FROM THE ARCHIVES:A campaign for multichannel TV in those areas which only received RTÉ in the 1970s was fobbed off with a second RTÉ channel. However, the campaigners were regrouping, Michael Finlan reported in this piece with a prescient punchline. – JOE JOYCE
THOSE CRUSADERS of the cathode tube who waged a holy war to take possession of the land of the multi-channels seem to have receded into the darker shadows of the national memory. But you’d be wrong to think that they’ve gone away entirely or that no more arrows remain in their quivers.
The bursting of RTE 2 on to the television airwaves represented a signal defeat for the multi-channel campaigners in those parts of the country where, until then, a strictly one-eyed view of the world seeped through the boob tube. The second channel brought in the best, or perhaps the worst, of everything and the multi-channel lobby was silenced.
However, silence does not necessarily mean surrender and there are signs that, with their war wounds washed and healed, the multi-view crusaders are ready to do battle again.
This time it is likely to be a quieter war, with the objectives being won by stealth and attrition. One of the most vigorous multi- channel campaigns was waged in Galway City. The people involved are still banded together in a loosely-knit body . . . They are, to a man and woman, dissatisfied with RTE 2, a not unnatural reaction from the defeated when the spoils of the victor are flaunted before them.
If RTE 2 managed to mix the most perfect programming cocktail imaginable (and that would take some imagining), I doubt the beaten warriors of the campaign would be impressed.
As far as they are concerned, the larger principle is that they feel very strongly that they were robbed of the choice of tuning into the other channels which are freely available in the rest of the country. They resent RTE acting as an intermediary and making the decision on what programmes are best-suited to the great unwashed audience west of the Shannon and elsewhere . . .
Anyway, the Galway campaigners are bestirring themselves for action once again. For the moment, they are playing their cards very close to the breast, feeling, perhaps, that in the past they may have damaged their cause by too much talk.
One gathers, though, that what they have in mind this time would circumvent the Department of Posts and Telegraphs entirely and invite free enterprise to tackle the technological challenge of bringing all the channels to the Galway area . . .
Rightly or wrongly, the Galway campaigners feel that RTE 2 was little more than a con-job. So, the second crusade is about to be launched. And one wonders if the media guru, [Marshall] McLuhan, was right after all when he propounded that it isn’t what you communicate but the way you do it that counts. With the obsession of television, the lateral line of communication may be coming to a final end just as this sentence now has done. Hello, global village . . . goodbye newspapers.