Live and clicking on the screen

While arts programmes move ever later into RTÉ's schedules, how we consume radio and TV is totally changing, writes Arminta Wallace.

For anyone of an arty persuasion, the documentary series which begins on RTÉ television tonight will fall into foggy, sleety February like manna from heaven.

Over the next three months, Arts Lives 2007 will examine a range of contemporary topics from punk poetry to chick lit, fashion design to photography. Some of the films will delve beneath the surface of the current arts scene to focus on influential, but often underexamined, arts personalities such as Gate Theatre supremo Michael Colgan. Others will take a quirky new look at personalities of the past, including Sheila Wingfield, Lady Powerscourt - once a noted poet, now a forgotten voice - and, in tonight's opening programme, the "art" of Charles Haughey.

The director-general of RTÉ, Cathal Goan, argues in his introduction to the publicity brochure for the series that these films don't just reflect the diversity and energy of the arts scene in Ireland, they contribute to it. Flicking through the brochure's glossy pages, it's difficult to disagree. Who wouldn't want to tune in to the "mysterious alchemy of artist, creativity and passion" which takes place when Alan Gilsenan turns his lens on Paul Durcan, when Seán Ó Mórdha examines the evolution of Irish landscape painting, or when Cathal Black looks at life and death through the eyes of essayist and funeral director Thomas Lynch?

In another set of introductory remarks, RTÉ television's director of programmes, Clare Duignan, points out that past series have met with "strong audience approval". Last year a film about Liam Clancy attracted more than 300,000 viewers while, in January 2005, almost 240,000 people watched a documentary on the work and life of John McGahern. "The new Arts Lives season," Duignan writes, "comes on foot of a sustained period of investment and development within RTÉ's arts programming."

Arts spending at the station has, she says, risen from €320,000 in 2002 to more than €1.3 million last year. This year it is set to top €1.8 million. Television drama, in particular, is on a roll, as is televised coverage of such major national arts events as Bloomsday and the Beckett centenary.

Is all this upbeat chirpiness simply the appropriate tone for a national broadcaster whose success is the envy of Europe, and which has an effective monopoly in the area of arts programme-making in Ireland? Or does it have just the slightest overtone of defensiveness, the sound of an organisation striving to maintain its grip on a rapidly changing broadcast environment?

There can be little doubt that the media world into which the current batch of Arts Lives films will be dispatched is very different to that which greeted the first series of programmes in 2003. Once upon a time, people actually dashed home in time to see or hear their favourite shows. Now it's all about media on the move, as viewers and listeners of all ages get a handle not only on such terminology as "catch-up programming" and "the drag-and-drop environment", but on the technology which enables them to download radio shows and video podcasts from all corners of the globe. This is a world in which, as a recent report prepared for the Arts Council on broadcasting and the arts puts it, people's first port of call when they reach home after work is "the PC, not the TV".

Could this be why arts programmes - especially those which engage critically with the arts - are moving into later and later slots in the schedules? There are a few honourable exceptions, such as Lyric FM's Artszone, presented by Aedin Gormley, at teatime on Saturdays, and TG4's Soiscéal Pháraic on Thursdays at 8pm. But, by and large, you need to be something of a vampire to keep up with the arts as they are broadcast in 2007.

Gone are the days of cosy afternoon cups of coffee with Rattlebag, presented by Myles Dungan. Serious amounts of caffeine are now required to keep awake until the end of, say, the music programme Other Voices, or Rattlebag's replacement, The Eleventh Hour, both of which gravitate towards midnight. Even the unfailingly jaunty Páraic Breathnach - who hosts The Eleventh Hour as well as Soiscéal Pháraic - must surely be aware that his audience may drop out - or drop off - before the final credits. As for John Kelly's The View, you need to be pretty alert to catch it at all, since it has shrunk to 40 minutes, on 36 weeks of the year.

