THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: You might not know his name, but you know his work: Steve Carson, also known as 'Mr Miriam O'Callaghan', controls what you watch on RTÉ Television
IF YOU were to meet Steve Carson at a party, in the kitchen maybe, in a quiet corner, and asked him what he did for a living, you might discover that he worked in television. You might prod for a little more detail and find that he works in RTÉ.
Sounds interesting, you would say. Know anyone famous? Eventually, maybe a couple of drinks later, you having told him how much you can't stand the Late Late Showand that they should bring back Bachelors Walk, you might finally get it out of him that he is actually quite important in RTÉ. That he is, you know, the man who commissions its programmes. That he has the power to make or break your night in. That he wields, in effect, the most powerful remote control in the country.
Since February, Carson has been "Director of Programmes, TV", effectively the man who decides what Irish television gets made and what doesn't. It's fair to say that most people outside the media wouldn't have been able to name his predecessor (Claire Duignan, now head of RTÉ Radio). And they'd likely struggle to name Carson. But he is a man who gets far more attention than most senior-level management in RTÉ tend to. As a producer he was behind the documentary series Haughey and Bertie, and these and other series have made him arguably the most successful producer of the past decade. But that his co-producer and wife is Miriam O'Callaghan is what has occasionally put him on the back page of the Sunday Independent.
That’s it out of the way then, what he calls the “Mr Miriam O’Callaghan” line, predictable, unavoidable, but relevant. It sits lightly with Carson, who describes himself as “not an extrovert or a joiner of things”. Neither is he a cigar-chomping, braces-snapping, roaring temperament, Michael Grade type. He tells of how, one recent weekend, he wandered into an RTÉ studio where a children’s talent show was being filmed. “It was this sweet thing that would never get reviewed. But to those kids in that studio it was something they’ll never forget. And without being too corny, that was kind of lovely. Because it wouldn’t have happened without us being around.” Perhaps this is unfair caricature, but there could be other TV executives who would have called an assistant over and told them to get rid of the kid with the buck teeth.
CARSON WAS Achild of 1970s British television, soaking up the psychedelic outflow of Bagpuss, The Moomins, Mr Bennwhen he was younger; Magpieand Swap Shopas he got older. Although, he remembers his father becoming quite moved by a Brian Friel play; the power of drama "really burnt in my brain". He suggests that it is "incredibly pretentious" to even share that memory, a symptom of the self-effacement that strikes him repeatedly.
He was born in 1968 into an east Belfast household, with two older sisters. His father was a journalist ("and a very good one") with the Belfast Telegraph, but young Carson wasn't attracted by print, lured instead by the flickering light of the screen. "I loved television. I was kind of a latch-key kid. I'd come home from school and I'd just sit and turn the telly on pretty much 'till I went to bed. I always watched a lot of television of different types. I was never precocious, but I'd watch a lot of documentaries early enough."
He was just shy of five years old when his mother, Patricia, died. “To use the metaphor of the times,” he says, “it was like a bomb going off. And there are still aftershocks. I’m probably more conscious of the situation now because of my own children. I can kind of see what could have been.” He and O’Callaghan have four boys together, to add to the four girls from her first marriage, an intimidating total but which he insists works well as a unit. His own mother’s absence, he says, he didn’t notice when he was young. “As a child, if your dad comes back and says, by the way kids we’re going to speak Chinese from now on, you just get on with it and speak Chinese.” Does he remember her? “Yes. Fleeting memories really. It’s just inescapably sad, the whole thing.” She must have been young. “No, she was 48. She was quite old when she had me. To be honest it’s tough on all of us, but she lost her life. She lost the chance to grow up with her family. So it’s toughest on her.”
His father Tom, now 81, raised the family through further domestic crises, including a financial hit that made the young Carson presume during the Oil Crisis that "the Arabs had targeted us". His father, though, is "a great talker, he's fascinated by things, and I had quite a good imagination. And I could sit drawing, reading, doing things and being quite happy. For a creative industry that's not a bad grounding. I did have quite a fertile imagination." Which leads to a twist in Carson's career, that this east Belfast Protestant, brought up in a city as it split in half, would go on to make television about southern Irish history – a 2006 documentary on Frank Aiken, Fine Gael: A Family at War, Haughey, Bertie– and sometimes, such as with 2001's Pearse: Fanatic Heart, Republican history.
