And the winner is...

Benny Ex-Vee-Eye

Today Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emerged from the Sistine Chapel-cocoon as Lord Butterfly Benedict XVI. Apparently he's a rather conservative fellow, not too into that whole 'progressive' thing, which he terms "relativism" (for him a 'four letter word'), and will likely carry on much like his predecessor, Pope J-P II. His rise to the top-job has been widely viewed as an interregnum, or 'stop-gap-solution', while the Catholic Church gets its act together and figures out how to, umm, be relevant again...yikes. He was, we're told, a member of the Hitler Youth Movement in his early years, which was apparently an unavoidable thing at the time. You know what they say, "when in Rome..."

I'm not a Catholic, fundamental or otherwise, and have, for this reason, generally relegated most fundamentalist religious noise-making to the status of 'white noise', but my beef in all of this is how secretive the selection process was that led to this rather important power-shift in a church that shepherds over 1.1 billion souls. That number may seem impressive, but the Catholic Church is, in a sense, starved for ratings. They really need some pizzazz to light up the piazza. They need some TV flair and high drama, up-close-and-personal, not puff-of-smoke-and-bells.

For this reason I implore the princes of the Church to consider some options for the next Cardinal Conclave, which, as Benedict XVI is already LXXVIII, may come sooner than you think.

The obvious choice from which to derive inspiration for the next conclave is reality television. Survivor, that pioneer of RTV, would be a good start.

Send all the cardinals to a remote Pacific island, with only enough bibles for half of them, divide them into two teams, and give them only enough holy water for 3 days. As interpersonal dynamics play out, cardinals would be forced to complete a series of immunity challenges that might include reciting a whole mass backwards as fast as possible, arranging life-sized cut-outs of the saints alphabetically and in order of piety, a confessional-face-off, and finally, a beatification contest. And then there's the tribal council which would be conducted in LATIN! It could be good...

Maybe a more contemporary and 'real-life' reality format would be better suited to an already jaded television audience. Think of Michael Jackson's trial. No cameras are allowed in the courtroom, so what has Star TV done to keep the ratings up? In a stroke of pure genius, they've gone to terrible length and expense to recreate, from court transcripts, each and every moment in a dramatically re-enacted play-by-play that's almost better than the real thing. How about a daily conclave re-enactment - which because the proceedings are so top secret any cardinal who divulges what happens is excommunicated - would be a free-form improv in red frocks!

Reality TV might be just what the church needs to finally reach the MTV generation and compete in an entertainment marketplace that has already moved way beyond 'coloured smoke and bells' technology.

In the meantime, we have a new Pope not so different from the old Pope, and an audience waiting to see how all of this will play out on TV. The more things change, the more they stay the same...