Every so often something comes along and gains popularity. Number 1 best sellers, movies, events etc. Sometimes these things are really amazing, but do they always live up to the hype?

They don’t!

So without further ado here are 5 popular things that failed to blow the socks off me.

Ireland’s Nightmare Realm was born in Tralee, Kerry, in 2009 and since then it has been scaring the wits out of visitors every Halloween. It seems to have overtaken Farmaphobia as Ireland’s most scary Halloween experience.

It pops up in Dublin every October, and it was 2022 when I popped my Nightmare Cherry, only to be left a bit dissapointed and totally unscared.

It was hard to resist The Nightmare Realm, with all those electrifying photos of people jumping out of their skin in fear, and countless awards for being so scary. It was voted The World’s Number 1 Halloween Event in 2018 by Unilad Adventures, The Most Entertaining Horror Experience 2021 by EU Travel Awards and the Best European Scream Park Event 2023. The pictures on social media make it look irrestibly terrifying.

However I left feeling like it was all just a bit silly. The event is held indoors in an old building, a bit like a small warehouse. There’s people dressed up in Halloween costumes walking around staring at you. There’s also amusements where people jump out at you from dark corners, sometimes saying strange things while doing so.

Personally I found many of the “scares” to be a bit predictable and cringey, at times almost laughable. It did not scare me at all. The props and themes were colourful and lively but overall the experience was pretty lame. Nonsense would be a good term to sum it up.

Dublin’s Copper Face Jacks was never my scene.

Copper’s is Dublin’s most famous nightclub. It is considered to be the Mecca of Irish nightclubs. It was often said that the cloakroom alone makes more than €2,000,000 per year from the endless hordes of booze-fuelled cattle that barge through its doors every night of the week; I use the term “cattle” because it is often referred to as a cattle mart.

Its known as a place frequented by Guards (Irish Police), Nurses and Culchies (Irish Countryfolk). Its also known as a place where people go to “get their hole” (Irish slang term for hooking up/scoring sex).

There’s an aspect of Irish culture that says there must be something wrong with you if you can’t get your hole at Copper Face Jacks.

I’m one of the misfits that never got his hole at Copper Face Jacks, yet I did find myself there on many nights out. Its a venue where people default to on nights out in Dublin because its one of the very few outlets that stays open after 02:30.

Yet its no different to most mainstream nightclubs; overcrowded, same crap tunes every night, too loud to hold a conversation with anyone, decadent and tasteless. You’ll not find any real music fanatics or stimulating conversation at Copper Face Jacks, but your eardrums will perforate with Cotton Eyed Joe at high volume, and if your not mainstream-hunky enough to get your hole you’ll leave wondering what the fuss is all about.

On the one hand Ireland has produced world famous plays and playwrights; Pygmalion, Playboy of The Western World, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett etc. On the other hand David McSavage – one of Ireland’s modern comedians – described Irish plays as “shit” on Brendan O’ Connor’s Saturday Night Show.

To be fair I enjoyed the pantomimes at The Gaiety when I went as a child and again as a teenager. Yet I wanted to further explore the theatre as I matured.

Theatre has an air of sophistication about it. Its more expensive than the cinema and its synonomonoys with uppity folk of a refined pallet. I fancy myself as a cultured fellow and a man of the arts, so I wanted to see if I was missing out on anything by neglecting the House of Shakespeare from my pastimes.

I went to a few musicals and a few plays. While I must admit the actors are often great and the stage good, the experience is often cringey.

Irish theatre is mega camp. Its probably one of the gayest things that can be experienced by a straight man. There was one scene in Copper Face Jacks The Musical where the protagonist sang “I’m Gaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy” on stage for a prolonged period. Irish plays are a product for the kind of visitors that dream of leprechauns and pots of gold.

Theatres are architecturally protuberant, historically aristocratic, and associated with famous artists, yet upon investigating I have found them to be too gay, too camp and too cringey.

“Van Gogh Exhibit in Belfast: The Immersive Experience. Have you ever dreamt of stepping into a painting? Now you can with this exhibition that has been touring since 2017 with +5,000,000 visitors! Get your tickets now! Awarded best 2021 immersive experience by USA Today. Ranked among the 12 best immersive experiences in the world by CNN.”

When I became aware of Van Gogh’s presence in Belfast it served to remind me of how ignorant I was for lack of knowledge regarding his biography. I almost felt guilty for having such scarce knowledge of one of the world’s most famous artists ever. Therefore I felt obliged to explore the highly acclaimed Van Gogh Exhibition at Carlisle Church in North Belfast.

To really delve deep I bought the VIP Experience for £28.90 and in my opinion it was a total rip-off.

The venue was not that big. It was cold inside. While the art displayed was good, and the information educational, it failed to blow me away because it just wasn’t that impressive.

For £28.90 I was in and out in 40 minutes having been properly ripped off. I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth it cost £28.90 for a few replicated paintings, a 360 projector slide show and a VR Experience. The price was madness.

To put it into perspective, it cost half as much for a day pass into The Louvre; half as much to see The Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo. It cost less than half to go see Avatar 2 in 5D; a captivating 3 hour cinematic masterpiece.

It made for an evening of dissapointment, although it did inspire me to wonder what it would be like if Van Gogh were to paint a storyboard of James Joyce’s Ulysess.

BBC’s Blue Lights was all the rave in Northern Ireland when it hit the screens in 2023.

Its a cop/gangster drama about the dangerous duties of the PSNI, and the murky underworld of drugs and gangsters in Belfast. It was so well received that they are now in the process of making season 2. However I couldn’t rate it as anything better than “just ok.”

Blue Lights could be described as Northern Ireland’s take on The Wire, but it will never be in the same league as The Wire. Apart from a couple of intense scenes, each episode passed with a growing realisation that word of mouth had made it out to be much better than it actually was.