Belief in cultural distinction was a major spur for the founding of RTÉ in 1962. But where would we be without foreign TV?
THERE WAS a time, around the middle of the last decade, when an Irish person could turn on their television and know they had access to the best service in the world; that the Irish viewing experience was the confluence of a perfect set of cultural circumstances.
Most Irish people spoke English as a first language, meaning we didn’t have to watch American programmes with clumsy dubbing. We got all the riches of British television without having to pay for it. What’s more, we got the references, the jokes, the characters – we grew up watching British television so, to an extent, its culture became entwined with ours.
Irish people showed up repeatedly as hosts, actors, writers and contestants. Ireland became valuable enough territory for British channels to target us directly: Big Brotherand X Factorauditions brought queues around Dublin corners, advertising to the stations and Jedward into the world.
In the midst of this was Irish television, which was going through a golden age of quality and confidence. Yes, there were attempts to ape British and American programming, but the programmes that hit home were the ones abouthome. And, despite struggling to match the standards set in Britain, and often criticised for failing to do so, the gap lessened considerably, partly because personnel in several of the independent production companies had also worked in Britain.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. British television, in particular, was originally greeted as a malign influence, or at least an alien one. That very word – “alien” – was used in a seminal 1956 report from the Television Committee set up to examine the potential role of the medium in Ireland.
By that year, there were an estimated 7,000 sets in the Republic, which was more than in some European countries – and all the more notable given there was no native broadcaster to feed them. Instead, they were tuning in to the new transmitter in the North, and between it and transmitters in Britain, television broadcasts reached the west of Ireland, through the midlands to south of Dublin.
The potential for cultural pollution concerned the Television Committee.
Robert Savage's Irish Television: The Political and Social Originsgoes into some entertaining detail on this, and among the report's findings was the belief that British television was "governed by ideas that are wholly alien to an ordinary Irish home".
Some programmes were “brazen, some ‘frank’ in sex matters, some merely inspired by the desire to exalt the British royal family and the British way of life. This last element runs through a wide variety of programmes.”
It went on: “It includes exploitation of semi-nudity, ‘blue’ jokes in comedy shows, documentaries . . . of the unmarried mother . . . plays hinging on the theme of adultery . . . and even films showing in detail the sex activities of animals.”
The belief that an Irish broadcaster would offer cultural distinction was a major motivation for the founding of Telefís Éireann in 1962. While much has changed since, not least that Irish television is now arguably more permissive than British in several ways, that original impetus remains a factor.
RTÉ's director of programmes, Steve Carson, touched on this in a 2009 interview. "I love our programmes that don't make sense anywhere else. The Late Latemakes no sense. It's two hours long, or two-and-a-half if it needs to be. It covers the health service and then a celebrity and it gets 50 per cent audience share.
“I mean, a US TV executive would go, ‘What the hell is that about?’ Look at our schedule. 9pm, it’s the news. Then you’ll probably have 40 minutes of serious current affairs. Then you’ll have a documentary about an artist. Our schedule wouldn’t make sense to BBC1. We are much more highbrow than BBC1.”
But it is now impossible to imagine Irish television without the influence of British – but also hard to imagine how British TV would have fared without the Irish. Since the early days, there has been cross-fertilisation. Several of the early pioneers of Irish television were brought in from the BBC, which had led the world in the medium.
Since then, traffic has increasingly been in the other direction, with many Irish directors, camera people, writers and other professionals either leaving Ireland for Britain, or returning from there having developed their careers in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the small pool at home.
British television has been replete with Irish stars since the early days – from Eamonn Andrews to Graham Norton – and there have been a succession of dramas and comedies that showed British television was far less worried about alien Irish culture: The Irish RM, Ballykissangel, Father Ted, Mrs Brown's Boysand Single-Handedwere British successes, with co-productions in some cases emphasising that link explicitly.
It has always been a far deeper relationship than the one with American television, which has been almost entirely based on importing programmes.
Despite the image of Dallasas a racy ratings grabber, most of it, as Fintan O'Toole pointed out recently, was culturally conservative. Nevertheless, it has gone out of fashion, and the past decade has seen a marked decline in US programmes on RTÉ in particular – a period that has coincided with an unprecedented flourishing of brilliant US drama.
Yet, the episodic hokum of The Mentalisthas been one of the few programmes to make it on to RTÉ prime time of late, alongside Desperate Housewives. Both sit far more neatly in the tradition of imported dramas – Marcus Welby MD, Dallas– than do Breaking Bador Homeland.
Yet, it is generally forgotten that there was television in Ireland before RTÉ. UTV’s first broadcast was on Halloween 1959 – during which Dublin viewers called to complain about the poor reception. Whatever about the complexity of the Republic’s relationship with British television, the one with the North had several layers added.
Sensitivities were strong well before television, with Unionists complaining in 1926 when the BBC celebrated St Patrick’s Day. Television’s arrival coincided with the slide towards violence, and became a cultural battleground. In 1959, Unionists complained about how the North was presented in an Alan Wicker television documentary – further episodes weren’t shown. Before this, an interview with Irish actor Siobhán McKenna, in which she expressed sympathy for IRA internees in the Republic, also caused major controversy.
These were precursors to an arduous wrestle over the airwaves, accusations of censorship and bias, the broadcasting bans in both countries during the Troubles and the great challenges for journalists and editors throughout. It has a legacy today in the delicate line UTV and BBC Northern Ireland must walk to avoid offending either community – and there is still the occasional apology.
The most recent came from an unlikely source: golfer and commentator Mark James quipped during the British Open that, with the success of golfers from the North, “maybe they will stop fighting each other”. Then again, you never have to look far for reminders of how, North and South, what happens on British television is watched closely here.
