Imagine you have to stay in next Friday night — no date, no tickets for Damien Dempsey — and your only source of entertainment is the telly. Worse still, you’re a Saorview customer, restricted to Irish TV channels.
Heart sinking, you study the listings for July 21. At 7.30pm on RTE 1 there’s a repeat of The Taste of Success, followed by EastEnders, then a repeat of an episode of the Fleadh Cheoil series.
After the news there’s a repeat of The Nathan Carter Show, and at 10.30pm a repeat of a documentary about singer Joe Dolan. Finally, at 11.35pm, there’s Breakfast on Pluto, a film lasting two hours and 15 minutes, which you’ve seen before.
Anything on RTE2? A repeat of an episode of a bought-in series on the Atlantic, followed by 70 minutes of MasterChef: The Professionals, a BBC show, and then an undistinguished movie, The Counsellor.
That’s followed by Shameless, a word that could reasonably be applied to whatever RTE scheduler decided this line-up constituted an evening’s entertainment, let alone fair value for the €160 licence fee.
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If you think next Friday is atypical, run your finger down the schedule for tomorrow night. At 7.30pm on RTE1 they start to repeat Polaitiocht: Power on the Box. That’s followed by EastEnders, a repeat of an episode of Ear to the Ground, and another movie after the news. Over on RTE2 there’s the usual combination of The Simpsons, Home and Away, The Big Bang Theory and another large serving of MasterChef.
TV3 is just as bereft of original Irish content, but it doesn’t benefit from the licence fee, and from Monday to Thursday right through the summer it provides one hour of current affairs in the guise of Tonight with Vincent Browne.
RTE’s Prime Time, by contrast, is broadcast only once a week during the summer. Prime Time has an editor, two presenters, a political correspondent, six reporters, two researchers, six full-time producers and a part-time producer. Forty minutes’ output a week seems modest for such a well-resourced programme.
If it comes to that, what on earth are RTE’s 1,978 staff doing all summer while these repeats are being trotted out? Much of the original Irish content is not even made in-house. Francis Brennan’s Grand Tour, a summer highlight, is made by Waddell Media; U2 Agus an Arc, to be shown by RTE on Thursday, is from Forefront, which made Fleadh Cheoil.
Some recent programmes were imported AND repeated. How to Defuse a Bomb, a documentary shown on RTE1 last Monday, was first broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland last December.
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Déjà vu also characterises much of the output of TG4, another station heavily subsidised by the public. Today, for example, it will show repeats of Sé mo Laoch and Geantraí back to back. The station’s schedule is currently propped up by coverage of the Tour de France and rubbish films. Between 5pm and 12.15am on yesterday’s TG4 schedule, for example, there were seven repeats, a news bulletin, a Tour de France report and a romcom.
Never urgent, the need for TV stations to show repeats has been removed by catch-up services such as the RTE Player, and built-in digital video recorders such as Sky+. We realise that TV viewership declines between June and August, but Irish channels are losing thousands of viewers to Netflix and can ill afford to spend an entire summer on the beach.