The National Broadcaster

Has anyone seen RTE’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’?  Hundreds of thousands of people apparently. What about ‘Operation Transformation’, another of the station’s sure-fire ratings winners? Despite having watched neither of them, I am very aware of their existence and I know that Des Cahill was a participant in the former show. During their recent runs, it was hard to avoid them because RTE radio one rarely missed a chance to advertise them via regular mentions on Ryan Tubridy and Ray Darcy’s shows. And there was even some light banter about ‘The Stars’ on the usually grim Morning Ireland. 

There’s an in-built assumption in this very parochial approach that the listeners are also regular watchers of RTE television and that other people (a fair-sized chunk of the population, mostly aged between 0 and 35) can go away.  RTE know their audience and are determined to hold onto them, rather than try to find new listeners and viewers.  As far as I can remember, Gay Byrne regularly tied in the Late Late Show to his radio programme but that was at a time when there was very little choice available on the airwaves and most people in this country had access to just two TV channels.  When he talked about a Late Late item, Byrne was continuing the conversation, but when Ryan, Ray, Miriam and even Aine talk gleefully about Op Trans or DWTS, it sounds rather desperate.   

Director-general Dee Forbes has been making some rather anxious sounds lately about the state of RTE, calling for a hike in the license fee and worrying about the 15-35 demographic most of whom obviously aren’t drawn in by the blanket coverage of dieting and celebrity dancing programmes.  David McSavage has drawn attention to what he considers the poor quality of the programming coming out of Montrose by refusing to pay his license fee. There is clear evidence that many others feel the same way – there is a high incidence of fee evasion in Ireland.

 This has led some people to wonder about the point of RTE. In this multi-platform media environment, for many people, it is another small fish fighting for attention in a vast pond of sounds and pictures.  Is a ‘national’ broadcaster necessary, they wonder? If so, what is it for?

Though it was heralded as a medium that would provide a ‘window on the world’ for the cave-dwellers of Ireland in 1961, RTE is at its best when it does uniquely Irish programming like ‘Nationwide’, ‘Ear to the Ground’, documentaries about the history of the country and investigative news programmes.  But it’s clear that RTE cannot compete with the bigger broadcasters.  Watching the BBC’s News at Ten after RTE’s Nine O’Clock News gives one an idea of the size of RTE’s budget – there are comparatively few ‘foreign’ news items on RTE and they only have two correspondents working outside of Ireland (in Brussel and Washington) while the BBC seem to be able to get cameras into emergency rooms in war zones everywhere. Watching the BBC news can be a hair-raising, visceral experience full of hellish violence from the four corners of the world while RTE is mostly about local trade union leaders’ grievances and bland comments from TDs.

 RTE has never been able to do comedy for some reason (Apres Match apart) and outside of soap operas, it is too expensive to produce drama programmes that can compete with the quality of shows coming out of Britain and the U.S.A.  Even so, the paucity of home-grown material is highlighted when one examines the schedule on any given day. On Monday, 24 April, 2017, less than ten of the 34 hours of programming on RTE’s channels was produced by the broadcaster itself and three hours of those ten were devoted to the daily news.

So surely RTE should stop trying to compete with the big fish and concentrate on what it’s good at? This bloated organisation that has a TV station and radio station (RTE 2 and 2FM) catering for a demographic that doesn’t care and the vast majority of programming on RTE 2 consists of imports that, thanks to digital, everyone can watch on other channels, while the national ‘pop’ music station plays hardly any music by Irish artists.  Sports organisations are following the money to richer pastures and RTE 2 will look especially denuded next spring without its live Six Nations rugby marathons.

So hasn’t the time come to get rid of RTE 2 and 2FM and leave whatever home-grown programmes that RTE feels might be a bit too edgy to the online RTE Player to which younger viewers will have easy access? RTE 1 and Radio 1 look and sound more and more like programming for the elderly - broadcasting for people who never tinker with the dial on their radio and rarely check the menu on the digital TV.

TV and radio, which are still young media, now look more like libraries (or in the case of sport, bookshops) with channels devoted to programmes to suit the most esoteric of tastes. It would be best for RTE to give up trying to be anything like BBC 1 or ITV and concentrate on being a high quality niche broadcaster aimed specifically at the Irish consumer.  RTE was heralded in the 1960s as a ‘window on the world’ for Irish people. As there are now a thousand windows through which we can look at the world, that role is now redundant and RTE would be better off providing a window on the country in which it is made for the people who pay its license fee.