WHEN RTE television was in its infancy, it attracted a captive audience fascinated with its every faltering step — not a difficult feat given that, in the early 1960s, most Irish people hadn’t access to UK channels and thus no competing claims on their loyalty.
That fidelity was tested when BBC and ITV transmissions became readily available in Irish homes, but there was still something about Telefis Eireann, as it was then called, that outside broadcasters couldn’t match. That was its ability to show us both the world around us and ourselves, too — acting as both window and mirror in the phrase used by John Bowman for the title of his recent history of RTE television.
All public service broadcasters, of course, strive for that kind of commitment to their particular communities, giving people not just what they want but what they should want, too — educating and enlightening their viewers as well as entertaining them.
Indeed, the history of RTE television has evidenced a constant struggle to balance these two aspirations, though in recent times it’s hard not to feel that the pro-enlightenment battle has been lost and that, despite earnest public assurances to the contrary by various director generals and controllers, everyone inside Montrose has given up pretending otherwise.
Perhaps I’m being unduly alarmist. After all, such dismal outcomes were being forecast when multi-channel viewing became a reality in the 1980s and 90s and were voiced even more insistently when the digital revolution vastly expanded the number of channels on offer — thereby decreasing the likelihood of a shared experience in which the majority (or even a significant minority) of viewers were watching the same programme.
Since then, though, there’s been the speedy and irresistible rise of new media, with their clamorous designs on our time and attention, while the way in which we look at television itself has also changed, with in-set recording devices, podcasts and catch-up players enabling us to look at programmes whenever we wish.
Faced with all these agents of fragmentation and struggling to make financial ends meet, RTE television appears to be in the process of downgrading its commitment to public service broadcasting while opting to slavishly follow instead what the ratings decree — mindful, no doubt, of HL Mencken’s adage that nobody ever lost any money by underestimating the taste of the public.
IF this is the case — and the paucity of serious RTE programmes over the last year doesn’t suggest otherwise — we can look forward to a near future when our national broadcaster will be almost indistinguishable from TV3, which doesn’t claim any moral duty to the public good and thus can show anything it thinks will make it money.
Maybe it’s time RTE gave up the notion of being a major media player intent on being all things to all viewers and resigned itself to the lesser, though not dishonourable, role of niche broadcasting, with a commitment to making programmes of real quality and general interest, somewhat in the manner of TG4, though without that station’s audience-restricting adherence to the Irish language.
Whether it could then justify the licence fee would be open to debate, but the fact is that, whether it likes to think so or not, recent trends have made it a niche broadcaster anyway.
– John Boland
Irish Independent