Irish Times TV critics recall their years on the couch

With its early deadlines and constantly changing agendas, the role of Irish TimesTV critic is rarely described as fun, but for those who have held the post it has also been an extraordinary and exhilarating job

FERGUS LINEHAN

Arts editor and journalist, 1961-2000

When RTÉ television began, I was working in The Irish Timesas a subeditor in the features department. I subsequently became film critic and arts editor. Around this time I was also writing a lot of comedy revue for radio and theatre. It was the kind of thing that could have translated well to television, but television was not a happy experience for me.

In those early years, there were some very talented people in RTÉ but – naming no names – also a lot of low-grade people and a lot of office politics. It seemed to me that it didn’t matter if your material was good or bad; what really mattered was how it was going to play with a producer and their career.

The technology was fairly rough and ready too. Once they started to run the cameras they were very reluctant to stop them. They tended to keep on going. There was one famous occasion when the set fell down.

After a while I became disillusioned with writing stuff for the station. But I reworked most of the material for the stage, with considerable success.

The things that worked well in those early days were things that got under the radar, like Halls Pictorial Weekly, which started as a magazine show and gradually increased its comedy content. Until the Late Late Showcame along, RTÉ's output was mostly very unmemorable, a lot of nothing kinds of programmes and an awful lot of American stuff. People were very cautious back then, afraid to offend the Church or the government.

As time went on RTÉ began to build up stars. Things did improve and start to loosen up through the 1970s and 1980s.

KIERAN FAGAN

Occasional TV critic 1979-1980

It wasn't funny being a TV critic in 1979–1980. It was – as a colleague grimly pointed out when I was anointed – like knitting without wool. Filing 1,000 pithy, insightful words per week about repeats of American shows like Chips– the adventures of Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox as California motorcycle cops — without using the word freewheeling was a weekly challenge.

TV was different then. There was much less of it and though some was vapid and forgettable it was more central to people's lives. An appearance on the Late Late Showmattered. It had impact. It was an intelligent chatshow with a large audience – as the Observercritic John Naughton described it. My misfortune was that my copy deadline was just before transmission, so I only got to review items 10 days after transmission. My ambition, never realised, was to have an overnight slot, filing after the programme for the next day's paper. I'd still like to see that done.

Then there were the hidden tripwires. The then editor Douglas Gageby had a bee (probably a hive of them) in his bonnet about military history. So anything touching on that had to get heavy-duty consideration. His wife Dorothy’s bonnet was equally populated by concerns about Christian Science. People have no idea what goes on behind the scenes in a great newspaper.

So I had to rely on native wit, and hope to generate a few bon mots. My highest point, I like to think, was describing Debbie Harry, singing Union City Blueson Top of the Pops, in January 1980: "She looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards and was game for the return trip."

But I did serious stuff too. Such as on the way RTÉ covered the resignation in 1979 of taoiseach Jack Lynch and his replacement by Charles Haughey. I got up on my high horse and opined: “We can see perhaps the most pernicious effect of the monster television – it demands that they [politicians] address its electronic innards for too many hours of the day, damaging their ability to perform the tasks for which they were elected.”

Not long afterwards I handed in my commission and moved to the Sunday Tribune. There was no clamour for my return.

EDDIE HOLT

TV critic, 1994-2001

I began as TV critic for The Irish Timesin December 1994 and wrote my final column in January 2001. Before that, from 1988 to 1994, I had been TV critic for the Irish Independent.

Over the entire period, one of the major changes was the proliferation of TV channels. In the I ndoyears, you only had six channels — unless Sky, Super or Nickelodeon, marginal channels all, took your fancy. By 1994 Sky Sports and live Premiership matches were integral to the television schedule, and during my years in The Irish Times, a sizeable number of viewers got access to hundreds of channels.

Popular culture was disintegrating. With 400 or 500 channels there was a law of diminishing returns; by the end of my stint, reviewing programmes that you couldn’t be sure most people had watched seemed pointless.

