New Year's Eve, 1961. The static whirred and bounced for a bit - those were the days when television sets took a while to warm up - and then the screens flickered and came to life. The opening broadcast by the newly-launched Teilif∅s ╔ireann was a modest offering by today's all-singing, all-dancing televisual standards: a speech by President ╔amon de Valera; a speech by Cardinal D'Alton; a live variety concert from the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. But there are those who say that it marked the beginning of modern Ireland.
RT╔ television was certainly destined to mirror, if not actually influence, a dramatically changing society. Everyone in Ireland cherishes at least one image from those 40 intervening years. Bosco bouncing up out of his box sporting stripy pyjamas, a lunatic grin and that voice: "Hello, boys and girls!" Charles Mitchell giving unparalleled gravitas to the news - a colleague still recalls the tone of his voice when he announced that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Current affairs coverage which reached the heights with Radharc and Seven Days; comedy which plumbed the depths with Leave It To Mrs O'Brien; Bunny Carr wielding his Quicksilver catchphrase: "Stop the Lights!" - and this at a time when the idea of giving a million pounds as a prize in a quiz show would have seemed like a plotline for some far-fetched science-fiction series.
But then, as an evening of special programmes scheduled to run on RT╔ 1 and Network 2 on New Year's Day will undoubtedly remind us, Ireland at the dawn of the "swinging sixties" was a very, very innocent place. Raidi≤ ╔ireann was already up and running, of course - but television was regarded as an extremely new-fangled business, and a luxury to boot, in a country which had just come through an extended period of recession, and whose population had reached an all-time low. On his "Irish television" website at www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rlogue/tegallery.htm, project-management software consultant and self-confessed television anorak, Richard Logue, has assembled a weird and wonderful collection of stories from RT╔'s history - and prehistory.
"There used to be a Museum of Irish Broadcasting in Rathmines, run by Paddy Clarke, an engineer who had retired from RT╔. On one visit there I saw a massive relief map of Co Wicklow, and asked him what it was. He told me that in 1958 the Department of Posts and Telegraphs was trying to figure out where to put the transmitters for FM radio broadcasting - and the way they did it was, they constructed a huge relief map of the whole country and placed light bulbs on top of potentially suitable 'mountain tops' to see what kind of coverage they would get. Five sites were identified by the light bulbs, and eventually used for television transmitters - with great success - by Teilif∅s ╔ireann. I think only we Irish could have come up with that idea."
In early 1960, the Dβil gave Raidi≤ ╔ireann its independence, setting it up as a semi-state body with responsibility for providing the state television service and appointing a new chairman, Eamonn Andrews. Already well known as a broadcaster in Britain, Andrews began to commute between his homes in London and Dublin - an impossibly glamorous lifestyle it must have seemed in those days - in order to finalise plans for the new station. Teilif∅s ╔ireann was scheduled to go on air at Christmas, but Andrews famously cast himself as Santa Claus and gave everybody in the entire organisation Christmas off - so no radio or TV was broadcast over the Christmas period, and the baby TV channel's birth was delayed until New Year's Eve, 1961.
Perhaps it was just as well. As the opening night speeches by de Valera and Cardinal D'Alton had shown quite clearly, the twin towers of conservative Ireland were already highly suspicious of the new medium's subversive streak. Teilif∅s ╔ireann had barely turned two before they became convinced the State had given birth to a monster. The trouble was caused by a late-night chatshow hosted by a go-ahead young presenter called Gay Byrne, The Late Late Show, which began as a six-week filler in the summer of 1962. Byrne and his production team pushed every button in the book, and some they had invented for themselves, to produce a mix of entertainment, controversy and - as far as conservative Ireland was concerned - pure provocation. Ulick O'Connor was a regular guest, offering compelling articulacy and unorthodox views. There were memorable confrontations when opposing ideologies - carefully chosen, of course, but the unsuspecting audience didn't know that - collided in the studio.
And then there was the case of the bishop and the nightie. During the course of a Mr- and Mrs-style quiz, a woman contestant admitted that she hadn't worn anything on her wedding night. The studio audience greeted her story with gales of laughter - but the bishop of Galway wasn't amused. He phoned Teilif∅s ╔ireann to complain, and prompted a rash of local-government motions as county councillors scrambled to condemn the "filth" that RT╔ was bringing into Irish homes. The affair reached its apogee when Oliver J. Flanagan of Fine Gael declared there had been "no sex in Ireland until the introduction of television".
In spite of - or partly, who knows, because of - the occasional bat of a crozier, telly in Ireland went from strength to strength. Sometimes its weaknesses turned into strengths. There was never much time or money for children's programming, so the few programmes which were made developed into mini-institutions. Wanderly Wagon, which ran from 1968 until 1982, was the best children's programme on RT╔ for many of those years. For a considerable number of them, it was also the only one. It featured a cast of loveable puppets - Judge the dog, Mr Crow and Sneaky Snake - who travelled the country in a ramshackle wagon, accompanied by an equally loveable band of humans led by the puppeteer Eugene Lambert, aka O'Brien.
"Remember the foreign children's cartoons they used to show?" says Richard Logue. "In his autobiography, Bob Quinn referred to them as 'cartoons of incomprehensible brilliance' - but I remember them as just incomprehensible. There was one called Lolek and Bolek which the continuity announcers used to produce with a flourish, saying 'And now we have a real treat for you, children' . . . Even as a kid I knew this was a rubbish cartoon, but I used to wonder why they mentioned it so often, and made such a big deal out of it. Years afterwards I discovered that the announcers kept a jar by their desk. Fifty-pence coins were tossed into the jar every time Lolek and Bolek was announced - and the announcer who had given it the most OTT introduction during the week pocketed the lot!"
The RT╔ budget didn't exactly allow for a wealth of drama serials or documentaries over the years, but the literary adaptations Strumpet City and The Ballroom of Romance made considerable waves when first broadcast, as did Insurrection, a series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Soap operas, both urban and rural, became something of a speciality, with Tolka Row and The Riordans being succeeded - eventually - by Fair City and Glenroe. RT╔ 2 went on air in 1978 with a variety show hosted by Mike Murphy. Within a decade, it had been reborn as Network 2, and had developed an identity involving large dollops of sports coverage, off-the-wall comedy shows such as Nighthawks and the divine duo from (Ian) Dempsey's Den, Zig and Zag.
On Monday, New Year's Eve, RT╔ 1 kicks off its evening of special programmes at 6.30 p.m. with Memoryscape, a five-minute film in which producer/director Dearbhla Walsh creates a kaleidoscopic journey through time. This will be followed by The Opening Night, a mixture of archive footage and interview with people who remember the night in question, produced and directed by Sheila de Courcy.
Later in the evening, presenter Seβn Moncrieff will give an invited audience of 40-year-olds the opportunity to see their lives flash before their eyes in The Big 4.0; and interspersed throughout the evening, viewers will tell their own telly stories - some moving, some funny, some reflective - in a series of vignettes called On the Box.
Network 2 offers its own take on proceedings, with Gerry Ryan choosing his Top 20 musical moments - good, great and unforgivable in Gerry Ryan's Hitlist.
It will be a night of celebration, of congratulation and of great affection. And why not? With digital and broadband battles on the horizon, and information technology in a constant state of flux, who knows what the next 40 years have in store?