IN the 1980s, some idealists believed in a brave new world of untrammelled access to the airwaves. Television would be liberated by the camcorder and the cable, taking control of production away from the self perpetuating elites of the broadcasting monopolies and handing it to "ordinary people". It didn't work, of course - who wants to watch other people's, home movies, unless it's for the relentless pratfalls of Jeremy Beadle's You've Been Framed?
But the BBC did invent a new genre to accommodate the new technology. Video diaries have been an established fixture on British screens for ten years now. The format seems ideally suited to Irish television - low cost programming that tells real stories by real people - but the Video Diaries series showing at the moment is the first example of its type to be seen on RTE.
The impression given is that the series crept by accident rather than design through the RTE system. Originally commissioned by the current affairs department in 1994 as a series about work and unemployment, the four half hour programmes were co ordinated by associate producer Edel O'Brien, a former video diarist herself, for the BBC with The Reluctant Mamoushka, in which she charted her experiences chaperoning young Irish ballerinas at the Perm Ballet School.
Kicking off last week with Bracism, young actress Anakana Schofield's account of her struggle with train track braces in preparation for jaw surgery last year, the series also includes Asylum, psychiatrist Brendan O'Reilly's diary of a Christmas spent on duty at the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum, and Rare As Rocking Horse Manure, the story of Patricia and David McGrath's struggle to develop their vineyard in Co Waterford.
The real gem of the series, however, is Tracy McElheron's Kiss The House Goodbye, by far the most entertaining programme you'll see on Irish television next week. Tracy lives in her father's house in Dublin with her husband Thomas daughter Lena and scores of snakes which Thomas breeds as a sideline to his pet shop job. Her hopes of getting her own house have to be put on hold when she becomes pregnant, and the diary follows the next nine chaotic months in her life. Kiss The House Goodbye won't win any awards for technical achievement, but it's a hugely enjoyable and affecting story - just the kind of thing that could only work in the video diary format. It also has the best dramatic use of a Choc Ice ever seen on the telly.
"People pick up on the snakes as the quirky, exotic factor, but for me the essence of that diary is in the little moments where Tracy confides in the camera," says O'Brien. "I asked her to turn it on when she least wanted to. Don't postpone it till tomorrow. When I was making my own diary, some of the material I shot was very artificial and staged. I was trying to be a perfectionist and wanted to say something in five sentences instead of 50, but lost the spontaneity along the way." In Kiss The House Goodbye. Tracy develops an enviable confessional relationship with the camera, which becomes like another family member.
"The audience knows subconsciously that there isn't a camera crew mediating the subject," believes O'Brien. "They're not thinking about it, but they can tell if somebody's acting in any way for the camera. When I started working on the series, people approached me with what they thought were brilliant ideas, but 99 per cent of them weren't video diaries - they were road movies or documentaries.
"I'd just spent three months travelling around the country. I met all these amazing people, who I thought should be seen in programmes. This was a rare opportunity - so little of Irish television features real Irish people. There aren't any observational documentaries. In the UK, documentary makers understand what slot is available, what type of programme you can make. We're not educated in that way, because it doesn't really exist in Irish television."
IT'S two years now since O'Brien began working with the diarists. "There was a point where they weren't going to be finished at all. I don't know what the series would be like if they had gone through the main RTE system." Although RTE's Independent Productions Unit has twice called for tenders in the last year for a further diary series, nothing has been commissioned yet. It would be a shame if the opportunity was let lapse.
"Video diaries are done to death in Britain," says O'Brien, who expresses a fervent wish to move on from the format herself. "It hasn't really been done yet here, but I wonder if there'll be a stage in ten years time when nobody will want to do it. At the moment, though, for some people it becomes part of their lives. They feel they have a story to tell."
