Sunday Independent (Ireland)

The holy ‘Ground’ once more

Ear To The Ground (RTE1) I

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T has to be said that Ear To The Ground is very good indeed — whenever I watch the RTE farming programme, which is probably not as often as I would watch programmes that are not about farming, I am struck by all the things that I don’t know about that subject.

Now admittedly this could be accomplish­ed just as easily by a very bad farming programme — though I actually live in “rural Ireland”, I am not of rural Ireland, in the sense that many of the deeper workings of agricultur­e are still a mystery to me.

So they could be fooling me here, telling me things that everybody knows, except me. But something tells me that this is not the case, that Ear To The Ground is enlighteni­ng, even for people who know quite a lot about farming, whoever they are.

I was never able to take much of it in, though I did watch quite a few programmes about farming when I was young, mainly because there wasn’t much else to do — there was Mart And Market on the telly, what were you going to do? Turn it off ? And if you turned it off, what were you going to do then? Nothing, that’s what. Because more than likely there was nothing to do.

So I remember the presenter Michael Dillon, and the fact that he was bald, and that he didn’t have an ‘RTE’ accent, as such, he talked like a farmer, albeit the type of farmer who gets to present a programme about cattle prices and suchlike.

So I would watch that show, but really I could never connect with it. The financial markets have the same effect on me, there is a switch in my brain that is automatica­lly turned off when these subjects are raised. So I remember just the odd word that would come out of Michael Dillon: “heifers”… “hoggets”… “bullocks”.

Nor did I feel that I was meant to retain more of this informatio­n than was strictly necessary, this was a programme about farming, for farmers — they were aiming directly for that demographi­c without worrying about the general viewer, without throwing in some nonsense that might appeal to people who don’t care anyway.

Which was an admirable attitude, though one which would be hard to bring to the screen nowadays — always the TV executives are thinking about the people who don’t care, trying to tailor everything to their needs, not minding that in the process they’re probably destroying it for those who do.

Ear To The Ground seems to get these decisions absolutely right, its credibilit­y with its core audience is not in question, but there is also plenty of variety and a lot of nice pictures of the countrysid­e for the likes of me.

There, I said it — countrysid­e. The word was used in the most recent episode of Ear To The Ground that I watched, and this is a sign of how far we have all come. Because in days of yore, only the British countrysid­e, as shown in its manicured chocolate box style on the BBC or ITV, was called the “countrysid­e”. In Ireland it was not such a lovely place and mostly it was just called “the country”.

And farmers were usually called Joe — on Prime Time, or its then equivalent, the RTE agricultur­al correspond­ent would invariably set up his report with the line: “For farmers like Joe…”

Now they can be called all sorts of things, and they are engaged in a multitude of activities which go well beyond the reach of “farmers like Joe”, or even “intensive farmers” like Joe — a recent episode had Ella McSweeney reporting on wildlife crime, which apparently is not crime committed by wildlife, but crime committed against wildlife, illegal hunting and the like; there was a feature by Helen Carroll on the manifold virtues of raising goats; and Darragh McCullough was in Drumsna, Co Leitrim, spending time with a couple of flower farmers.

To be honest, it’s hard to believe that all these things are going on out there, but it’s great to know that they are — the past may be another country, but so is “the country”.

 ??  ?? ‘Ear to the Ground’ with Ella McSweeney and Niamh Duffy
‘Ear to the Ground’ with Ella McSweeney and Niamh Duffy

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