Hugh Linehan: Burrowes gave rural Ireland a voice

While he began his television career with the Dublin-set Tolka Row, it's for his two long-running rural dramas, The Riordans and Glenroe, that Wesley Burrowes will be rightly remembered in a TV and film scriptwriting career that spanned more than 40 years.

With his passing, we have lost another link to that pivotal decade in modern Irish history, 50 years on from independence, when social, cultural and economic changes we now take for granted began to make themselves felt.

Not least among these was the emergence – or, rather, the arrival in Ireland – of powerful new forms of popular communication and entertainment.

Seen at the time as superficial and transitory, these forms – the chat show, the pop song, the soap opera – proved more durable and more influential than anyone might reasonably have expected.

Nothing is more powerful than seeing your own life experiences and stories dramatised on screen.

Apart from the occasional wobbly-accented, Irish-set American or British movie, this was not something you could hope to see until the arrival of what was then called Telefís Éireann in 1962.

Locally produced indigenous television drama, rooted in the country’s strong tradition of popular theatre, was a startling innovation for people all over the country.

And RTÉ, as the monopoly television broadcaster in the State, was the only show in town, particularly if you lived in those large swathes of the country where British TV was unavailable.

The initial idea for The Riordans came from Gunner Rugheimer, the Scandinavian controller of programmes. It's a sign of how far away that time seems from us now that the proclaimed objective was "helping Irish farmers understand modern agricultural methods".

Social conventions

The show did indeed feature endless debates between Benjy and his father about the merits or demerits of new-fangled ways of farming. But, in the same way that a weekly entertainment and chat show hosted by a smooth young presenter called Gay Byrne became a forum for discussion of all sorts of taboo subjects, so an educational drama for young farmers also became a challenge to social conventions.

Storylines included the first marriage breakdown, the contraceptive pill, and the problems faced by a liberal priest.

It’s been suggested that Burrowes, a product of Queen’s University Belfast, was in a good position to take a Northern Protestant eye to Catholics’ concerns and make plotlines that were relevant far beyond their function as entertainment.

What made audiences so fiercely loyal to The Riordans, though, was not the social issues, or even necessarily the storylines.

It was the gallery of strong, memorable characters created by Burrowes.

Benjy, Tom Riordan, Batty, Minnie, Mary and Maggie were rooted in his close observation of his own neighbours in Co Kilkenny.

Spin-offs

The same was true of the spin-offs which followed.

The Riordans

begat

Bracken

and

Bracken

begat the slightly more urbanised

Glenroe

, which was finally cancelled by RTÉ in 2001.

One wonders, if The Riordans had achieved the longevity of Coronation Street, what its depiction of rural Ireland in 2015 would include.

But Irish soap operas took a different route, back to the cities and suburbs where the majority increasingly lived. Fair City and TV3's well-received Red Rock operate to a more accelerated tempo, and include elements of the thriller and the whodunnit to keep a more distracted audience coming back for more.

Soaps

Were

The Riordans

and

Glenroe

really soaps at all?

The phrase, which originated in American serial dramas used by sponsors to sell products to housewives, still has a snobbish and faintly misogynistic ring to it.

As John Bowman notes in his 2012 history of RTÉ, Burrowes himself resented attacks on the programmes by "quasi- literary column-writing smart ass pub-poets".

At this remove, it looks now as if what he created was a particularly Irish take on the genre, one which explored the shifting currents of rural society with a sympathetic eye, a well-tuned ear and – crucially – a well-developed sense of the humorous and the absurd.