Birth of a station

The country's first wholly commercial TV station is located on an industrial estate in the west Dublin suburb of Tallaght, and…

The country's first wholly commercial TV station is located on an industrial estate in the west Dublin suburb of Tallaght, and senior TV3 staff are secretly very pleased that their counterparts in the State broadcaster have dubbed them Tallaght TV. "It's much better than being the Dublin 4 network," one quipped this week.

The bland exterior doesn't even hint that behind its walls Irish television history will be made when it goes on air for the first time at 5 p.m., tomorrow week. Inside, slick design meets state-of-the-art technology. A property journalist would have a field day.

A news editor sits at his desk in one of the small but ultra-modern offices off the TV3 newsroom where a few of the station's 145 employees stride purposely from computer to office and back again. They are young and trendy and some of their accents are Australian. Another reminder of Rupert Murdoch hovers above the news editor in the form of a blown up headline from a newspaper article; "Do we really need the bastard son of Sky?"

The question was posed by a journalist who vilifed the station's programming schedule after TV3's trade launch last June. It was criticised somewhat less harshly in this newspaper. With programmes such as Aussie soap Breakers, Team Knight Rider and something called Sunset Beach on the bill it was all too tempting for critics to join rock star Bruce Springsteen in a maudlin chorus of "57 channels (and nothin' on)".

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Thankfully, there is no attempt by anyone at the station to aspire to anything but what it says on the IRTC-approved packet. Officially it is a mix of entertainment, local news, sport and acquired programmes from Britain and the US, aimed at the 15- to 45-year-olds market. Unofficially, if not the illegitimate offspring, it is a not-so-distant cousin of a network called Sky.

"We are an Irish entertainment network," Canadian chief executive officer and managing director of TV3, Rick Hetherington says.

He repeats, mantra-like, the magic statistic which suggests we are a nation most of whom feed off a staple diet of anything so long as it's not RTE.

"Apart from news, 70 per cent of all viewing in this country goes to foreign broadcasters," he says adding that the State broadcaster has only recently moved to counter this. A recent revamp has seen Network 2 abandoning the public sector image and now with programmes such as Friends and The Simpsons looks for all intents and purposes like "an American broadcasting outfit".

"What makes TV3 tick and what makes RTE tick are two different things," he says. RTE 1 serves the public service remit "very well", including as it does a certain percentage of minority programming. According to Hetherington, the next few months will be a kind of education process for a nation getting used to indigenous commercial TV.

TV3 started transmission of its testcard on Wednesday and is a must-carry on the cable and MMDS systems. It will also broadcast on some UHF channels, and you can tune in to it on your TV in the normal way.

Kieran Devaney, a former producer with SKY News and now editor on the station's news at six programme, (the absence of the Angelus means the news starts on time at TV3), looks worn out by the pre-launch preparations.

It has been contended that the station will either live or die by the quality of its news and other home-produced programmes which initially will form 18 per cent of the station's output. This figure is set to increase to 25 per cent by year five.

"It's not tabloid," insists Devaney before that possibility has even been raised. "We will be people-orientated and professional." They will bring, he says, a fresh approach to the news.

Even the weather will be different on TV3. "A small village, somewhere in the country could find themselves at the centre of their very own weather forecast," he says. In the wake of the Omagh bombing the TV3 news department analysed how they would have covered the tragedy.

"We would have had six camera crews and six reporters on the story," he says. Scheduled programmes would have been rescheduled. Quite a departure then from RTE, which showed us Xena Warrior Princess while one of the biggest stories of the decade was unfolding.

Then there are the TV3 babes. Attractive bright young things with limited to fair experience, but oodles of potential were plucked from the relative obscurity of places such as TnaG to become the station's main news journalists.

While the move towards the dumbing down of news on both commercial and public broadcasters has been greeted with groans by more highbrow commentators, TV3 is committed to providing nothing more sinister than what they call "bright, breezy, watchable news".

But the TV3 babes concern Irish Times TV critic Eddie Holt: "What's next, topless news? I mean how far can you go to make the news sexy before it becomes ridiculous?"

At least a little further than our State broadcaster anyway, according to TV3 research which found that some news programmes are perceived to be talking down to their audience, or behaving like domineering relations.

While TV3 adopts the role of flirtatious teenager to a public it intends to woo, CanWest Global, the broadcasting empire which owns 45 per cent of the station, will be its wealthy but disciplined stepfather.

