Poet, Critic & Journalist
I learned a lot from watching The Seahorseman (RTE1). I learned, for instance, that the female seahorse has a penis and that the male is the one who gets pregnant, which presumably means that the male is actually the female, and vice versa, though the filmmakers chose not to enlighten me on that. But I […]
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On these balmy summer evenings, when God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, there’s nothing that boosts one’s sense of euphoria quite like a a barrage of programmes about bombings. TV3 was first up, with Sunday night’s A Bloody Friday: The Dublin-Monaghan Bombings, RTE continuing the theme on Tuesday with the first […]
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With Fine Gael busily devouring itself in the manner of one of Goya’s more nightmarish visions, I summoned up memories of A Family at War, that hugely entertaining RTE documentary series from a couple of years back in which disgruntled party members gleefully disembowelled each other as they recalled various leadership heaves. This history of […]
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IT was just before kick-off in the England-USA game and on RTE2 Bill O’Herlihy wanted to know what Eamon Dunphy thought of Wayne Rooney. “A great player,” Eamon sagely pronounced before stepping up the praise a gear or two. “I think he’s magic. He is a great, great player. He could light up this World Cup.” And, as if that wasn’t enough: “He’s a nice kid.”
Halfway through Eurovision: The Contenders (RTE1), Marty Whelan stood beside an ancient cot at the Dublinia exhibition and announced “I’m going to have a lie-down in a second”.
Halfway through Eurovision: The Contenders (RTE1), Marty Whelan stood beside an ancient cot at the Dublinia exhibition and announced “I’m going to have a lie-down in a second.” I’d have dozed off, too, were it not for the surreal sight of Marty making lavish hand gestures and droning out drivel against the backdrop of our […]
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Ten European Parliament hopefuls were in the Questions and Answers studio to explain the role of MEPs in this time of unprecedented economic crisis. From Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell I learned that the first duty of any self-respecting MEP was to “turn up” in parliament, from which vantage point he or she could then “network” […]
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Baz Ashmawy is RTE2’s intended answer to Louis Theroux, except that the BBC has never required its man to co-host a cringe-inducing reality contest. But then again, on those occasions when he’s not being smirkingly faux-naif, Theroux can come up with programmes of insight and substance, whereas Ashmawy was all too suited to the ghastly […]
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Bestselling thriller writer John Connolly is interviewed at length on Radio One’s evening arts show. A week later he’s the subject of an hour-long RTE1 Arts Lives profile. A few weeks after that, he’s one of the main interviewees on Ryan Tubridy’s Late Late Show.
Bestselling thriller writer John Connolly is interviewed at length on Radio One’s evening arts show. A week later he’s the subject of an hour-long RTE1 Arts Lives profile. A few weeks after that he’s one of the main interviewees on Ryan Tubridy’s Late Late Show. Meanwhile, pop impresario Louis Walsh is a guest on Brendan […]
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Midway through the Arts Lives documentary, Gilbert O’Sullivan: Out on His Own (RTE1), the singer-songwriter explained to his wife his stance regarding the promotion of his music and his image. “I’m not talking about myself,” he told her. “I’m talking about Gilbert O’Sullivan.”
Midway through the Arts Lives documentary, Gilbert O’Sullivan: Out on His Own (RTE1), the singer-songwriter explained to his wife his stance regarding the promotion of his music and his image. “I’m not talking about myself,” he told her. “I’m talking about Gilbert O’Sullivan.” The “myself” in question was Raymond Edward O’Sullivan, who was born in […]
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Where would we be without RTE to cater for our every need and to serve our deepest longings? Recognising, for instance, that one weekend chat show wouldn’t be sufficient to slake our thirst for interviews with C-list celebs, our national broadcaster decided last January to follow up Friday night’s Late Late Show with a Saturday […]
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About halfway through the Arts Lives film, Ladies and Gentlemen, Gavin Friday (RTE1), former Virgin Prunes member Guggi spoke of his departure from the avant garde Dublin band in the mid-1980s. “After I left they were shit,” he said. In truth, for those of us who experienced them at the time and whose tolerance didn’t […]
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ITV’s flagship arts programme, The South Bank Show, has just begun a new series — its very last, as it happens. After 32 years in existence, it was effectively axed last summer when its creator, the novelist and cultural apostle Melvyn Bragg, felt unable to comply with the stringent budgetary cuts demanded of him by […]
‘I realise I’m a little overwhelming,” Nicholas admitted to Lena about a third of the way into The Eclipse, RTE’s much-trumpeted St Patrick’s night drama, co-written by Billy Roche and Conor McPherson from a story by the former and directed by the latter. Overwhelming was one way of putting it — he could also have […]
“I realise I’m a little overwhelming,” Nicholas admitted to Lena about a third of the way into The Eclipse, RTE’s much-trumpeted St Patrick’s night drama, co-written by Billy Roche and Conor McPherson from a story by the former and directed by the latter. Overwhelming was one way of putting it – he could also have […]
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Prime Time and The Front Line are always fretting about unemployment, but who needs their dry analyses and numbing statistics when instead you could be watching celebrity gardener Diarmuid Gavin scrounging for a living? That, at any rate, was the premise of Famous, Rich and Jobless (BBC1), which invited four celebs to abandon their customary […]
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In these bad days for the Catholic Church in Ireland, RTE1 offers us the two-part On God’s Mission, which allows those who so desire to wallow in memories of a time when we had more priests than the country needed and so dispatched them to the far corners of the globe where “they brought their faith, education, medicine and humanitarian aid to millions”. That, at any rate, is how narrator Barry McGovern described their influence; a view also espoused by President McAleese, who warmly regarded Irish missionaries as “our primary ambassadors — we were judged by them”.
Two weeks ago, on RTE1’s The Meaning of Life, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern paid homage to a deity who forgave and forgot earthly transgressions and who had no problem with such footling matters as extra-marital relationships. That wasn’t the God familiar to me from the same kind of upbringing and education that Bertie experienced, but […]
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