RTÉ television was a catalyst for change in the development of modern Ireland
The second most even-tempered man in show business gets remarkably touchy about the early, the formative, the seminal days of Montrose.
He says that all sorts of chancers from overseas pitched up in Donnybrook in those days, claiming to have been controllers of programmes and producers of foreign TV stations when, in fact, they were janitors in those stations. Those chancers, he said last week, got prestigious, powerful and financially rewarding jobs in the new TV station, and once safely in those cushy posts, set out to prevent guys like him succeeding at home, forcing them instead, to knock on the door of the BBC.
The first most even-tempered man in showbusiness, Bunny Carr, had a different experience in the early days of RTÉ. He was one of the voices used over the short ads that happened at the end of each commercial break, when a slide would sit on screen while a reader exhorted viewers to buy the product pictured. Bunny says he spent night after night urging viewers to buy Belinda baby pants. Belinda baby pants kept him inside the tent while he peppered the powers-that-were with proposals for programmes starring himself. Seventy-three proposals. That’s right. Before one of The Suits eventually accepted an idea for a show called Teen Talk, the wannabe broadcaster submitted 73 other proposals which went nowhere. Well, no, that’s not quite true. Make that 72 because one of his ideas, he maintains, got nicked — turning up on screen as Jackpot, a quiz presented by Terry Wogan. When Carr pointed out to the relevant commissioning editor the uncanny resemblance between his proposal and the televised show, he was laughed at, and grimly joined in the laughter, because getting shirty would have landed him back in Belinda baby pants for the foreseeable future.
Jackpot and Belinda baby pants are equally mysterious to me, because my parents never bought into this new TV idea. The arrival of Teilifís Éireann, with its St Brigid’s Cross, may have meant less snowy pictures, but that would not, they believed, have justified buying something that rotted your brain, your finances, capacity for conversation and music-making, and interfered with homework. So we didn’t have a set. Which gave me an odd insight into what the arrival of Irish television meant, 50 years ago.
It meant Mr Ed. On the school bus, in the morning, the week before the station went on the air, the conversation could have been about anything. It could have been about nuns. (They taught us and ruled our lives and hem lengths.) It could have been about our families. About food. Homework. Bunty or Judy (the regnant comics).
On the school bus, in the morning, five weeks later, all had changed. Now, the conversation was about Mr Ed. When I asked who was Mr Ed, all my classmates would make the same face, their jaw twisting to the left and their upper lip curling. You wouldn’t believe it was possible for so many people to simultaneously become so frighteningly ugly. This was because Mr Ed was a horse possessed of the capacity to twist its lip. Big deal, I hear you say. But if you say “big deal”, you wouldn’t have made it as a TV entrepreneur back then, because someone made trillions out of dubbing a male voice so it roughly matched the lip movement of the horse. It thereby created a talking horse (if you were a TV watcher who was infinitely credulous while having no life) and a massive worldwide hit which still, I fear, runs in slack hours of TV and certainly figures on YouTube. That Mr Ed was ever broadcast was a crime against nature, and getting it secondhand through the mimicry on the school bus, as I did, was arguably worse than getting it firsthand.
The 50th anniversary has already thrown up a lot of the best and worst memories viewers recall from the decades of RTÉ. But that is to consider RTÉ television as a medium or aspect of media, rather than as a catalyst for change. While increased affluence and improved education, both of which coincided with the early decades of home-grown television, always tend to reduce repression — the fact is that at the heart of the confluence of factors which created modern Ireland was television, and the new sense of communicative freedom live television offered.
You could say what you wanted to say, and the more it enraged people, the more likely you were to appear regularly. But of even more importance was the profound shift in perceptual positioning provided by the TV cameras. Once upon a time in radio, broadcasters knew their place. Broadcasters knowing their place was a concept that died quickly, once we had our own television network. It died quickly, but not easily. It’s instructive to read in historian Robert J Savage’s examination of the impact of television on Irish society between 1960 and 1972 — entitled A Loss of Innocence? — of how the mild Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, responded to a request from Gay Byrne to meet him to discuss bringing Government ministers on to The Late Late Show. Byrne had apparently approached a clutch of ministers, including Charles Haughey, George Colley and Des O’Malley with a view to their guesting on the programme, and, Savage notes, “at least one of them [Mr O’Malley] would be willing to participate if he had the Taoiseach’s approval”.
He didn’t. With bells on, he didn’t have the Taoiseach’s approval. Lynch refused to meet Gay Byrne, on the basis provision already existed for political discussion and he saw no reason for ministers to go on The Late Late. At a later cabinet meeting, Erskine Childers, the cabinet minister in charge of the portfolio which included television, “reported that Byrne had been dealt with... [and] severely censured”.
IF he was severely censured, it has to have been the least effective censure in history. Not because Byrne had a vision of change for Ireland. He was personally conservative. But what was more important than either the censure or his personal values, was that Gay Byrne personified an idea whose time had come. That idea was that the deference which amounted to self-censorship had no place in the televisual world. From now on, no question would be un-askable, no topic untouchable.
On the face of it, those who gained most from television were those who — like the Radharc priests — copped on early to the potential of the new medium, and mastered the relevant skills, while those who lost were the politicians who tried to control the uncontrollable and return it to the quaint original role seen for it as an instrument of Government policy.
Except that television is a constantly changing medium, and, while politicians learned and changed with it, Radharc died and the Catholic Church lost its place and its power in, and through, television.
