Poet, Critic & Journalist
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 […]
{ 0 comments }
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 […]
{ 0 comments }
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 […]
{ 0 comments }
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 […]
{ 0 comments }
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 […]
{ 0 comments }
Last Monday week Charlie Bird told an uncaring nation that he was quitting his job as RTE’s Washington correspondent. Seven days later George Lee caused somewhat more of a stir when he announced that he was resigning from his nine-month-old post as a Fine Gael TD. Such is Bird’s inflated notion of himself that he […]
{ 0 comments }
At the outset of Charlie Bird’s American Year (RTE1), Barack Obama was being inaugurated as US president, and our intrepid Washington correspondent was wondering what lay ahead for the man. “This time next year,” he mused, “where will the journey have taken him? Who knows? And who knows where the journey will have taken me?” […]
{ 0 comments }
IN a press release announcing its spring schedule, and with January not yet gone, RTE declares itself delighted by what it has already been offering us this year, starting with ‘The School’, a series which apparently has been “critically acclaimed”.
Gay Byrne returned to our screens on Monday night with a second series of The Meaning of Life (RTE1), but having spent the three weeks since New Year’s Day waiting for our national broadcaster to transmit one programme of real substance, I feel more like pondering the meaning of RTE.
ACCORDING to the press release announcing its spring schedule, TV3 has had a “fantastic autumn”.
Everything’s a reality show on RTE these days and now you can’t even go to school without being forced to run a gauntlet of camera crews. School? We’ve all been there. It’s got teachers, it’s got pupils, it’s got classes. It can be dreary, it can be enlightening. Some pupils do well at certain subjects, […]
{ 0 comments }
Announcing its January schedule, RTE promises us “a wealth of home-produced programming” that will “get 2010 off to an entertaining and energising start”.
It was the decade in which there were more programmes than ever to watch, though just as few worth watching. Indeed, more invariably means less, and so when the very finite number of good programmes capable of being made are spread over 187 channels, they hardly register amid the gunge that surrounds them. There’s only […]
{ 0 comments }
It was the year of Susan Boyle and The X Factor, for those who care about such things. It was the year in which Michael Jackson’s death caused even the most sober of broadcasting organisations to lose all sense of balance and perspective. And it was the year when economic realities should have put paid […]
{ 0 comments }
It was the year in which RTE’s marketing gurus vanquished and routed serious programme makers. Certainly, I can’t think of a twelve-month period in which RTE made fewer programmes of substance or quality, but, hey, who needs programmes at all when you can marvel at Montrose’s mission to turn every nonentity on its payroll into […]
{ 0 comments }
Killers, which RTE1 screened on Sunday night, was essentially an hour-long version of those murder-scene reconstructions you get on the same channel’s Crimecall, except that on Crimecall they’re invariably followed by pleas for assistance from the public in catching the criminal while here the perpetrator had already been identified, arrested, charged, convicted and locked up. […]
{ 0 comments }
RTE seems to have reached the sorry stage where the mere notion of celebrity is enough to get a programme made. How else to explain Tuesday night’s RTE1 documentary, Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own? The Shane in question was Shane McGowan and the Victoria was Victoria Mary Clarke, and whereas the former is deservedly […]
{ 0 comments }
