Up until then, the station had struggled to produce programmes people actually wanted to watch. The cheap-and-cheerful format of Ireland AM made breakfast a bland, three-hour ordeal. Agenda, fronted by David McWilliams, showed potential — but was relegated to a Sunday slot.
The dilemma was straightforward: in television, you need to spend money, but CanWest, TV3’s biggest shareholder, wanted to spend as little as possible. Instead, it grudgingly limped along with a licence-fulfilling news service, hoping to build a market for third-rate Americana.
TV3’s managing director, Rick Hetherington, alternated between denouncing the licence fee as anti-competitive and demanding a share of it. RTE, not CanWest’s reluctance to invest, was apparently to blame for TV3’s inability to make hit domestic programming.
Then a fairy godmother materialised in the shape of ITV. Following a huge buy-in, Coronation Street magically moved from Montrose to Tallaght, and with British ratings-boosters such as Ant and Dec, Emmerdale and Heartbeat exclusively on tap, the future seemed rosy. To demonstrate TV3 cared about Irish talent, Eamon Dunphy, long used to acting the fig-leaf at Today FM, was brought on board.
But TV3 management was so unaccustomed to making its own high-grade material that The Dunphy Show was greenlit with two flaws. The first and most obvious was the unjustifiable decision to pitch it against The Late Late Show. The second was the completely outsourced nature of the production — rather than invest in its own staff and facilities, TV3 bet everything on an unproven contractor. The real story behind the show’s premature demise hinged more on ITV’s displeasure with its style than anything else. To this day, it tantalises to wonder what Dunphy could have achieved with a more thoughtful format in an appropriate slot.
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Now CanWest, debt-plagued by spending billions elsewhere, wants out of TV3. Worse still, management finds itself in the paradoxical position of suing the fairy godmother — events in the UK forced ITV onto the Sky Digital platform, and TV3’s exclusive access vanished overnight.
ITV isn’t rushing to buy CanWest out — it already owns anything worth having. Denis O’Brien, UTV and Setanta have all been mooted as possible saviours, but the lesson has to be that without a valuable element of home-grown product, TV3 will always be at the abject mercy of the international market.
Any potential suitor could begin by studying CanWest’s other TV3 in New Zealand. In among all the recognisable shows is a strong element of primetime current affairs and indigenous drama. Why wasn’t the same philosophy applied here? The biggest irony of all is that TV3 Ireland has made RTE, and the licence fee, look completely indispensable.