Liam Clancy

It was through my colleague and great friend Joe Kennedy that I first met Liam Clancy. That was 20 years ago come New Year’s Eve, although of course I’d known of the man throughout all of my adolescent and adult life. Indeed, for an Irish teenager in the early to mid-1960s it was impossible not […]

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A ho-ho-hum as RTE’s ‘cracking’ festive schedule is a real turkey

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.

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MIRIAM O’CALLAGHAN

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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Miriam and sisters didn’t do it for me

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.

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2666. By Roberto Bolano.

Is this the great novel of our time? Before his early death in 2003, the Chilean-born Roberto Bolano was widely admired in Spanish-speaking countries, but it was only when he was translated into English that his fame became global and he is now routinely written of as one of the most important literary talents of […]

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In the Footsteps of American Giants

On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe — if we’re Francophiles — the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]

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This was a rant just waiting to happen

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.

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Let’s hope TV3’s ratings success forces RTE to step up its game

THREE nights ago, 333,000 viewers saw Pat Kenny being abused about his salary by a member of RTE1’s ‘The Frontline’ audience. A few minutes earlier, 493,000 viewers had been watching as Bill Cullen fired Ruth from TV3’s ‘The Apprentice’, and later 297,000 ignored ‘The Frontline’ to observe Ruth’s non-appearance on TV3’s ‘The Apprentice: You’re Fired’.

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John Martyn

John Martyn died at the beginning of this year. He was only 60, but although news of his death came as a shock, for many of us who’d followed his career down through the decades it wasn’t really a surprise because, although he was blessed with extraordinary musical gifts, there had always seemed something determinedly […]

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The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years. By Clive James.

In the early 1980s, after a decade as Britain’s funniest and sharpest television reviewer, Clive James became an active participant in the medium that had so excercised his marvellous critical faculties. In doing so, as he relates in this fifth volume of his memoirs, he found himself inhabiting “the strange world where everybody knows your […]

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LIAM CLANCY

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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Liam — we still hardly know you

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.

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PODGE AND RODGE / WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

It’s now late October and, apart from The Frontline, the RTE autumn schedules haven’t provided viewers with any series, or even single programme, of substance and quality. But they have provided lots of the opposite – gimmicky antics masquerading as economic insights in RTE1’s Addicted to Money, twaddle with a solemn face in the same […]

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John McGahern’s Essays

When John McGahern died in March 2006 at the age of 71, he was the most admired Irish fiction writer of his generation and there seems no reason to alter that evaluation today. This is not always the case after a writer’s passing. Graham Greene’s reputation went into a decline on his death in 1991, […]

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LIFE IS A DREAM: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007. By Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan believes that hearing a poet reading his work aloud is crucial to appreciation of the poetry, and in his brief foreword to this volume he enlists the support of TS Eliot in asserting that “public reading is the life blood of the art of poetry.” The words on the page are not enough, […]

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Addicted to Money; Cork’s Bloody Secret…

In Tuesday night’s first episode of Addicted to Money (RTE1), David McWilliams posed the question “Who killed the economy?” and while we awaited the answer we were treated to many of the verbal flourishes familiar to anyone who’s watched previous series by this pundit – starting with the assertion that we had been “encouraged to […]

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LIFE IS A DREAM: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007

By Paul Durcan. Harvill Secker, 16.99 sterling Paul Durcan believes that hearing a poet reading his work aloud is crucial to appreciation of the poetry, and in his brief foreword to this volume he enlists the support of TS Eliot in asserting that “public reading is the life blood of the art of poetry.” The […]

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Does God hate?; Who do you think you are?…

Does God hate sex? Or women? Or science? No, but what God does hate (and viewers, too) are ideas for series that are as outmoded and naff as RTE1’s new Sunday night vehicle for Marian Finucane. Who on earth comes up with these notions? In the 1960s, when God’s existence was largely unquestioned in this […]

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THE DOGS AND THE WOLVES. By Irene Nemirovsky.

The Kiev-born Irene Nemirovsky was Jewish and in 1918 when she was a teenager she and her family had to flee the October Revolution for the safety of Paris, where in the 1920s and 1930s she became a best-selling novelist. Attempting to fit in, she tried to conceal her Jewishness, befriending and offering her work […]

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THE APPRENTICE

For most of Pat Kenny’s new current affairs show, The Frontline (RTE1), the host was content to stand back and let the audience have its say, but no such modesty marked the second season of TV3’s The Apprentice, which, like its predecessor, was unashamedly about Bill Cullen. “You’re all here because you want to work […]

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