“Firstly,” he explains, “my parents weren’t bigots . . .”. Actually, as founding members of the Alliance Party, they were card-carrying non-bigots. Meanwhile, as one of three in his primary school class to pass the 11-plus exam, gaining him a grammar-school scholarship, he took the middle-class route through life in Belfast, which, as with many of his generation, led to him getting out of there at the first opportunity. “But I always had a strong sense of Irishness, and a strong interest in Irish history. I’ve seen Gerry Adams go on about ‘all we were taught at school was British kings and queens’. I wasn’t taught that at all. Maybe I was lucky at the school. So when I moved to Dublin in 1997 it was weird because I kind of knew it through O-level history.”
That otherness has had its advantages. “It’s good in television to be of something but slightly to be an observer, to have a bit of distance as well. I think I have an interesting perspective on it, but I feel part of it. I don’t feel like an interloper coming in.” Of the Pearse documentary, he says, “I didn’t grow up in the nationalist tradition, but I’m not a revisionist because a lot of revisionism comes out of a sense of resentment and hatred of being brought up in that tradition and kicking against the pricks. So I skipped all that really. I don’t feel the need to drag Pearse down.” It’s an approach that could also arguably be seen in more recent subjects.
He spent 10 years in England, building a career but no affinity for the place. “It never felt like home. I kind of felt I could be there for the rest of my life because that’s where my career was. But I could have been, not one of those sad old men in Kilburn dreaming of home, but I never felt at home there and I probably would never have gone back to Northern Ireland. I mean, even the fact that I’m in a mixed marriage now – that would still be an issue in Belfast. And it’s not here. So this is the best for both of us really.”
HE MET O'CALLAGHANwhen he was a producer on Newsnightand she was its Irish correspondent, and there's a dollop of movie-script cliché about how they have been described as having had a tetchy working relationship at first, before falling for each other. Carson moved to Dublin in 1997, working as a freelance producer in an RTÉ that was not particularly interested in dynamism, "where people would be coming up with reasons not to do things, people harking on about the golden days . . . In the 1990s I was in RTÉ and there was a sense that the golden years were gone, and that we'd made Strumpet Cityand Cathal O'Shannon did the documentary about crime in the early 1990s. And I used to think, that was one series and people are still talking about it."
Going independent, he and O’Callaghan set up Mint Productions at a time when RTÉ was crumbling under its previous financial earthquake. “I don’t want to sound overly self-deprecating, but looking back it was actually insane to set up the company when we did, because RTÉ was in financial meltdown in 2000 and 2001 and there was like nine documentaries commissioned that year. So it was really stupid. I didn’t get any salary for six months or a year, and relied on Miriam’s salary. But bear in mind that Miriam’s salary wasn’t what it is now, so it was tight.” He adds quickly, “You know, without trying to sound like Pee Flynn.” Yet, there was never a sense of feeling overshadowed by O’Callaghan, or being reliant on her income. “One of the reasons I’m an off-screen person is that I kind of like the idea of being in the background. Still having an ego, still having an influence and control over what you make, but not being front and centre, because I never resented that line, ‘Mr Miriam O’Callaghan’. I always thought, ‘great’. I’m really proud. I’d be really proud to have Miriam as a friend. To have her as my wife . . .” and here he gives a palms-up, “how do you credit it?” gesture. “I think back to Belfast and that Presbyterian sense of ‘it’s all going too well’.” He later describes himself as “nauseating” when he talks about her.
As a business partnership, he says they try to leave work behind them on the way in the door, although there would be the occasional pre-bedtime idea from her, after which she would sleep soundly while he lay awake trying to figure out how to do it. Now that he's in RTÉ, a subplot to the recent coverage of the Late Late Showhost's job was his role in a decision involving his wife (he withdrew from the process), and their sudden emergence as the most powerful couple in Montrose. "There are large parts of my job I don't discuss – I couldn't discuss – and we don't."
The move into RTÉ came just as he was searching around for the next challenge. He describes Mint’s house style as impressionistic, a collage, underpinned by the idea that the viewer should make up their own mind about the subject. But by the time he had reached the end of the Bertie series he had reached the end point of that style. He had also started a master’s degree in 20th century Irish history at UCD; a return to college partly triggered by someone asking him if he had any hobbies outside television. He had no answer.
