It’s all quiet on the TV front...
PUBLIC ENEMY SKY ATLANTIC, TONIGHT, 10PM
WELL, we’re entering that time of the year again.
It’s the time of the year when apparently everyone who works in TV land goes on their summer holidays and leave the rest of us shlubs poking through the schedule like gold miners trying to find a nugget (or, in the case of TV critics, like pigs trying to find a truffle).
For example, as soon as the news ends on RTÉ One tonight, the schedule goes straight into repeats, with a brief break for a movie (The Place Beyond The Pines 9.35pm)
Its younger, supposedly hipper sibling, RTÉ 2 suffers from a similar aff liction.
In fact, from 4pm, everything on the second channel will be a repeat, with the exception of the Champions League semi final between Atletico and Real.
Fine, we can forgive RTÉ 2 in this instance, but only because they’re showing the football and let’s put it this way, I rather doubt that they had to pull some original programming (either home produced or imported) to make way for the match.
This happens every year, and in the face of so many other networks available it seems either lazy, contemptuous or a case of well-that’s-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it, a very Irish curse.
Let’s put it this way – do you even know just how many channels you have on your TV?
Sure, most of them are rubbish, but there’s always something for someone somewhere in the listings, even if your choices are rather diminished if you don’t have an insatiable appetite for aliens, Nazis and sharks.
The point is, at a time when we’re hearing so much whinging coming out of RTÉ about the need for an increase in the license fee, it just seems needlessly careless, or arrogant, to accompany that broadside with an entire schedule full of stuff we’ve seen – or deliberately avoided – before.
TV3, in fairness to it, has one original programme tonight in Assassins (10pm), but after the kicking the Donal McIntryre-presented show received last week, it’s unlikely that a grateful nation will be rushing out to Ballymount to thank them.
The best bet on a weak week night is probably the first episode of Belgian drama Public Enemy (Sky Atlantic, 10pm).
Guy (Angelo Bison) was a notorious child killer in the 1990s, but now the Belgian authorities have placed him in a halfway house with some monks.
When a child goes missing, all eyes turn to Guy, but is he responsible or just a handy scapegoat?
It all sounds very Marc Dutroux, the infamous Belgian child killer whose crimes exposed secrets at the very top of Belgian society.