Viewed from the inside: 50 years at RTÉ

It is nearly half a century since John Bowman started working at RTÉ, just as its television station was coming on air. Now he has written the story of the institution he knows so well – and he’s tried not to hold back on points of controversy

FOR A FEW MINUTES after arriving at John Bowman’s Dublin home, I find it difficult to focus on what the historian and broadcaster is saying. That’s because my brain is playing tricks. Part of it is thinking that his utterly familiar voice is emanating from a radio rather than from the man himself, sitting opposite and pouring coffee at his kitchen table.

These days, the 69-year-old Bowman is heard on RTÉ Radio 1, presenting Bowman Sunday Morning.He is less visible on television, having effectively retired from the medium when he presented the last Questions and Answers, in 2009. RTÉ is the organisation that has defined his broadcasting career, and next year will mark the 50th anniversary of his association with the national broadcaster. He began working for Radio Éireann in 1962, and later worked concurrently for television as both mediums expanded, most notably on current-affairs programmes, including Today Tonight.

Next year is also when RTÉ television will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Thus it is entirely apt that Bowman, who began his career just as the television station was coming into existence, was the person RTÉ commissioned to write its history. Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television 1961-2011has just been published. "Different people will expect the book to do different things," Bowman says, while making it clear that he had complete autonomy about what he wrote.

In his introduction, Bowman writes: “It must be a complicating factor that I am both an insider as a broadcaster and am attempting to play the role of an independent historian of an institution for which I have some regard . . . This book has entailed me writing about contemporaries, colleagues and, sometimes, friends. There could even be some points of controversy which some of them would rather I had not included.”

Indeed there was a kerfuffle earlier this week when some newspapers gleefully sought reaction from RTÉ presenters named in passages that referred to their pay. One of these alluded to minutes from a 1992 meeting of the RTÉ Authority, which dealt with Pat Kenny’s request for a pay rise. Bowman quotes Vincent Finn, then head of the authority, as saying: “He does not like being number two and in many ways he believes he is better than Gay Byrne.”

Bowman went on Today with Pat Kennyon Monday to discuss the book. In a good-humoured scrap between the two broadcasters, Kenny declared that he "had no recollection" of what had happened 19 years ago because he wasn't present at the meeting. Bowman stated again that Finn's quote was recorded in the RTÉ minutes, which he had dug up. And there the matter rested.

Bowman was only 20 and still a politics-mad student at Trinity College Dublin when he received his first commissions for interviews from Radio Éireann. He was determined to be part of the new television service.

“I was hugely enthusiastic about broadcasting, and I watched television with its snowy reception through much of the 1950s,” he says, sitting in his sunny kitchen, to which many of the books that command the house’s interior have found their way. “I thought it was so exciting. I knew television was coming, and I wanted to carve out a career which would allow me to do things that I wanted to do anyway.”

He has been immersed in research for the greater part of the past three years, working consistently from 7.30am until 8.30pm. “I’ve been so preoccupied by this book that I’ve been frozen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s quite a bit in the last few years – as my wife tells me,” he says, half-ruefully, half-happily.

When a journalist interviews a writer, the unspoken contract is that the journalist will have read the book attentively, and in its entirety. This is a contract that both parties know is occasionally broken. The first question I’m asked, before even sitting down, is if I liked the book. Throughout the interview, with relentless politeness, Bowman stitches in multiple versions of questions that ask not only if I have read the book but also how closely I have read it: “Did you see that?”, “Did you come across that?”, “Did you notice that?”

Some questions refer not just to specific parts of the text but also to picture captions, and one to the dedication. What Bowman is doing, of course, is grilling me skilfully. But I have indeed read the book, and now I also know what it must have been like to be a panellist on Questions and Answers.

In the book, he deals with his own contribution to RTÉ by basically omitting it, other than including the infamous Questions and Answersduring the 1990 presidential election that eventually caused Brian Lenihan's campaign to implode. So, from his long experience, what does he consider makes a great question in live current-affairs broadcasting?

“There are only two questions of real consequence,” he replies immediately. “How and why. It’s going to be somewhere in there, and it’s usually why. And unless you’ve the homework in your head, it’s useless. That’s the only place it can be.”

