marital travails of a woman in Cavan, she and her alleged husband were outed as fakes. Their rows were in fact a ruse to promote a new pub. Their triumph was that it worked.
The birth of Cavan Woman is hardly a milestone in Irish broadcasting. But like the first moon walk, this small step may stretch further than its print. Not only is it the foremost act of make-believe since Ryan himself claimed to have killed and then eaten a lamb while enduring The Gay Byrne Show survival course, it is also a timely reminder of how profitable deception can be.
New Ireland thought it saw old Ireland behaving more or less as the stereotypes always had it and decided both to exploit it and to help it out. Old Ireland obliged by speaking in a rural accent, confiding its dreadful personal relationships, and allowing a sense of menace to emerge from underneath its comfy country surface. No wonder it was irresistible.
Cavan Woman and her man were the hottest duo radio has seen for quite some time. Stuck in an arranged match, made 25 years ago, and starved by a pretty vacant sexual relationship, their marriage breakdown started over who would or should attend the new pub to see strippers in action there.
If the essence of public-service broadcasting is to let people tell their own stories, then the Cavan Woman conspiracy raised the question of who may be second-guessing whom. Its consummate play-within-a-play pressed virtually every button in the fabric of millennial Ireland.
As a gripping mini-drama, the story fitted easily into the real-time impersonation genre now used for many radio and television ads. The difference was that the proprietor of the public house got his airtime free.
The woman told horror stories about their wedding night and claimed her husband thought women were still living in the middle ages; he argued that it was shocking she could turn her back on him and then compromise her womanhood by wanting to watch men whip their shirts off for money. Their apparent lack of insight was compelling.
Interviewed by Emer Woodfull on Soundbyte, the show's producer, Willie O'Reilly, admitted that the Cavan Woman conspirators "spotted the weakness in our system" and said they used mobile phones to fox the under-resourced and very busy team. Asked why such personal confessions were featured rather than public-interest stories, such as the plight of the homeless on Dublin's streets, his answer implied that Dublin's homeless were too local a story for so national a show.
Andy Warhol's truism that everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame predicted the urge to tell which fuels much talk radio and most chat-show TV. Thirty years on, what no one predicted then is that professional spinners would themselves begin to be out-spun.
Still, the assumption prevails within media that it ought to be one-way traffic. In the contract of truth and trust that underwrites the act of mediation, professionals may joke by having their audience on - Gay Byrne pulled a particularly cute stroke using the Mystery Voice Competition last April Fool's Day - but audiences are not usually expected to do so, unless by invitation.
Knowing the requirements that a story be gripping, media-literate audiences are increasingly editing themselves to fit the bill - if what matters is to be provocative and entertaining, then what matter if the content is not absolutely true?
Channel 4 was notoriously hoaxed by a wannabe father-daughter duo who were actually nothing of the sort. Curiously, when the station eventually used some of the original footage in a further documentary explaining how the hoax happened, it preferred to interpret the couple's motivation in terms of their personality defects rather than any latent ability as media manipulators.
There is a major difference between the kind of ethical standards expected from a documentary and those of a fairly tabloid talk show. In the desperate competition for ratings, as ads take up more time between programmes, and programmes start to seem more like ads anyway, it's a foregone conclusion that the line between fact and fiction will be harder to draw. But when broadcasters themselves can't tell the difference, audiences are seriously cast adrift.
Pulling the wool over our eyes has long been a feature of radio, and television too. Orson Welles's War of the Worlds shocked the American people as far back as the 1930s; The Truman Show recently took the blurring of lines that has been happening in soaps and docu-fiction to its logical conclusion. Innocuous programmes such as Oireachtas Report let us in on the pretences sometimes necessary to make programmes - what a tight shot suggests as a packed Dail is revealed in a long shot to be no more than four or five TDs huddled together in an empty chamber.
And audiences have always struck back. Actor Gabriel Byrne used to phone late-night radio shows, disguising his voice, just for the heck of it, and it's a safe bet he isn't the only person who did. Fans of the American shock-jock Howard Stern regularly register their protest at what they consider to be the pretence of gravitas and balance that characterises mainstream American media by phoning news and current-affairs programmes, and then owning up soon after they get through.
But what distinguishes this hoax from other anarchic invaders is its exceptional literacy in the conventions media professionals like to think they own. Either that, or The Gerry Ryan Show in particular, and Irish media in general, may be becoming too predictable for anybody's good.