THE RTÉ HEreturned to, he describes as "totally different" from the grinding organisation of more than a decade ago. Even then, he admits to having a "less jaundiced view" of the broadcaster than some other Irish independent producers might have, due to his experience of some commissioning editors in the BBC and Channel 4; patronising, arrogant sorts who "regarded you as untermensch".
Nevertheless, RTÉ is once again in a spot of financial bother. “This has been an incredibly tough year incredibly quickly. I think that RTÉ’s last financial meltdown was coming down the horizon for a few years. This one, literally since I joined, it fell off a cliff and kept falling.” Cuts have been made. Lifestyle programmes have suffered, although he’s at pains to stress that a documentary unit has been set up. Otherwise, the cuts are to non-essentials such as hire cars and unnecessary outside broadcasts, so “the money goes on the screen. I don’t think the viewers should ever worry about our problems. I say this to our staff, they don’t give a monkey’s about how we manage things. They just want their programmes.” He’s keen on getting this across, constantly mentioning the new autumn schedules during the conversation, usually with an exaggerated, mildly passive-aggressive “well I’m glad you asked me about the autumn schedules”, just after yet another question about his wife.
It irks him that there have been reports that RTÉ will react to the downturn by dragging down the content. “Where does it cross with my interests and my background that I would want to come into RTÉ and wreak havoc with something RTÉ has justifiably earned a reputation for?” Public service broadcasting is, he believes, a “virtuous circle” in Ireland. There is no need to create a “walled garden” of programmes that are serious and worthy but watched by nobody.
"If you want to chase ratings you will get them making serious programmes. Look at The Rutland, which got a 30 per cent share. That's extraordinary. If that was the BBC it would have got 6 per cent and they would have been punching the air. So I'm very conscious that Irish viewers are not the same as other viewers. And again, I love our programmes that don't make sense anywhere else. The Late Latemakes no sense. It's two hours long, or two and half if it needs to be. It covers the health service and then a celebrity and it gets 50 per cent audience share. I mean a US TV executive would go, 'what the hell is that about?'. Look at our schedule. Nine o'clock, it's the news. Then you'll probably have 40 minutes of serious current affairs. Then," he says with delighted incredulity, "you'll have a documentary about an artist. Our schedule wouldn't make sense to BBC1. We are much more highbrow than BBC1."
This is the first season of programmes that he has truly influenced, so ask him for two things he recommends people watch and he gives a list that is well on its way to including the whole lot, (a how-are-they-faring-in-the-recession Pure Mulegets first mention). His grand plan is to develop programmes that are "distinctly Irish". To make television that wouldn't play anywhere else, to tap into community and tribalism in the way that, say, Celebrity Banisteoirhas done.
“It’s based on the fact that although we’re now incredibly saturated, with dozens of channels, we’re in a very competitive market and people think of us as being in a monopoly but we’re really not. We’re not in a monopoly for viewers. We’re up against the best public service broadcaster in the world, the biggest and best commercial broadcasters. So that people watch our programmes still, a 40 per cent share in a multi-channel age, that’s because people want to watch Irish programming.”
He's not too illuminating on how boxing show Lords of the Ringfits that, other than that it offers the thrill of sport and is good for charity. But he has an idea that RTÉ could do a "build a barn" project, across a whole summer in a particular community, which he describes with more conviction than the idea might seem to warrant. "I'll probably get four 'build a barn' ideas now." As for himself, he goes home in the evening and flicks through the channels, irritating the rest of the family, hunting for comedies or drama because watching documentaries is bit of a busman's holiday. He's just bought the box set of The Wire, despite not normally committing to lengthy drama series. "I'd just watch silly things on E! . . . And sometimes I can think I'm working, when in reality I'm sitting on my arse."
BORNBelfast, 1968
FAMILYMarried to TV presenter Miriam O'Callaghan. They have four boys along with four girls from her first marriage.
TV HIGHLIGHTSSetting up production company Mint, with O'Callaghan; he was behind the series
Fine Gael: A Family at War, Haughey and Bertie, as well as
Legal Eagles, Unit 8and
Who Do You Think You Are?
TURNING POINTLeaving the independent sector to become RTÉ Television's new director of programmes