Challenge of new TV world for ailing RTE

There it sits, big, squat and probably matte black, occupying pride of place in your living-room. It has destroyed the art of conversation, turned your children into spherical objects, purveyed pornography, undermined religious belief, ruined amateur sport, debased political debate, coarsened your culture, and frittered away the best years of your life. And most of you still can't live without it.

The brouhaha over Granada's acquisition of 45 per cent of TV3, and the consequent departure of Coronation Street from RTE, has raised a flurry of questions about Irish television and its direction. But the politics and business of how and why our television is the way it is cause most people to reach for the zapper.

The complexities of financing, the mysteries of new technology and the tectonic shifts in global media ownership seem remote and unfathomable.

The hard sell of the various special interests involved quickly grates. Commercial companies announce they want to give you more choice, then dish up the same old rubbish.

Public service broadcasters make high-minded pronouncements about maintaining standards, then shave expensive minutes off their current affairs coverage and hope you won't notice. When it comes to television, everyone's trying to sell you something, and it's usually a pup. Meanwhile, the number of our political representatives with any understanding of the issues involved can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

For gung-ho capitalists and technophiles, television is the Trojan horse which will deliver all sorts of valuable (and profitable) goodies into Irish homes in the next couple of years. Cable companies are digging up our streets to bring us movies on demand, unlimited Internet access and interactive sports coverage, not to mention hundreds of new channels.

For doom and gloom merchants, (many of them in the print media, which has always had a love-hate relationship with television: emphasis on hate), it's a sign of further decline. They tut-tut over this week's fuss about Coronation Street migrating from RTE to TV3, and ask whether this is of concern to public service broadcasting.

Television, like everything else, is not what it used to be. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or Big Brother become emblems of moral and intellectual collapse, dumbing down and cultural imperialism.

Apart from the ridiculous implication that there was ever such a thing as a Golden Era (just look at the archive programmes), the truth is Irish television is not what it used to be, but not in the way that the doom-mongers imagine. It's just not that important anymore.

It's not that people aren't watching - they're watching in a different way. What the new technologies have in common is they fragment the audience. In the US, the traditional network channels have been in freefall for several years, their market share eroded by specialist cable channels and the Internet.

With digital television starting to roll out in the UK, the ITV audience is dwindling. The traditional notion of the television as the electronic hearth around which the family huddles every evening for some kind of communal experience is gone, or going fast.

Most homes now have more than one set in the house, and an increasing number have three or four. Thirty five years ago, this country was transfixed by the Bishop and the Nightie.

Last week (on what RTE likes to pretend is the same show) it couldn't have cared less that Freddie Starr stuck his tongue down Pat Kenny's throat.

In such a climate, whither public service television? The question is not confined to Ireland. Public service broadcasting was based on the idea of television as a shared experience, of a limited number of channels which would carry, in the words of former BBC television boss Bill Cotton, "the best of everything for everybody".

At its best (and the BBC was the best), that notion of public service encompassed everything from Saturday evening gameshows to high-minded documentaries.

Since taking the top job at the BBC earlier this year, Greg Dyke has announced plans for a fundamental shift, with new digital channels specifically catering for high and low culture. Under the new dispensation, British television will become more like British radio, with themed channels for sport, news and classical music.

What happens in Britain is bound to affect what happens here. Dyke's proposals are highly controversial in the UK, but at least they represent a response to the changes ahead.

RTE, by contrast, appears too mired in its immediate difficulties to formulate a strategy for the digital future. No amount of glossy promos can disguise the fact that the station's autumn schedules are decidedly skimpy on interesting, new, home-grown programmes.

Having gone seriously over-budget last year with its millennium-linked programming, cutbacks in production are the order of the day. The sort of streaming Dyke envisages would be extremely difficult on RTE's relatively tiny resources.

Irish television has never been particularly Irish. Sixty per cent of programming on RTE 1 and Network 2 is imported, and the percentage is considerably higher on TV3. Add in the considerable market share of the British terrestrial and satellite channels, and the single most important function of Irish-based broadcasting is to put Irish people and Irish stories on screen. The first two years of TV3 has shown us not to expect too much from that quarter. If we want Irish programming, we're going to have to pay for it, and pay more than the current derisory licence fee of £70. It is RTE's misfortune that its current campaign for a licence increase coincides with the highest inflation figures in a decade. Not much chance of Charlie McCreevy lending a sympathetic ear this year, then.

But the station only has itself to blame for its tardiness in putting its own house in order, and its secretiveness about how much of its annual wage bill goes on its over-swollen administration, rather than programme-making.

AS FOR TV3, with Granada's involvement, and with Champions' League and Coronation Street as the linchpins in its schedule, the commercial channel is looking like the equivalent of an ITV franchise for the Republic of Ireland, a televisual equivalent of the British chain stores which dominate our high streets and shopping malls, with "regional opt-outs" for local news and sport.

Whatever happens in the battle between TV3 and RTE, it is only a sideshow. The pity is it didn't happen 20 years ago, when Network 2 was first mooted. Establishing a commercial rival to the national broadcaster in the early 1980s would have forced RTE to modernise its work practices earlier, and sharpened up its programme content in the face of competition (it was the arrival of brash ITV, after all, which shook staid BBC out of its slumber).

Too late. The new battlefield will be digital, and the weapon of choice the "personal video recorder system". Under brand names such as TiVo and Replay, these little black boxes, far simpler to programme than a VCR, will go out and find whatever kind of programmes you like among the hundreds of channels on offer.

If you're a Clint Eastwood fan with an interest in sumo wrestling and a passion for gardening, TiVo will graze across the channels, selecting, recording and grading programmes according to how closely they fit your particular requirements.

More sinisterly, it will feed information back to potential advertisers on your lifestyle and viewing preferences. "It lets you watch anything you want to watch when you want to watch it," say the makers of TiVo.

The TV channel is dead. Long live the all-powerful, all-consuming couch potato.

Hugh Linehan was recently appointed Entertainment Editor of The Irish Times.