Colm O'Regan: Forget mindfulness, searching Saorview can help your mood

An anniversary slipped by this year while we were all distracted. The 10th anniversary of Saorview being switched on on May 26, 2011.

You might remember Miriam O’Callaghan doing a big switch with a computer mouse in October 2012, but that was the switch off. No, 10 years ago this summer we were in the throes of financial meltdown but also wall-to-wall Saorview Warning advertising, the SEPA and GDPR of its day. Rabbits ears up and down the country were being thrown out. Coax-cable holes were drilled into old cottages to make sure there was no interruption in supply of Coronation Street. Forget ‘green retrofit’ or vaccination programmes, Saorview was the Big Deal.

It’s sort of been overtaken in recent years by Netflix and ‘on demand’ but every so often I’m back to a Saorview-only house and I have to say: It’s a break I needed.

First of all, normal telly is really good for children. They just learn that sometimes things are not available. “I want Vampirina,” says the youngest. “You’ll have to watch whatever’s on,” I tell her, not a little smugly. After a bit of objecting they just happily sat down to watch Whatever Is On.
They learn about the ephemeral nature of time.

“PAUSE!” shouted the youngest when she needed to go to the toilet. “No” said her sister, “this is your only chance to watch it. When it’s over that’s it. They’re not going to play it again.” Toilet needs won out but we all learned a lesson that not everything can be storied endlessly in the Cloud, needing to be cooled in data centres that burn the planet.

(Speaking of which, when the robots take over, we might be glad that un-Internety things like Saorview still exist, ready to broadcast messages to the resistance. Or at the very least old episodes of Tipping Point.)

By comparison with Internet Telly, there is less choice, but by the standards of 1980s, there is plenty. I’m a member of a Facebook group which shows old TV schedules from the 70s and 80s and it reminds me there was so little on. We had a programme called Closedown which was just a short programme telling the country the telly was being switched off and to go to bed.

There are moments when it dips of course. But that’s life. At some point in the afternoon, it’ll be the cooking on Maura and Dáithí, Small Children Petting A Lamb on RTÉ 2 /RTÉ Junior, The Chase/Tipping Point on the three TV3s, a bit of Tour De France or Leanbh Ag Peatáil Uan on TG4. Then you wander up to the RTÉ+1 to see an earlier bit of Maura and Dáithí and onwards to Number 22 to the strange world of Oireachtas TV to see a man shouting in an empty room. A bit of performance art not unlike the plays that’d be on telly 40 years ago. (No disrespect to any of these. You just mightn’t be in the mood.)

Eventually you get to the radio. Radio on the telly is brilliant. It’s a halfway point for people who aren’t quite ready to turn the television off that day but still want to hear John Creedon play righteous Jamaican Ska followed by A Brilliant Cork Band That Should Have Been Huge on a balmy July evening.

But … get this. If you’ve found there is nothing on. There is a peace. You’re not missing anything. You have checked. Now you can get on with other things. I’m telling you. FORGET MINDFULNESS. Saorview is a tool that can genuinely help your mood.

It should be in tourist brochures next to yurts, sunsets and black pudding served on a roof tile. The Saorview Logo and a motto for life: Watch Whatever’s On.