My reviewing for the Timescoincided with the early years of the Celtic Tiger, but for me the ruination of the Catholic Church was just as significant a social change. They were linked in a way: once Ireland got wealthy we cared no more for shibboleths and priests' curses. The media played a major part in this: with exposure of the Bishop Eamonn Casey and Fr Brendan Smyth controversies in the 1990s; and on television through the RTÉ documentaries Dear Daughter(1996) and States of Fear(1999).

After Dear Daughterwas broadcast in 1996, I wrote that: " Dear Daughter, shown on RTÉ on Thursday night, was one of the most harrowing, but most important, home-produced programmes of the year . . . At the core of a lot of these abuse scandals is a way of thinking and of viewing the world which will not just fall away, even though it would actually be in the interests of Church power for this to happen."

The conspiracy of silence which protected the Church in the 20th century is now over.

SHANE HEGARTY

TV critic, 2001-2005

On Sunday March 18th 2002, a few hundred thousand people sat down to watch And Here Are Your Hosts– a tribute to RTÉ personalities through the years, as part of the station's 40th birthday celebrations. Two things stood out.

The first was Telly Bingo's Shirley Temple-Bar, dragged up in a child's dress and pigtails and seated between tuxedoed lions of broadcasting. It could hardly have been more surreal if Marty Whelan had turned up in a mankini.

The second thing that stood out was the gloom. “This must be the biggest obituary in history,” quipped Derek Davis, at a time when RTÉ was being clobbered by one management consultancy report after another.

This is what I wrote: “It was less a gathering of buoyant party-goers, than a band of survivors who know they’re coming to the end of a war, but aren’t quite sure whether they’ve won it or not. Gallows humour was plentiful. Towards the end, [host] Brendan Courtney asked Pat Kenny and Gay Byrne what the future holds for RTÉ. He had to ask the question a second time after the initial answer came in the form of sarcastic snorts.”

Yet, RTÉ was arguably in the midst of its best years. Its use of independent companies was producing some fine documentaries and series. There were grand projects – most notably Beckett on Film, which marked the centenary of the writer's birth by producing every one of his plays via an impressive line-up of directors and actors.

The broadcaster had begun to develop a nose for Sunday evening drama that could finally replace Glenroe. It was unsuccessful with the ponderous GAA-themed On Home Ground, but did far better with enjoyably melodramatic The Clinic.

And it began, finally, to figure out comedy. In one month in 2001, it broadcast two new comedies: The Cassidys, which stank so much you had to open your sitting room window in order to watch it, and Bachelors Walk,a jazz-scored, laughter-track-free roam around Dublin that was so successful it ruined the old joke about RTÉ comedy. What's more, it arrived around the same time as Paths to Freedom, which centred on Michael McElhatton's ex-con Rats. There were more: The Panel,hosted by Dara Ó Briain, was a freewheeling treat in its early days.

There were bland and terrible things too, including an obsession with twenty-something boom-era dramas, such as Love is the Drug,which wasn't so bad, and The Big Bow Wow,which really was.

Across the dial, TV3 was in the process of failing, regularly and quickly, but these would prove to be valuable disappointments. You might have forgotten reality show Haunted House("[it] will haunt everybody involved with it") or its Irish version of The Weakest Link – but you will remember The Dunphy Show, which took on the Late Late Showin the manner of a fly playing chicken with a juggernaut.

But TV3 developed in the years that followed – it learned from its mistakes, understood how to make British series or ideas work for it, and has become a genuine competitor to RTÉ.

HILARY FANNIN

TV critic 2005-2009

RTÉ and I are both 50 this year. In fact, I can claim the distinction that, unlike other TV reviewers, my relationship with the national broadcaster began in the womb. My mother, a soprano, Marie Hand, was pregnant with me when she was invited to Dublin's Marian Hall to sing She Wears Red Feathers and a Hula-Hula Skirtas part of a pre-recorded variety show that was broadcast on the first night of RTÉ television.

It seems a tad unfair, however, that RTÉ, which started out wrinkled and grainy in black and white, now gets a plasma-friendly makeover every couple of seasons, while I’m heading inexorably in the other direction.

