The national broadcaster rehashes its greatest hits, but the tightening of the purse strings comes at a cost to the viewer
They tell a story. More often than not during those years, the festive Guide came with a flashy gatefold cover featuring either a photoshoot or a specially commissioned cartoon illustration depicting the national broadcaster’s so-called big names – Ryan Tubridy, Miriam O’Callaghan, Marty Morrissey, Jennifer Zamparelli et al – cavorting in various Christmas scenes.
In a way, these personality-heavy covers were a perfect illustration of the hubris, self-satisfaction, arrogance, complacency and tone deafness that would eventually lead, via revelations of undeclared payments, barter accounts, borrowed cars, absurdly overpriced flip-flops, obscenely large exit payments to senior executives, outrageous spending on entertaining corporate clients and a loss of €2.2m of public money on the catastrophic Toy Show musical, to RTÉ’s current reduced status.
The chastened, humbled RTÉ that emerged from the wreckage, a place of presenter salary caps, lower expectations and, in what counts as bad news for viewers as well as independent production companies, a severely curtailed commissioning budget, seemed to be reflected in the Guide’s Christmas cover for 2024.
It was a modest, charming illustration of children in front of a toy shop by artist Shannon Bergin. There was nary a grinning TV or radio face to be seen among the stuffed toys in the shop window.
Unfortunately, modesty of ambition is the hallmark of RTÉ’s new slate of programmes for the winter, unveiled last week.
Despite being hailed in the broadcaster’s publicity bumph as “a fresh start for 2025 with new faces”, the winter schedule looks stale, while the “faces” fronting the many returning series couldn’t be any more familiar if you had them recreate the famous poster for The Usual Suspects.
Perhaps someone should consider doing that for a future RTÉ Guide cover.
The big innovation is nothing more than a slight reshuffling of the weekend line-up on RTÉ1. Ireland’s Fittest Family, whose latest season was delayed due to a contestant’s death, has been moved from teatime Sunday to teatime Saturday.
The fourth season of The Young Offenders finally gets an airing, several weeks after being unceremoniously dumped on to the RTÉ Player and eight months after BBC1 showed it – a delay apparently caused by RTÉ’s need to spread its finances thinly.
Another Saturday night returnee is The Tommy Tiernan Show, now on its ninth season. Inevitably for something that’s been around that long, its novelty has faded.
What was once a daring, unconventional and risky format has morphed into a cosy element of the chat show genre it once subverted. The unpredictability has become predictable.
The big innovation is nothing more than a slight reshuffling of the weekend line-up on RTÉ1
Sundays are the same old business as usual: Dancing with the Stars, Room to Improve – although last Sunday’s opener, featuring a participant who held firm against Dermot Bannon’s suggestions, to his visible irritation, at least provided a rare flash of friction – and The Meaning of Life.
All are solid draws for those who like this sort of thing and bring in plenty of viewers and advertising revenue for the national broadcaster. But where is the much-trumpeted freshness?
It’s certainly not to be found in the rest of the returning series, which include First Dates, High Road, Low Road (to be fair, one of the more palatable RTÉ travel shows), and the triple property porn whammy of The Great House Revival, Home of the Year (both with Hugh Wallace) and Cheap European Homes.
The dedicated documentary slot on Mondays got off to a good start this week with the two-part Michael Lynn: The Fugitive, about the long quest to bring the fraudster to justice, yet you have to question the wisdom and value of an upcoming two-part profile of gangland figure-turned-election candidate Gerry Hutch.
There’s also a raft of Irish-language series, but shouldn’t these be the preserve of TG4, which was set up to meet that demand?
It looks like we’re in for a long winter notable only for its lack of anything notable.
