If RTE wants a pat on back, it should watch the competition

Our national broadcaster fobs off viewers with mediocrity, as if it hasn’t realised we have so much more choice today, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

RTE launched a first-rate autumn season last week. How do we know that? Because RTE said so.

There it was in black and white on the national broadcaster’s news website: “RTE launches first-rate new autumn season.” So much for fair and impartial reporting. It looked more like advertising.

In the hours after the announcement, the network kept up a steady stream of similar puff pieces. And to be fair, no blame should be attached to the boys and girls in the newsroom for making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Everyone has to pay the rent.

There’s less excuse for highly paid executives to peddle the same nonsense and expect not to be called out on it. RTE Director General Dee Forbes actually dared to say the new line-up “explores all sides of Irish life, past and present”.

If that really is the case, then the country is in worse shape than anyone suspected.

It was the announcement that The Late Late Show would be broadcasting an edition from London in October which summed up the problem. Is this really what Ryan Tubridy was talking about when he reportedly “teased” listeners to his RTE Radio One show last Monday morning that there would be some “very special news” at Thursday’s launch? “There’s big things happening this season, and it’s extremely exciting,” was how he put it.

Thrills must be thin on the ground in Montrose if flying to London to present a one-off edition of a chat show is what passes for excitement. Especially since the avowed purpose of the trip is to explore “the unique relationship” between the two neighbouring countries.

Not that old chestnut again? It’s true that Brexit has presented some challenges to political and economic alliances across the Irish Sea, but it’s doubtful that The Late Late will add much to anyone’s understanding of them over the course of a couple of hours on a Friday night. More likely is that Ryan will spend the evening chinwagging with some carefully vetted Irish emigres about what life’s been like for them since they left home, before ending with some warm, reassuring words about the special relationship between the two islands.

This is a textbook example of what journalists think ordinary people are interested in hearing about, as opposed to what they’re actually interested in hearing about. Most people don’t give all that much thought to the nature of the relationship between Ireland and Britain. They just don’t. Only for journalists and broadcasters does it remain this perennial preoccupation, dredged up every so often to fill some empty airtime.

Even if viewers did, for some perverse reason, want to stroke their beards and ponder the nature of Irishness and Britishness at the end of a hard day’s work, it’s highly unlikely Brendan O’Carroll of Mrs Brown’s Boys fame would be top of the list of authorities that they’d call on to guide them through the maze. Because that’s another treat RTE has lined up for viewers this autumn — a one-off special with the working title of Brendan O’Carroll’s Britain, in which the Dublin comedian heads to the UK to “explore the bonds” between the two countries. No offence, but that wouldn’t have been “must see TV” in the days when viewers were stuck with RTE One and Two, never mind in a world of multi-channel, on demand programming.

What’s dispiriting is the dead air of box-ticking about it all. There are to be shows about boom and bust in the property market, drug use, obesity, social media pressure, sex trafficking. It’s as if the powers that be in RTE had a meeting at which they ran through a checklist of whatever they’d happened to see on the news lately and commissioned a programme about each one. It will all be worthy and well-meaning, and all the right liberal quotas will be met, but will anyone cancel their plans to stay in and watch any of it?

Even the drama seems to take the same tendentious approach. Taken Down is still in production, but this new crime series from the makers of Love/Hate will apparently begin with the discovery of the body of a young Nigerian migrant near a direct provision centre. The story promises to shine a light on “a twilight world of the new Ireland”, and I am fearful that this will mean hours of prime time TV devoted to banging Irish viewers over the head with how racist we all are, when, breaking news, we’re really not that bad. It may surprise us by not consisting entirely of nasty white people being horrid to immigrants, but let’s not hold our breath.

Killing Eve, about a Russian assassin trying to stay one step ahead of the security services, looks more promising, but that could reflect the fact that it’s been bought in from overseas.

The majority of RTE’s most popular shows — from Dancing With The Stars to First Dates and Who Do You

Think You Are? — are formats brought in from other jurisdictions. Even the forthcoming “new” shows, such as the one featuring sports presenter Marty Morrissey and 2FM Breakfast Republic co-host Bernard O’Shea taking a road trip, have been done to death countless times before.

If in doubt, just point the camera at a celebrity and hope for the best. It’s this way of thinking which led last week to the demeaning spectacle of Keelin Shanley and Caitriona Perry being paraded at the launch as if they were starlets, rather than the new faces of Six One News. It’s the national broadcaster, not OK magazine.

With 60 new shows being unveiled in the autumn, there’s bound to be something for everyone. That’s just a question of numbers. There’s a lot of fresh comedy, for example, much of it written by and starring women. RTE’s record isn’t sparkling in that department, but fingers crossed.

It just all looks a bit... yeah, whatever. RTE needs to up its game not to be left behind, but there’s not much evidence it even understands what it is up against. Every failure is blamed on the squeeze on revenue. Here’s the bad news, though. Even if RTE had limitless resources, plenty of us would still rather watch Netflix, which is relentlessly entertaining rather than smugly sanctimonious.

RTE hasn’t a hope of competing with Netflix, which saw nearly $4bn in turnover in the first three months of this year alone; but it can learn the lesson which has made the company so successful.

Life is demanding enough as it is. Watching TV shouldn’t be a penance too.

‘Most people don’t give that much thought to British-Irish relations’