TV3 lives in hope of RTÉ Two's wings being clipped

ONE PERSON is missing from the glossy pages of TV3’s eclectic autumn season brochure, and her name is Emily VanCamp. She’s the star of twisty-turny, brooding vengeance soap of the moment, Revenge, and David McRedmond, TV3 chief executive, would dearly have liked her to be there.

“Is there one television show you never miss?” I asked him at TV3’s launch shindig, expecting the answer would be Vincent (his is a first-name-only kind of fame at TV3). “Well, I’ll tell you this, and I don’t mind saying this, and it actually happens to be on RTÉ Two – Revenge. It’s a fantastic American series,” he said, sounding surprised himself. “But they’ll kill me in TV3.”

McRedmond might enjoy Revenge’s weekly dose of duplicity, jealousy and sociopathic plotting in the sunny Hamptons – it’s the kind of show where people dress all in white – but he’s not a major fan of the channel that broadcasts it.

“If TV3 Group is to succeed and indeed if other media is to succeed, Government must stop propping up an outdated State monopoly system,” he told the cast of Dublin Wives and other assorted guests.

“RTÉ Two is a pure entertainment channel – it is our direct competitor in TV3,” he noted, arguing that this loss-making competitor “destroys the market”, and threatens to undermine TV3, which would be “absolutely flying” in any other European market.

Here, TV3 turns a profit but, along the way, there have been compulsory redundancies, pay cuts and an effective €81 million write-off on a loan from the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation – or what McRedmond references as “the pragmatic view” of its lenders. For TV3’s venture capitalist owners Doughty Hanson, regulatory reform is a dish best served immediately.

“It’s not up to me what RTÉ should do or what the Government should do,” says McRedmond. “All I’m asking is to actually sort out the market. Surely one solution is to say maybe not have RTÉ Two. We don’t need it any more. The rationale is gone now that we have TV3. Put the great sport on RTÉ One. You know, why isn’t the All-Ireland final on RTÉ One, on our main channel – of course it should be. Why don’t they do that?”

Why? Forgive me for being Captain Obvious as someone said on Revenge the other night – yes, it is total schlock – but shutting down RTÉ Two would be a drastic measure. And it’s not hard to get a sense that, despite RTÉ’s projected 2012 deficit of €57 million, drastic measures to address its drastic financial crisis are still regarded as, well, a bit drastic. First they came for our State assets, our tax credits and our social welfare system, then they came for ICA Bootcamp.

McRedmond picks on RTÉ Two because it is TV3’s direct competitor but there is a logic to his argument that won’t be lost on licence fee payers, even those who appreciate the choice offered by RTÉ Two and who find the idea of a sports-filled RTÉ One schedule grim.

Some €31.21 out of each licence fee paid goes on RTÉ Two – it costs more than all of RTÉ’s radio services put together. It accounts for 24 per cent of RTÉ’s share of the licence fee, receiving €43.7 million last year.

However, it spends almost €63 million on making programmes, with outlays including €11.4 million on imports and €10.1 million on transmission costing a further €25.2 million.

This results in a deficit on its public service activities of €44.5 million. But with just a commercial contribution of €26.9 million, the channel wound up with a net deficit of €17.6 million last year, making it the single largest reason that the broadcaster recorded an overall net deficit of €16.8 million.

It’s not that RTÉ hasn’t responded to the financial black hole. It has, and it is starting to show. The cost per transmitted hour on RTÉ Two last year was €10,100, a drop of 7.3 per cent compared with just a 0.6 per cent tightening (to €16,600) at RTÉ One. Meanwhile, the channel’s audience share fell from 10.2 per cent to 9 per cent last year, as TV3’s managed to nudge upwards from 12.2 per cent to 12.4 per cent. In peak time, the gap between the two stations is even wider – TV3 has 13 per cent to RTÉ Two’s 9.3.

RTÉ Two will have enjoyed a sport-related audience boost this summer. But, ominously, sports rights have been identified as a key target for cuts. Imports, too, are on the chopping block, while home-produced drama on RTÉ Two is now virtually non-existent.

What’s left? The other big category is the €11 million spent on children’s programming – shows that could, in theory, find a home on Saorview. As for the evening schedule, it is thin indeed, with just the occasional 30 minutes of home-produced comedy that probably wouldn’t get a slot elsewhere.

It will be much easier for the Government to allow RTÉ to continue along this path of whittling down RTÉ Two’s budget, chipping away at its identity and letting its market share fester unimpressively than to pull the plug, meaning Doughty Hanson may have to settle for the long game.

Ten minutes after I talk to McRedmond at TV3’s launch, I bump into Ben Frow, the station’s director of programming. We talk about Dallas and Deception for a while, before I move in with my killer question. Is there a show you never miss?

“Yes. Revenge. I’ve watched all 22 episodes,” he says. “But I watch it on E4, I don’t watch it on RTÉ Two!”

Most people do have that option.