You can learn a lot from television. For example, horror fans know you should never go into a basement if the light bulb doesn’t work. And it’s common knowledge that a camper van can act as a makeshift lab for a crystal meth start-up. But television can also lead you astray so never choose a career based on what it looks like in the movies. If you watched Maid in Manhattan, you might believe that housekeeping staff spend their days trying on the hotel guests’ designer clothes.As someone who cleaned rooms in a family hotel, I can tell you the pickings were slim if you were hoping to try on the guests’ outfits. It was the late 1980s so an occasional fancy blouse or batwing jumper could be found hanging in a wardrobe but you’d search long and hard for a Dolce et Gabbana cream coat like the one Jennifer Lopez sashayed around in. In the late summer our golden oldie guests rolled into town with their brown suitcases. They lived like monks so you would hardly know they were in the hotel room apart from their dentures in the bathroom. Believe me when I tell you that no member of our housekeeping staff ever considered trying them on.If you have dreams of becoming a writer, don’t be fooled by the so-called writers on the screen. Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw allegedly wrote just one column a week yet she spent money like a sailor on shore leave and wore shoes that cost more than some people’s cars. Now I don’t know how much columnists are paid in New York, but an Irish columnist’s pay cheque would barely cover a pair of slippers and a bag of lollipops these days.The Beast in Me series also starred a writer, played by Claire Danes, and initially it accurately portrayed her job. She was permanently irritable and spent a lot of time talking about writing while not actually doing any, which is spot-on. She couldn’t afford repairs to her crumbling house and you often weren’t sure if she was wearing her pyjamas or day time clothes. Again, an incredibly truthful depiction of a writer.Then she made a fatal error. She secured a very important interview for her book but rocked up for the meeting one hand as long as the other. She produced no notebook, dictaphone or other recording device when she sat with her interviewees. If that was real life, it would trigger a mild breakdown in the writer, but because this is television she produced a global bestseller.[ Weird fishes: Alison Healy on obscure competitions and the contestants they attractOpens in new window ]Possibly the most flawed representation of a job can be seen in the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. If you entered An Garda Síochána expecting your working day to unfold as it does in this NYPD precinct, you would be sorely disappointed. The detectives spend about five minutes per day doing police work. The rest of their time is spent flirting with colleagues, playing elaborate pranks on each other and blatantly flouting workplace safety rules with dangerous games. In a real-life police station, bins are probably set on fire, ceilings broken and two way mirrors smashed but you wouldn’t expect the detectives to be the culprits. And if farming is your dream job, then it would also be unwise to take agricultural advice from Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner portrays a farmer in this movie and has annoyed generations of farmers by digging up a half-mature crop of corn in the middle of summer because he wanted to build a baseball field. Fair enough, he wanted to build the baseball pitch so he could play catch with his dead father, but could he not have waited a few weeks and harvested the crop first? Teagasc advisers all over the country reached for the smelling salts when they saw this wanton destruction of a cash crop.But sometimes programme makers do their work so well that viewers get muddled between the actor and the character. The Riordans actor John Cowley was so believable when he portrayed the farmer Tom Riordan that he received letters from farmers about their agricultural problems. Actor Joe Lynch once told how some dog breeders who watched Glenroe were so taken by Dinny’s rapport with his greyhound that they were convinced the actor was a real-life greyhound expert.And the late Dermot Morgan successfully inhabited the role of Father Ted so well that he found it hard to shake off his priestly image. When he was being interviewed by the (British) Independent in 1997, the reporter noted that the actor asked the waitress for coffee. “Right away, Father,” the waitress replied.