The organisation's track record - it owns TV3 and TV4 in New Zealand, Network 10 in Australia, the main TV Network in Canada and a fair whack of UTV - has already impressed advertisers. TV3 has bypassed RTE's tactic of selling ads to the highest bidder and made individual deals with their clients on the basis of viewing figures.

"You can't beat a trained surgeon doing brain surgery," said a member of one satisfied advertising agency. Another sector delighted at the set-up of a new station are independent producers who now have another outlet for their programmes. Former film producer, Jane Gogan is the commissioning editor of TV3. "We want to keep people working hard on the creative side in order to break formats and be radical, that's what Irish viewers want," she says.

Speakeasy, presented by newcomer Caroline O'Callaghan, is not the best example of this radical approach but it is not "patronising" and is "intelligent" representing a considerable breakthrough for an afternoon chatshow.

According to David BlakeKnox, RTE's director of television production, the arrival of TV3 has implications for the State broadcaster's advertising revenue but in competitive terms they are looking at the bigger picture.

"Our strategy is not being determined by TV3 but by an assessment of the whole broadcasting environment which is the most competitive in Europe," he says. The principal competition for both stations will be from the ITV/UTV network which has more viewers outside its official broadcast area than inside it.

If things had gone according to CanWest Global's plan, it would now be a major shareholder in the UK's Channel 5. In 1995 it was the highest bidder for the tender.

It was turned down by the Independent Television Commission, which said the programmes were not of high enough quality and that there were too many repeats.

John Fairley, a former head of Yorkshire Television who led CanWest's bid, says that a thinly veiled nationalistic agenda led to the failure of its consortium UKTV.

"Our proposals were superior, we were the highest bidder, we should have won it but they wanted the licence to stay in the country," he said.

It was 10 years ago next month that an advertisement was placed in the back of this newspaper asking for those interested in setting up a new TV station in Ireland to respond. James Morris, heads the consortium which holds 20 per cent of the shares in TV3. Back in 1988, he told his staff at Windmill Lane Pictures in Dublin it was too good an opportunity to miss.

He laughs about it now, but the intervening years saw any number of complications. The initial £2.5 million investment of the consortium which also includes accountant to the stars, Ossie Kilkenny, and U2 manager Paul McGuinness was lost forever after their first licence for a third TV station fell through.

Morris's company went into examinership as a result, but has since recovered. The trauma of UTV signing on and then pulling out of the project also took its toll, but the fortunes of the TV three musketeers took an upward turn when they were introduced to CanWest Global in 1996.

TV3's biggest coup so far has been to secure the rights to all of Ireland's away matches for the European Championship qualifiers. They claim they did so, not by paying above the odds for the rights, but by offering to show all the other matches in Ireland's group. The station also has options on England's away matches.

It may have the matches the nation wants to watch, but commentators keep returning to the news service, a crucial segment some feel will trip up TV3;

"They are going head to head with RTE on this and yet they are cutting corners," says a media source who does not want to be named. He says the atmosphere will probably be great "with all these young people buzzing around" but the lack of heavy-hitting journalists will mean it has the feel of a college product. "They have hired people who look grand, but Dan Rather they ain't."

Today FM's political correspondent, Mark Costigan, was one of the better-known media folk to be approached about a job in TV3.

"We discussed the notion of me moving to the station," he says. "I got the impression that the top management were very smart individuals with a lot of experience and a lot of financial power. It was also apparent that there would be a high emphasis on the visual content of their news service. The word Sky was on people's lips."

That is more than would have remained on his own lips had he taken the job. One question put to Costigan by an image-conscious TV3 head-hunter concerned exactly how attached the broadcaster was to his moustache. But it was loyalty to Today FM, not the thought of shedding facial hair, he insists, that made him turn it down.

Rick Hetherington's point that as a nation we have yet to be educated about the whole concept of commercial television is given a stamp of local authority by (who else?) a Dublin taxi-driver.

"Is that the new TV station?" he asks suspiciously as he motors away from the industrial estate. "That's more of us taxpayers' money down the train."

When told that it was established and being run through private funding and advertising revenue he is unimpressed. "Yeah, but when it closes down the Government will be throwing grant after grant at it won't they?" he snorts triumphantly.

On Sunday September 20th the Great Irish Public comes face to face with TV3. This, as they are fond of saying themselves, is television.