During my tenure as Irish TimesTV reviewer, an extraordinary, exhilarating job that was akin to spending five years behind a karaoke machine trying to catch up with the lyrics, technological change reconfigured the industry. The Sky box, web access and downloading have entirely changed the way we view television and, bar such rousing exceptions as the Frontline"envelope" moment that changed the presidential campaign, there is no longer a sense that we view television output as a community. But maybe that's not a bad thing, especially when you remind yourself of some of the drivel that seeps from the screen.

Pre-eminent during my time at the helm was reality TV. While all eyes were on Big Brotherand The X Factor from across the water, we also had our share of home-grown delights. ICA Bootcamp, which taught a bunch of peroxide blondes how to shovel manure, must come top of the class for inventiveness and originality, while, in glorious last place, the truly awful 2006 offering, Celebrity Show House(no, of course you don't remember it), inveigled Linda Martin (yes, she is a celebrity) to decorate a €300,000 house on an estate called Rampart View in Virginia, Co Cavan.

Somehow one imagines that Martin's dramatic valance wasn't enough to save that baby from the economic reaper that was heading our way, even as Prime Time Investigateswas sounding the warning bells with Buyer Beware.

Meanwhile, Eddie Hobbs was asking us what we were going to do with our SSIAs – plastic surgery and full-on funerals seemingly being top of many lists. Maybe we should have clubbed them all together and invested in the Irish television industry as, despite the money sloshing around the country like pig swill during the boom, there never seemed enough to go around when it came to producing quality home-grown dramas and documentaries.

Without a shadow of doubt, the writing, directing and acting talent was and is there. It would be wonderful to look back and say that the inspiring work of people such as writer Mark O'Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson (who gave us, among other dramas, the brilliant Prosperity) and documentary-maker Alan Gilsenan (who gave us Paul Durcan: The Dark School,a conversation with the poet that still resonates with me) was not the exception. It would be great, but sadly untrue, to record that they were simply the standard-bearers for the talent that is out there and that should be flooding our screens, kicking The X Factorand all her devil spawn where that watery Irish sun don't shine.

BERNICE HARRISON

TV critic, 2010-present

The remote control was officially handed to me in March 2010 and if I’ve learned anything it’s that there’s no point in trying to untie the knot in the knickers of those who rant on to me, regularly and at wearying length, about how much rubbish there is on TV these days – as if there hasn’t always been rubbish on TV. It’s just different rubbish but it’s more than counterbalanced by the sheer quality, scope and entertainment value of the programmes on offer.

For every minute of screentime I've endured that was filled with gobby young ones from Essex, Jersey and Tallaght, unfunny sitcoms, spotty backsides and endless repeats, there have been hours of brilliant documentaries (BBC's Panorama, Channel 4's Dispatchesand RTÉ's Prime Time Investigates); must-see dramas (the list is too long but it's bookended by HBO's Mad Menwhen I started the column and RTÉ's Love/Hatelast month); and astonishing nature programmes such as the BBC's Frozen Planetand Wonders of the Solar System.

During my time on the couch Big Brotherlimped off Channel 4 – signalling the end of a particularly vacuous but culturally powerful TV phenomenon and now The X Factor, that other ratings juggernaut, seems to be on the slide.

Nearly two years on, there are still many mysteries I have yet to solve and as we're marking RTÉ's 50th year, I'll confine them to that station: aside from an excellent children's schedule, what is the public service goal of RTÉ Two? Why does RTÉ persist with the tired old Late Late Showand why is that station's arts coverage on TV so slight when there's so much that could be done?

But that’s all nearly by the way when by far the biggest change on my watch hasn’t been so much what’s on TV but how we consume it. Digital recording and the myriad of web-based options mean that TV is increasingly on demand – with the viewer, not the station, deciding when to watch.

Last week I had a marathon, deeply satisfying seven-hour session of The Killingand I expect to see the BBC's Christmas blockbuster Great Expectationssometime in February. I rarely see Grey's Anatomyon RTÉ Two but catch up on the excellent RTÉ player.

The remote control is starting to fully live up to its name. How schedulers – and advertisers – deal with us viewers being more in control is the unfolding TV story to watch out for.