THE TV INSIDER ON EVERYTHING YOU’VE WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT RTÉ... BUT HAD NOBODY TO ASK
LOYALTY
SEPT 16 - RTÉ are considering hiring a PI to find out who I am. Consider that. The national broadcaster, using licence fee money, to track a whistleblower. Who is just trying to show what needs to change to save the organisation. How does @rtenews view unmasking whistleblowers? How does the NUJ? Rather than address the issues, just destroy the person airing them. So I have been busy, there is a second account with 500 tweets written, ready to send. If I lose access to this account. All I want to do is show the things that need to change to save a broadcaster that is vital for Ireland. Profound disloyalty is staying quiet. I’m disgusted... I am sad and scared.
ATMOSPHERE
SEPT 7 -Working on a show no one, including presenters, wants to make.
SEPT 14 - [After they deactivated and then reactivated the account] Sorry, I had a bit of a wobble, back now. I walked in the door yesterday and someone immediately asked me if I was the secret producer. So I freaked out and deactivated the account. Then I went for a coffee and realised everyone was asking everyone else if they were the secret producer. So, yeah.
SEPT 15 - Everyone here is going nuts. Walking around RTE, lot more people on Twitter than usual. Something happening? OK everyone is having a meltdown in here, bye for now
LICENCE FEE
SEPT 15 - Someone asked me if I think the licence fee is worth it. And why. My answer is yes it is, but a lot of it is being wasted. Why is it worth it? First independent investigative journalism. He who cannot be named owns every media outlet worth talking about. Apart from RTE we need someone to report the news that isn’t owned by a billionaire. Secondly, Irish output – TV3 make no kids, comedy, Irish language, proper investigative journalism etc. Not their fault – they are driven only by market forces. Licence fee means RTÉ can do that which isn’t driven by profit. RTÉ just need to do a better job of it.
YOUTH FOCUS
SEPT 15 - Podge and Rodge, Off the Rails, Republic, Den, Twotube – were all made internally and were cancelled without replacing them. All aimed at under 40s. All, apart from Twotube maybe, things people were proud to work on. Not all good, but at least shows viewers gave a s**t about. We have stopped making shows for the under 50s. Oh sorry, Vogue comes out of her mansion now and then to patronise marginalised communities. #edgy. Sorry, that’s bitchy. But I spent time making docs. Vogue’s ‘docs’ go against all the decent aspects of RTÉ. Selling its ethics for viewers.
YOUNG PEOPLE’S PROGRAMMES
SEPT 11 - When you walk in to stage 7, which is the TV production team building, the first thing you walked by, for years, was Young People’s. It always was busy, bursting with the youngest, and usually most enthusiastic people in #rte. Now - the lights are off. Only a genre head executive producer and the odd straggler. It had been diminished for the last 15 years. When I joined it had the Den, even after Zig and Zag left there was Dustin, Socky. But the commissioning editor cancelled that, and replaced it with stuff that kids didn’t want to watch. Stuff parents would approve of, rather than kids would want to watch. Gradually everyone in the dept got old.
SPORTS
SEPT 14 - Someone asked - What’s with RTE’s narrow range of sports? Surely a public service broadcaster has a remit to cover all our games and endeavours. Well, you can only cover so much. If you go back 10-15 years, when Glen Killane ran sports, it was a centre of excellence. Not only did it have most sports, but the coverage was slick, and, if we didn’t have the budget of the big UK channels, we still made a good stab at it. Look at it now. Soccer? Apart from an hour of the FAI mandated Soccer Republic - nothing. Good to see another show with any soccer coverage. But there isn’t. Then of course, Rugby - how much of that do we have? F1? Even losing part of the GAA coverage, although that should be laid at the door of the GAA. The whole country participates for free in the GAA, and then they go and sell out to a foreign broadcaster most of the country doesn’t have. Makes you proud to be Irish. Good forward thinking, Croke Park. Anyway back to #rtesports. Look what we have now, a fraction of what we had 15 years ago. And the coverage we do have is tired, derivative. Same people in Sports, just 15 years older. No mission. No style. No joy. Still, Ryle gets to commentate on the odd rugby game. [MoS Editor’s note: RTE also cover the Champions League and Irish international soccer matches]
PROMOTIONS
SEPT 8 - Since the recession hit a decade ago, there have been basically no promotions. The same people are in the same jobs they were in 2008. So you have 50-year-old researchers, 60-year-old BCOs [broadcast co-ordinators]. Everyone frustrated and pissed off, and fundamentally not arsed. Genre heads, our bosses – are the exact same people as 10 years ago, 15 in many cases & people wonder why #rte makes the same shows always.
WORK ETHIC
SEPT 7 - Reporting to a genre head (that’s what we call commissioning editors) who is so lazy they put on an out of office with no return date #rte.
