Women’s lives laid bare in RTÉ’s real-life mini soaps

A young woman from Tralee struggling to cope with her dad's death. A performance artist going home to Ohio to tell her folks she's now a stripper in Cork. A Dublin couple trying to climb a wearying mountain of bills. These are just three strands of a ground-breaking programme that RTÉ hopes will put the real into reality television this autumn.

When Bill Malone became channel controller at RTÉ 2 last year, he made it clear he wanted to shake up the station and widen its appeal to a female audience. By taking a punt on Connected, a reality programme the like of which has never been made in this country – and which, apart from one man, happens to feature an all- female cast – he has ticked both boxes.

The thing about reality television is that it's never really real. It can't be, because it either takes place in some hideously unnatural setting – such as the Big Brother house – or because the protagonists are followed by camera crews whose very presence inevitably reshapes events and reactions to them into contrived set-pieces, as anyone who has ever seen Tallafornia or Made in Chelsea will know.

A new kind of reality

But Connected is different. In it, six people were handed a video camera and asked to keep diaries for six months. After getting a few basic tips on how to set up shots and tell stories on film, each of the six filmed between four and six hours of footage each week detailing their daily lives, and sent it to the production company.

With 2½ hours of footage recorded for each broadcast minute, the edit was always going to be key. More than 30 full days of raw footage has now been distilled into 20 half-hour episodes that weave together the women’s stories into stress- filled, emotional and sometimes hilarious mini-soaps.

Unlike soaps, however, there were no scripts or outside forces directly shaping events and it is all so real that viewers will be forgiven for occasionally wanting to reach into their television screens to give the protagonists a hug and maybe tell one of them to cop themselves on.

Connected has taken the online obsession with self-revelation offline and into the goggle box, and, as the series progresses over the next 10 weeks, the participants will become connected to each other and the viewers through "transformative life changes and journeys of self-discovery", to quote from the Israeli television production company that developed the format.

All this could easily turn into appallingly voyeuristic and exploitative television, but it is utterly compelling and has proved wildly successful elsewhere. It is the highest-rated Israeli cable television programme ever, and has proved popular with audiences in Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark. A slick-looking US version is in production and will be screened by AOL in January.

The programme was made by Animo and Kite TV – two of the leading production houses in the State – and the series producer is Rónán Ó Muirthile. He has been heavily involved since casting began last summer. The six chosen ones were not in place until November, and they started filming just before Christmas. “You have to find people who want to be in the show and who are able to tell a story,” he says about the lengthy casting process.

These women’s lives are laid bare in an almost unprecedented fashion. Why would anyone be willing to do that? It’s not like the budget available for experimental programming was ever likely to make them rich. “One of the buy-ins for them was they got to see the programme as it was being put together, so it was more collaborative than a normal documentary,” he says. “We are producing it but we are producing it with them.”

That production element appealed to Venetia Quick. She is a radio producer with Q102 and works on the station's Call Cooney show on weekday evenings. She is married with three children. "I wasn't going to do it at first," says Quick. "To be honest, the idea horrified me when I first heard about it, but learning how to direct myself in something like this and learning how to use the camera appealed to me."

She and her husband, Martin Thomas, who also features in the programme, decided it could be something they could do together, a project to serve as a welcome distraction from the financial struggles they had lived through since he lost his event management business when the economy collapsed.

“I found it all a struggle in the beginning, because it is so intrusive, but I actually started to enjoy the process,” she says. “Talking to the camera became quite therapeutic. You have to be completely honest when you are talking to the camera; I think if I wasn’t, people would very quickly pick up on that.”

She is glad now that she did stick her head above the parapet and talk so openly about her family’s everyday struggle. “So many people have the same fears and the same worries. It is too easy to say, ‘Ah things are grand’ all the time, but for a lot of people at the moment, things aren’t grand.”

She is well aware that by pulling back the curtains on her private life, she is likely to come in for some flak, particularly from keyboard warriors who stalk the social networks looking for prey. “There are going to be people who slag me off. Am I prepared for that? A little bit. I know I will have to have a thick skin, but I am only human, so it might get to me.”

A heart-breaking story

One of the most troubling stories in Connected is told by 20-year-old Alanna. Her video diary starts happily enough, as she moves into a house with four friends. It soon becomes clear all is not well in her world, and over the next couple of programmes she talks with heart-breaking honesty about her dad's suicide, which left her orphaned two year earlier.

“People might feel a bit uncomfortable watching some of it, I suppose, but if I was watching someone crying on the television I’d feel sad for them, but I don’t think it would make me uncomfortable,” she says.

Ó Muirthile accepts that accusations of excessive voyeurism could be made about a programme that, on many levels, barges into a young woman’s private grief in the name of entertainment. “We have had to anticipate a lot of different reactions, but my gut feeling is that it is going to go down really well.”

He points out that “we all experience the same emotions” and expresses the hope that “a sense of empathy and the idea that we are not alone in the world” will come out of the programme. “I can’t stress enough the bravery of the contributors, and I think there is a real public service element to this series.”

For her part, Alanna says she is in a better place now and, like Quick, she describes the making of the programme as therapeutic. She doesn’t know if she is prepared for the strange kind of fame that is about to come her way. “I haven’t even thought about that, to be honest, but if it does happen, I will just try to enjoy it.”

Connected begins on Monday on RTÉ 2 at 10.30pm, and airs nightly for the week. It then airs Tuesdays and Thursdays for rest of the run