On a grey, wet and windy Irish morning, the beaming sun logo of TV3's Ireland AM - the first home-produced breakfast television series - seemed, at first glance, incongruous. It didn't for long, however, because in a consummating coupling of the show's identity with advertising, screen credits showed that the real name of the new arrival is Ire- land AM And Kelloggs. A sunshine logo for the makers of "sunshine breakfasts" makes more sense.
Combining a breakfast cereal company with a breakfast television series, Kelloggs and TV3 have obviously struck a corporate compromise which both believe will be of mutual benefit. But it is yet further evidence that the gap between editorial and/or entertainment and advertising is diminishing all the time. This is TV as a business aimed at an audience primarily defined not as citizens, but as consumers. Its overlords are accountants, not producers.
Traditionally, the very notion of asking somebody what they ate for breakfast has been an idiomatic shorthand for the epitome of noseyness. On the first edition of Ireland AM and Kelloggs, however, a vox pop of people on Dublin's Grafton Street sought answers. Well, given the context, fair enough. But even if somebody had said it - and who knows? - you were never going to hear anybody suggest that, say, Kelloggs Sugar Puffs aren't all they're puffed up to be. That, in itself, is a minor matter, of course, and can hardly be counted as one of the great suppressions of our age. But it is symptomatic and we all know that sponsorship inevitably exerts pressures on the sponsored.
Still, given that TV3 is commercial television, it will want to be judged by commercial criteria. It is gaining in the ratings (the Republic of Ireland soccer team's away games in Croatia and Malta have lifted it to a somewhat artificial 10 per cent share but, nonetheless, it is properly hitting about 8 per cent) and its backers and big-wigs can feel reasonably pleased.
In fairness, too, to its inaugural breakfast show, the menu on offer, while overwhelmingly Ultra Lite, was competently presented by Mark Cagney and Amanda Byram. It wasn't quite a case of cornflakes being served in the finest bone china but it wasn't greasy spoon fare either. The problem, however, on a morning when the rest of the populist media were leading on the horrific injuries to Kilkenny hurler P.J. Delaney, was that the obsessively light and upbeat tenor of Ireland AM was, frankly, too reminiscent of a Kelloggs cornflakes ad.
THE GUESTS - Dana, Brian Keenan and D'Un believables - were, in themselves, fine, and even the often-less-than-jovial Keenan (well, he has good reasons for that) was never going to puncture the show's cheesy good cheer. This is happy television and its schmaltzy sense of the world, in which lifestyle is practically synonymous with life itself, is typical of cut-price, commodified content.
Huge swathes of American television look like Ireland AM. Indeed, the format, with its Ken 'n' Barbie presenters, lifestyle items and all around generally unbearable lightness of being, has been exported to Europe in the last decade or so. Like a hotel chain, the look of individual hotels from city to city, country to country, continent to continent, doesn't vary greatly. Sometimes called cultural globalisation, it really reflects the fact that commercial culture is now the world's defining force. It's not just that it's the only game in town - increasingly it's the only game in every town. The game is simple to understand if risky to play: maximise profits by cutting costs. To an accountant, television and its "product" - programmes - need be no different from the products of manufacturing industry.
In one sense, the fact that Ireland AM adds 10 home-produced programming hours weekly to TV3 is to be welcomed. The new channel has been notoriously skimpy in producing its own content. But these are 10 hours of inexpensive, studio-bound, TV Lite in which PR is sure to find yet another home. Happy, sunshine television wants a happy, sunshine world, whatever the weather. Now one full year on air, TV3 appears to be achieving its commercial targets. Its schedules, however, remain remarkably thin when it comes to Irish content and its major audience pullers - Ireland's away international matches - are primarily a technical, not a creative, enterprise. One year ago, it promised babes and a new way of seeing Ireland. Well, it did deliver a few babes and a wacky weatherman briefly stole the headlines. Since then, the channel has depended largely on vacuous American sit-coms of variable quality. In commercial terms, the new Ireland AM And Kelloggs is of a piece with the rest of the TV3 schedules.
STILL, it has stolen a march on RTE in getting breakfast TV on screen. For its part, RTE is likely to launch its own breakfast programme before Christmas. Its emphasis will be on news rather than lifestyle and if it is to prosper, it shouldn't be under-resourced. One substantial breakfast would clearly be preferable to two half-cooked.
But getting even home-based news junkies (obviously, the car radio crowd sitting in traffic jams are out of the question) to switch from radio to television in the early morning could be a long haul. TV3, meanwhile, will continue with its lifestyles and "celebrities" - a Titbits magazine on screen - and will not require substantial audiences to break even or make a profit.
The upshot of it all, of course, is that competitively-priced TV will have its effects on RTE, too. Already this season, the national broadcasting company has gleefully embraced recycling (Make 'Em Laugh and Reeling In The Years) as it, too, is subject to intensifying commercial pressures. For the future, it almost certainly does have to provide its own version of TV3's new venture, but the mood among many of its head honchos is that they'd prefer not to have to bother.
Ireland AM believes that people do not want horror stories, such as East Timor, in the morning. Maybe they're right and maybe there is a large constituency keen to join the ranks of the shiny, happy people in a shiny, happy, corporate world. However, if this is so, we're in more trouble than we thought. There was a moment on yesterday's debut programme when presenter Mark Cagney referred to "Ireland Inc.". It was a throwaway line but it did show how pervasive commercial culture has become. Ireland - Celtic Tiger, Cayman Island accounts, million pound houses and all the rest - is still rather more than a mere commercial entity in which "lifestyle" is synonymous with "life".
So it is up to RTE to come up with a more substantial breakfast for the morning grouches among us. It could; but internal feuding and external competition won't make it easy.
Eddie Holt, The Irish Times TV critic, lectures in journalism at DCU
