Harry Wild: If RTÉ made guff like this, we’d mock it. So why is it OK to buy it?

At the time, 1978, RTÉ wasn’t exactly known for large-scale drama productions. The Burke Enigma was undeniably large-scale: five episodes totalling six hours, shot on film rather than videotape, and starring Ray McAnally and John Kavanagh as a pair of detectives dedicated to bringing down a Dublin crime family — prescient, no?

Written by Michael Feeney Callan, who went on to work on numerous hit series in the UK, including Shoestring and The Professionals, it was RTÉ’s first ever crime drama.

Strangely, unlike Strumpet City, an even more ambitious RTÉ series that came along two years later, The Burke Enigma has left virtually no imprint.

The master copy of the series is presumably gathering dust somewhere in the bowels of RTÉ, yet it’s never been restored and released on DVD. The only reminder of it on the RTÉ archive website is a few low-quality black-and-white photos, while its IMDB page is about as bare-bones as it gets.

The Burke Enigma was a huge deal at the time. It was a lean period for Ireland, which was stuck in one of its recurring periods of poverty, and for Irish television. RTÉ had never made anything like this before, and it would be a long time — three decades, give or take — before it made anything like it again.

It’s perhaps understandable that, back then, a national broadcaster lacking the funds necessary to regularly compete on an equal footing with the BBC and ITV — which by the end of the 1950s were available to 60pc of the population — would eagerly grab anything with a vaguely Irish connection it could get its hands on.

St Patrick’s Day, for instance, invariably meant RTÉ would screen an Irish film or two, even if the definition of what constituted “Irish” was extremely flexible.

A firm afternoon favourite with the RTÉ schedulers was The Quiet Man. Depending on personal opinion, The Quiet Man is either a charming piece of Technicolor whimsy that boosted the country as a tourist destination, or an endless parade of Paddywhackery that leaves no stereotype unturned and qualifies as one of John Ford’s worst films (I know which side of the field my spuds are planted).

If it wasn’t The Quiet Man, it was Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People, which admittedly really is a charming piece of Technicolor whimsy.

The evening might bring something more adult-themed, such as David Lean’s monumentally tedious Ryan’s Daughter, which took a whole year to film and feels like it takes a whole year to watch, or — lord preserve us — Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the risible Far and Away.

The backdrop to all of these might be Ireland, but the product is pure, unadulterated Hollywood phoniness.

It didn’t stop at “Irish” films that were about as truly Irish as a pretzel; the faintest whiff of the Oul’ Sod emanating from some mediocre American TV series used to be enough for RTÉ to snap it up.

To wit, faith-based 1990s series Touched by an Angel, which starred Irish actress Roma Downey. The national broadcaster seemed to think the more presence of Downey — now America’s most powerful purveyor of the kind of conservative Christian TV that appeals to the Trump base — was enough to justify showing this ghastly tripe at teatime on Sundays.

Harry Wild - Official Season 2 Trailer

I’d assumed RTÉ had grown up and out of this old bad habit years ago, until along came the dreadful Harry Wild (RTÉ1, Wednesdays), which returned for a second season last week.

If you haven’t seen Harry Wild (lucky you), it stars Jane Seymour as an annoying English former literature professor who lives in Dublin and livens up her retirement by solving murders.

It’s basically Murder, She Wrote for the 21st century, with a few mild swear words and more blood than Jessica Fletcher was used to. It’s set in a theme park version of Dublin where the sun is always shining and even the gurriers have hearts of gold.

Harry Wild is made by British-American outfit Acorn TV and aimed squarely at US viewers, who are lapping it up (it’s in its third season over there). If RTÉ made something this awful, it would be ridiculed. So what makes it OK to spend our licence fee to buy it in?