Poet, Critic & Journalist
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 […]
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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?” […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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THREE hours before Brian Lenihan delivered his Budget, RTE radio’s Sean O’Rourke had deemed it “possibly the most leaked document of all time”, an opinion shared on Newstalk by pundit Mark Mortell, who thought it “leaked to a phenomenal degree”, and a little later by RTE1 anchorman Bryan Dobson, who felt that perhaps it had been “leaked to soften us up”.
Am I imagining it or have Podge and Rodge curbed their enthusiasm for potty talk in the last week or two, and if so could this be due to the dismay expressed by myself and a few others at the duo’s recent inability to distinguish the ribald from the rancid? Given RTE’s unwillingness to heed […]
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LAST night I dreamt that TV3’s Christmas highlight would be a panto featuring Bill Cullen as Scrooge, Jackie Lavin as the Widow Twanky and Vincent Browne as the Wicked Curmudgeon of the West, with TG4 showcasing Daithi O Se as Puss in Boots along with a chorus line of minority-language weather babes — both of which sounds more fun than the “cracking Christmas schedule” just announced by RTE.
For a brief period back in the 1990s, though it now seems like the 1890s, Clare McKeon was RTE’s chosen presenter of girl-talk shows. I can’t recall whether this was before or after our national broadcaster’s equally fickle infatuations with Bibi Baskin and Carrie Crowley, but for a while Clare was its darling, fronting a […]
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For a brief period back in the 1990s, though it now seems like the 1890s, Clare McKeon was RTE’s chosen presenter of girl-talk shows. I can’t recall whether this was before or after our national broadcaster’s equally fickle infatuations with Bibi Baskin and Carrie Crowley, but for a while Clare was its darling, fronting a succession of shows in which women fretted about love, pain and the whole damn thing — and in the process talked an awful lot of twaddle.
Alan O’Brien’s tirade from the audience on last Monday’s edition of The Frontline (RTE1) was an outburst waiting to happen, and I’m only surprised such an expression of fury at the salaries of top broadcasters hadn’t occurred sooner — on Pat Kenny’s morning radio programme, say, or the Marian Finucane Show or Joe Duffy’s Liveline: three formats that invite people to speak their minds.
Edited down from a film shown in cinemas earlier this year, Alan Gilsenan’s The Yellow Bittern: Liam Clancy’s Life and Times (RTE1) was an oddity, not least because in March 2006 RTE had already screened the same director’s two-part documentary The Legend of Liam Clancy. In the words of its own press release, that two-hour […]
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Edited down from a film shown in cinemas earlier this year, Alan Gilsenan’s The Yellow Bittern: Liam Clancy’s Life and Times (RTE1) was an oddity, not least because in March 2006 RTE had already screened the same director’s two-part documentary The Legend of Liam Clancy.
