True Lives (RTE 1, Tuesday)
UCD Millennium Lecture (RTE 1, Monday)
True Stories (Channel 4, Sunday)
Castaway 2000 (BBC 1, Tuesday)
Coronation Street and RTE are pretty much the same age. The soap was first screened on Friday, December 9th, 1960. RTE, trading then as Telefis Eireann, made its inaugural appearance on New Year's Eve, 1961. What does it mean, almost 40 years on from these debuts, that a British soap opera, albeit a fine one, should become so pivotal in the latest debate over the future of Irish television? Apart from the clarion irony, it means, it seems to me, that chickens are coming home to roost.
When a State-owned Irish television service was first proposed, the core ideological debate was, broadly speaking, between the de Valeran and Catholic Church isolationists, and the Lemass and business integrationists. Inevitably (rightly too), the integrationists won and Ireland, literally, plugged into the outside world. The rest is, again literally, history. It has not been a glorious history, though it has had significant triumphs, and both for better and for worse, RTE has been the single most influential cultural institution in Ireland.
Irish governments have always known this, of course. As long ago as 1965, Lemass left RTE in no doubt that he regarded it as "an arm of government". Less than a decade later, another government sacked an entire RTE Authority. Shortly afterwards, political censorship, in the form of Section 31, effectively castrated Irish television on the burning (yet again literally) issue of the conflict in the North. To its lasting discredit, many journalists and producers within RTE not only complied with, but vigorously supported the censorship. In more recent times, Ray Burke "capped" RTE advertising revenue and governments have routinely rejected pleas for an increase in the licence fee.
Clamped then by forces from without, and sometimes undermined by forces from within, RTE often struggled to be what it ought to be: the people's station. Politically, it became a victim as much as an agent, or even chronicler, of Irish history. Now, as the current Government continues to cosy up, often understandably, sometimes obscenely (think of a McCreevy budget) and always in the name of "hard realities", to capital, the really hard reality is that RTE is in dire danger of becoming a victim of Government economic policy.
TV3, for which Ireland is a market - an economic entity - first, and a political, social and cultural entity by the way, is 90 per cent owned by foreign investors. As media ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, the channel is a symbol of the annexation of nation states by global capital. As a business, the commercial channel has pulled off a smart deal in linking up with Granada, the makers of Coronation Street. But should television simply be a business, like, say, shoe-manufacturing? Must commercial considerations rule everything?
The public versus private debate is, of course, deeply ideological, deeply complex and for most people, probably deeply tiresome. Yet it is impossible to argue logically that we are not rapidly becoming a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is one of the inevitable downsides of the economic boom and the way in which it has been achieved. It is an axiom of the market that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Too bloody true! Weakening, indeed trying to dismember RTE is, it appears, part of the price.
For all its faults - its timidity, overpaid "stars", bureaucratic culture, lack of originality, historic lap-dog readiness to behave as "an arm of government" - RTE is worth preserving. Certainly, the idea (and, in fairness, much of the reality: news, sport, the better "talking heads" efforts) of RTE is worth preserving. For years, this column has argued for a means-tested hike in the licence fee, which ought to be, at a minimum, doubled and, if people really cared about television, probably trebled.
Given that almost two-thirds of RTE's income is generated by advertising, most of which is abysmal and irritating too, the station is effectively a commercial outfit anyway. At the time of its inception, the mongrel method (licence fee plus commercial advertising) of financing television here was not only irresistibly attractive but the sensible option too. However, as reliance on advertising has been increased by governments, we ended up in the pathetically ironic situation that a soap made by a commercial British company became a revenue lynchpin for the State-owned Irish "national broadcaster". That truth is what needs to be broadcast.
There are no new arguments to be made in the wake of the Granada/TV3 strike on RTE. At least, I can't think of one and I haven't heard any. The battlefield has been known for years and the false promises of "consumer choice" have led to a kind of tyranny of the majority. If it grabs ratings, it grabs profits - end of story. Anything else is precious, even elitist, old guff. Such is the line of the commando wing of the commercial channels.
In doing, for itself, good business, what has TV3 done for viewers? Nothing really, at least as yet. Its acquiring of Coronation Street and The Champions League has demonstrated an ability to plunder but not to innovate. This is accountants' television, run to make profit, not to make programmes. If viewers enjoy watching some elements of that run, then that is a bonus by-product. But commercial television is run for media moguls and, business-folk that they are, they'll screen practically anything that can be converted into cash.