SEPT 8 - Lunch brings me to the working day of production teams. Now, before I start this, there are production teams that work hard. But most don’t, start time 10am...ish. Normally people queue for our first coffee and scone in the oasis (that’s the coffee shop in the RTÉ TV building). First break – 11am – time for another coffee. 20 mins minimum. I know we just had coffee, but hey. Lunch 1-2. Although usually 1245-215. There are hour-long exercise, running and yoga classes every day. So people do them, and eat lunch.#rte Second break around half three or four. That’s another 20 minutes. People start leaving around half five. By 6 the place is deserted #rte. Having spent years running pa [production assistants] in independents, I couldn’t believe #rte hours when I started. I thought it was amazing. And it is. But it’s like that because the vast majority of people in here, think what they are doing, is pointless.
MOVING PRODUCERS AROUND
SEPT 12 - No, what is an issue is that RTÉ thinks everyone should be able to do everything. There are very few specialists. so researchers, and esp producers are moved around. Good at docs? You’ll be moved into entertainment. Know your way around lifestyle? They’ll move you to a comedy show – well, we don’t make any comedy internally any more. But expecting everyone to be a jack of all trades means you end up with people not very good at anything. And when we are good at something – they move us anyway – it’s the definition of how to make bad TV.
BACK CATALOGUE
SEPT 12 - #RTE has an amazing back catalogue that is literally rotting because no one cares enough... Don’t get me started on the Player.
PRESENTERS
SEPT 12 - I don’t really want to get into naming names because the stuff I’m talking about is the problems within RTÉ. That being said, there are lovely presenters, and horrible presenters. Sometimes the nice ones are bad presenters. The worst behaved tend to be the ones not on short-term contracts, but who have been there a few years, drop the nice facade and start acting out. Course there are some awful unpleasant people that have been there decades... there is a duo on radio that colleagues have worked for that I’d go a long way to avoid.
CAMERAWORK
SEPT 9 - So, people complaining about the way the #latelate is filmed... Here’s why everything shot in RTÉ studios looks like it’s stuck in the 70s #rte is very heavily unionised and the camera department (and studios in general) have used this power to... make it hard to make good looking TV. Work practices are implemented not for safety, or staff protection, but to discourage innovation because innovation is hard work. So here’s some of the fun rules: Want to go handheld? In any other studio a cameraman picks up the camera and a trainee looks after the cabling. In RTÉ you can’t use a trainee (€10 per hour) you have to use ANOTHER CAMERAMAN (€50ph) Why? Because the union wants you to. No safety reason. Just protectionism. RTÉ has a one-man jib. In RTÉ you have to have 2 people for it which makes it harder to use properly. Why? Jobs for the boys. Next: training – there isn’t any. People from other areas like staging... are promoted, have a few chats with other camera people, and then, a week later are on set shooting, even though they can’t shoot to save their lives. If a camera person is bad and a lot of them are, there is no way to make them better. If you complain, the union goes nuts. You can’t request the good camera people, so every time you turn up in studio, you have different camera ops, some good, some bad. Our #RTE camera ops treat rehearsals like a joke. Routinely pulling up chairs and having a read of the paper, or take a break, so when you move between shots they routinely miss them, meaning the rehearsal has to stop and go back so they can put down their magazine. That is why the Late Late, Ray Darcy, Prime Time and everything else we make look awful – we can’t go handheld, can’t use jibs properly and can’t get the same crew every week. I was working on a kids show a couple of years ago and one of the ops complained because of the complexity of the shots... because and I quote “it’s too much work”. And it’s not the camera ops individual fault. It’s the view, in studio, that what is important is doing things the way they want to rather than the way it should be done, for the best show, the happiest crew, and most satisfied viewers. But no, better to make mediocrity. But that’s just one department. I can tell worse stories for staging, sound, electricians. And, most of all, my department – production.
OVERTIME
SEPT 9 - So Staging. Work past a certain hour, or weekends, it’s double time. Work late and weekends, triple time. Work past midnight, and it’s overtime payments that’d blow your mind. I’ve no problem with being paid overtime etc. but TV shows are made at night and weekends... why should you hit the bonusball jackpot for turning up for your job? I’m just bitter because researchers producers etc. don’t have any... overtime. Anyway that means that there are times when people from #rte staging have earned over 100k a year. Staging, for those who don’t know, are the people who move sets. Of course, there are a lot more people on 100k+ in the admin and management staff. And a lot of them do a lot less than moving stuff around.
THE PACKAGE
SEPT 12 - Someone asked in the DMs if I was taking the package. The package, for my handful of non-RTÉ insiders, is a big wodge of money to leave. I won’t. The package is fundamentally flawed. #RTE need to clear out the deadwood of middle management (hi genre heads and Execs) and unmotivated staffers (hello producers, SPs, old APs & researchers.) The problem is, people in those brackets know that they earn more in RTÉ than they would outside RTÉ. Also RTÉ offers a very nice lifestyle – frequent summers off, time off in lieu, very flexible hours and finally a completely risk free environment... the only people that leave are a)the most skilled – the people that you don’t want to leave or b) people close to retirement – which saves you no money as they were leaving anyway. There are other reasons to stay in #rte obviously... My point is that the package doesn’t do what it should.