Arts Lives programmes run from 10.15 to 11.15pm, which may strike viewers who have to leave the house at 6.30 in the morning as a tad on the tardy side. "One of the things we're genuinely proud of is the way we're scheduling arts programmes," insists David McKenna, executive producer of arts and music. "This is a strong peak-time slot. We're putting arts documentaries right in the heart of the schedule. But this isn't about us patting ourselves on the back."

Nor is it, he says, about paying lip-service to the public service remit. "We are obliged as a public service broadcaster to reflect the cultural life of the country. But the thing is - we'd be doing it anyway, because our audiences want to see it. It's an often-quoted truism that the most successful programmes on Irish television are Irish-made programmes. And a reflection of that is that we can make arts documentaries, put them out at a quarter past ten on a Tuesday night, and people want to see them."

There is, he adds, far wider interest in the arts than is acknowledged. "Arts programmes are often filed under special interest, but if you actually start looking at the numbers of people who read books, go to films, listen to music and go to concerts, you're talking about huge numbers. And it's a really important part of their lives - as important as sport is to the people who follow it. Arts and entertainment cross over a lot of the time. Let's face it, there's very little great art of any kind that isn't entertaining and exciting."

But does it work the other way round? If, for example, an entertainment programme such as Ryan Tubridy's radio show has a regular "arts" slot, does that count as "arts" programming even though the content of such slots is overwhelmingly mainstream? Not according to Duignan, who says the trend towards infusion of arts components into general programming doesn't represent the arts policy of our national broadcaster.

"The way in which programmes are scheduled has changed a good deal over the years," she says. "General channels like RTÉ are now competing with the highly specialised schedules of digital channels. To offer people a programme without flagging very clearly to them what it's about is akin to starting out on the back foot. In general, when we're dealing with the arts in any deep and considered way on television, we tend to deal with them in a dedicated arts strand. If people like the arts, they want to know where to find the arts."

Duignan says she's still a big believer in the communality of people watching a particular programme all together, at the same time, and being able to discuss it afterwards in the traditional way. "What you would like to think is that every night in your schedule - every week in your schedule - you would offer people programmes which give them that opportunity," she says.

"That said, we also have to recognise that people lead busy lives and they want to have more and more control over what they watch and when they watch it." Such control, inevitably, means more power in the hands of the audience - and less in the hands of traditional broadcasters such as RTÉ. And the business of choice is both central, and far-reaching. "If you're interested in music, you can go online and find precisely the music you want," says David McKenna. "It's not like when I was a young fella and if it was in Golden Discs, you could have it and if it wasn't, you couldn't. End of story.

"Some very practical things have to be worked out about how we get what, until now, has been broadcast programming into the world of the internet. And then there's a second question, which is: are there quite different types of programmes which we should be making for these new media? It's particularly interesting in terms of the arts, because arts and music have already made a lot of the running on the internet."

Such questions are of major interest both to the makers and consumers of arts programming. They are also of interest to artists in that they offer new opportunities for the dissemination of art to the wider public. Which is, as the Arts Council's development director Stephanie O'Callaghan explains, why the council has decided to convene a major conference on broadcasting and the arts in August of this year.

"Changes in scheduling around arts programming last summer were the catalyst, prompting us to look more closely at the role of broadcasting in the arts," says O'Callaghan. "But when we looked more closely, we found it opened up some really interesting topics, both in terms of how artists access audiences and how audiences get their information about the arts."

Preliminary research conducted for the Arts Council suggests that over the next decade, just about every aspect of the traditional relationship between the arts and broadcasting will be up for grabs. This includes everything from the way in which audience figures are calculated to the use of blogging and other internet environments as a way of "building" new audiences.

We will, of course, have to be careful that the public service baby doesn't get thrown out with the broadcasting bathwater. But if we look at the brave new digital world as a possibility rather than a threat, who knows what "mysterious alchemies" we may be tuning in to over the coming years?

The first Arts Lives programme, Charles Haughey: Patronising the Arts, is on RTÉ 1 tonight at 10.15pm