Not only will they screen almost anything that can be converted into cash but moguls, being multi-media moguls, will use newspapers, radio stations, Internet sites - whatever they own and whatever it takes - to further their commercial ambitions. RTE, like every other media outfit in existence, deserves criticism but it deserves praise too, something which, as yet, can scarcely be said of TV3. What, in all fairness, has it added to television in Ireland? Competition? Yes, of a sort . . . but for all the usual commercial platitudes about not being molly-coddled and "standing on our own two feet", it has been more parasitic than competitive.
The trick, as you'd get with privatised transport, is to acquire the profitable bits and forget the loss-making ones. Everybody knows this. It's hardly rocket science. As a result, what is to become of RTE? Well, faced by a hostile ideological climate, nationally and internationally, it certainly can't depend on politicians. It can appeal to the public, which, in the wake of O'Flaherty and Eircom, is increasingly anti-authoritarian. But a real, not a PR-ish appeal, is necessary and RTE's old, monopoly-bred arrogance must be ditched.
On the positive side, RTE can use the clarion irony as a clarion call. It's absurd that Coronation Street, "based on an idea by Tony Warren" should be a cornerstone for a national TV service, based on an idea of empowering as well as entertaining us in our daily lives. That the idea hasn't always met its ideal is not the point. It has still served us far, far better than the agenda of media conglomerates and their absurdly wealthy and powerful moguls. Fair enough, business is business but the business of television is about more than the bottom line.
Anyway, albeit more briefly than usual, to the core business of reviewing programmes. True Lives: Ahead of the Class focused on the problems of abnormally intelligent children. We saw a four-year-old boy talk about the rings of Saturn, the single ring of Jupiter and the counties of Ireland. A six-year-old boy required "special needs" education because he finds repetition a bore. An 11-year-old girl and a 17-year-old male spoke about the isolating effects of their intelligence.
The risk was that sympathy would be in short supply for kids with such "problems". But Liam McGrath's documentary managed to elicit the humanity of the intellectually gifted. At DCU's summer school for such incandescently bright sparks, pre-teen youngsters reflected on the effects of the bullying and smart remarks they often attract from jealous peers. Some of them wore wearied expressions on fresh faces. Even the super bright, it seems, can't find any way around the fact that, in general, children are the ultimate conformists and expect their peers to conform too.
Apparently 2 per cent of children are classed as gifted. This means that there are about 17,000 of them in the Republic. It seems a high figure - one in 50, or roughly two in every three primary school classes. Where do they go when they grow up? What do they do? Ahead of the Class is perfect for a series of sequels at four- or five-year intervals. Perhaps DCU already has follow-up studies on former groups. For all their academic ability, you'll find that, more often than not, less endowed kids from more endowed backgrounds will still end up with the bulk of the plum jobs.
From DCU (the dyslexia joke notwithstanding) across to UCD, where Mike Dexter, president of the £14.1 billion sterling Wellcome Trust, spoke about the current and future states of universities in the UCD Millennium Lecture. As broadcast, this lecture was not a lecture but an interview, conducted by Julie Dwan. Dr Dexter, in spite of an irritating Maggie Thatcher habit of repeatedly adding little rhetorical questions to the end of statements, made the right noises about "the moral power of knowledge".
But he failed to address the most fundamental issue of the "academic research system". Research into the effects on research of the corporate funding of research must be a key issue. It can't be, of course, so long as universities - like television - are forced to become increasingly dependent upon private money. When the academic gowns of corporately funded professors wear their sponsors' logo - like a Premiership team's shirts - at least the pretence of academic detachment will be unsustainable.
ON the other hand, perhaps all the private versus public ownership debate was put in context by the starkest programme of the week. True Stories: Bread Day visited the Russian town of Zhikharevo, formerly a workers' settlement and now home to just a few dozen elderly people. Just 50 miles from St Petersburg, snowy Zhikharevo is a bleak beyond even the wildest dreams of a wet weekend in Kinnegad.
The old people have to push a railway wagon for miles along the siding to the town. The sleepers are too weak to take an engine. They push to transport supplies of bread. Their feet freeze and sometimes the wagon becomes frozen solid to the tracks. The constant pushing is the truth, not merely the myth of Sisyphus. The railway and the snow reminded you of Auschwitz. The scene was a monument to the failure of Russian communism and yet it was a monument, too, to the savagery of the market when there are no profits to be made.
Finally, Castaway 2000. With Big Brother concluding last night, the BBC's "reality" soap has had much of its thunder stolen. Eight months into their stay on remote Taransay, the community members haven't quite descended to a Lord of the Flies state. But the fact that a trainee psychotherapist and a qualified GP are behaving so obnoxiously is not the best PR for medicine. There's a research opportunity here (subject to "appropriate" funding, of course). What might Freud and Hippocrates think of that?