CHANGING MORES FROM BEHIND THE RTÉ CURTAIN
Betty Purcell joined RTÉ in 1979 as producer of a new radio programme, Women Today, presented by Marian Finucane and broadcast daily at 2pm.
In the years that followed, Women Today would repeatedly fall foul of Church and State authorities. The Ireland of the early 1980s found itself scandalised by the programme’s candid treatment of women’s personal lives – their sexuality and reproductive choices, their relationships, and their thwarted professional and social ambitions.
That was 35 years ago – longer than a lifetime for many of the people working in broadcasting today. Readers who were not even born then may find themselves marvelling at Purcell’s account of the acute moral conservatism that prevailed such a long time ago. As far as the rest of us are concerned, unfortunately it’s still only too recent.
Purcell now produces Tonight With Vincent Browne on TV3. She left RTÉ in 2012 after 33 years working in current affairs on Women Today, Day By Day, Questions And Answers, and documentaries. Later she was drafted in to add substance to an increasingly featherweight Late Late Show with Pat Kenny presenting. She also spent five years with the RTÉ Authority.
The three decades recalled in this memoir saw seismic change at the State broadcasting corporation, to say nothing of society at large, and Purcell was in the thick of a lot of it. And she’s evidently – justifiably – proud of the part she played and the stands she took.
Most significant was probably her opposition to Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which barred Sinn Féin members from the airwaves. Purcell was so fiercely against the crude censorship that Section 31 imposed – the impediment it presented in the effort to produce balanced journalism – that she took a case against it to the
‘So fiercely against crude censorship of Section 31 that she took a case’
European Court of Human Rights in 1991. Purcell lost her case, although the Act was repealed a few years later by then arts minister Michael D Higgins.
Purcell gives vent to old enmities and antagonisms with, for example, Ray Burke, Charlie Haughey, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Eoghan Harris. Then there was her explosive spat with Pat Kenny, with whom Purcell had already argued over his reported claim that ‘he would rather be in a plane piloted by a hungover man than a pre-menstrual woman’.
She concludes with an analysis of the two serious cock-ups that were the libellous Mission To Prey programme and the unverified tweet on the Frontline presidential election special. For these errors she blames poor leadership and a trend towards ‘tabloidisation’ of current affairs.
The memoir takes in other matters that will not be of as much interest to the general reader, such as internecine disputes within RTÉ, and the difficulties of dealing with the Workers Party faction in the organisation. But on the whole it’s an edifying look at the recent history of Irish broadcasting and journalism, and it may be enlightening for anyone not old enough to remember just how different was the society we lived in a generation ago.