Then he adds, tartly: "The broadcaster in a programme like Questions and Answersis the gatekeeper against bullshit and nonsense, and against people rewriting their own history, or being surprised that Crossmaglen is full of fuel launderers or of cigarette smugglers. I don't like politicians who say they're amazed to hear this."

Talking about the place of RTÉ past and present in Irish society, he says: "Television is taken for granted now. That's why people kick RTÉ around so much. But they don't switch it off. There is no programme in the world in the whole history of television, I would say – I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect it is true – which has ever played as important a role as The Late Late Showplayed in Irish society in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s."

Later, he adds that “the custodians of the station have managed to keep a significant audience share, and the Irish public is still watching RTÉ in very considerable numbers”.

What is his opinion on the licence fee? Does he think it’s fair? There’s a pause. “Em, I think . . .” Pause. “Em.” Another pause.

“That’s a surprising question!” is Bowman’s eventual surprising answer, as are the serial “ems” that an experienced broadcaster is usually expert at editing out of an interview before they’re even uttered.

Finally, he answers cautiously: “I think what people get for the licence fee has always been very good value.”

What does he think of developments in audience interaction, whereby current-affairs programmes now have a Twitter commentary running concurrently with their broadcast? "I remember a variation of that. My late son, Jonathan, would watch Questions and Answersand would be on the phone to a friend doing a running commentary – I'm sure at my expense, knowing Jonathan."

He hasn’t looked at any of the current-affairs Twitter streams. “I’m not a tweeter,” Bowman says, chuckling. “I believe in being paid for my opinions.” Then he adds: “I’m very old-fashioned about this. I don’t pay much heed to things that are not signed.”

I point out that many people use their own names when tweeting, including several high-profile broadcasters at RTÉ, such as Miriam O’Callaghan. He just shrugs.

Has he any interest in how social media changes the way viewers interact with television, and broadcasting in general? “It interests me to the extent that it is a new phenomenon and that it may be influential. But I don’t engage. I suppose I’m too old-fashioned and too busy and whatever.”

The arrangements for this interview were made via several calls to a home landline, a method unusual enough in 2011 to prompt a question: does he have a mobile phone?

“Do I have a mobile phone? Do you want the truth? You do, of course,” he says, laughing. “This really does embarrass me.” He doesn’t look remotely embarrassed. “I have a mobile phone, but I only use it for outgoing calls. I have other systems for communication, e-mail and so on. People can contact me, but I don’t have a mobile phone I leave on.”

He talks at length about his dread of a mobile ringing incessantly, and not wanting to feel hounded and distracted by it. What he hates, it seems, is the thought of interruption.

Later that day, Bowman e-mails to draw my attention to something in the book’s acknowledgments that he thinks I may have missed. It includes this line: “I was one of the first in Ireland with an iPad and find it wonderful, so don’t paint me as too much of a Luddite.”

His next projects include two RTÉ documentaries, and “there are a number of books I want to write and am being invited to write. I’ve any number of projects. Eimer tells me I’m dealing with eternity, not with ageing. My minds tells me I’m 48 – but I’m not.”

Jonathan, the Bowmans' eldest child, died in 2000 in a terrible accident. Window and Mirrorincludes a photograph of a sweetly confident 10-year-old Jonathan doing a magic trick on the 1980 Late Latetoy show, during which he won £3 from Gay Byrne. Bowman brings up Jonathan's name unprompted, and with great affection, several times: it's clear that he doesn't want him to be forgotten by others outside the family.

I ask him how losing a child affects parents’ thoughts on their own eventual death. It is a while before Bowman answers. He looks suddenly vulnerable and in pain, a man eternally facing the dilemma of wanting to keep his son’s name in the public eye and yet having to acknowledge once again that he is dead. What he says, slowly, haltingly, staring off to the side of the room, is: “I always think of Jonathan as being still present. I think I still kind of know him really well. I never go down Grafton Street without expecting to meet him, which I know is ridiculous, but . . .” He cannot finish the sentence.

When Bowman is showing me out, my eye is caught by a square stone table in a corner of the patio. Beautiful lettering is carved deep into it. The table, Bowman explains with evident pleasure, was commissioned to mark a wedding anniversary in 1992. His name and his wife’s are inscribed, as are the names of their four children. Also carved into the stone is a quixotic statement: “Nothing is durable but flimsy words.”

Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television 1961-2011, by John Bowman, is published by the Collins Press, €25