Missing child drama The Boy That Never Was, GAA series Hell for Leather and new RTÉ Player sitcom Good Boy are among the shows destined for RTÉ screens as it bids to woo audiences amid a “saturated” media landscape.
U2’s Adam Clayton will explore the impact of Irish showbands in Ballroom Blitz; Angela Scanlon will narrate Anorexia, My Family and Me; Imelda May and guests will revive lesser known Irish folk songs in An Leabhar Nótaí; and Blindboy will offer his take on early Irish Christianity in Blindboy: The Land of Slaves and Scholars as part of the upcoming season.
RTÉ will also launch Clarity, a new cross-platform content strand aimed at countering disinformation and demystifying complex issues in the news.
RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst said the broadcaster was offering a range of programmes that had “at the heart of it” the kind of public service content “that no one else is doing”.
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Alongside Hell for Leather – a four-part study of “the complicated history and evolution” of Gaelic football from the makers of The Game – its factual slate includes documentaries about businessmen Michael Smurfit and the late Ben Dunne, plus On the Beat, a series following frontline gardaí.
Its natural history line-up is led by the three-part Ireland’s Coast, narrated by Oscar nominee Ciarán Hinds, which is based on the book the Coastal Atlas of Ireland.
Other arts programming includes Creedon’s Musical Atlas of Ireland, in which John Creedon traces how music has shaped Irish culture. Mr Bakhurst said he was “impatient for it to be on”, having seen part of the show in the edit suite during a visit to RTÉ’s Cork studio.
The RTÉ boss said the organisation “shouldn’t just be chasing ratings” in its commissioning decisions. “We should be doing important genres like music and arts and culture, which doesn’t necessarily drive huge audiences but is part of our remit.”
RTÉ’s new multiyear funding agreement with the Government, which guarantees it public financing of €725 million over three years, would help it achieve a “balance” of returning favourites and riskier new programmes, he said.
Securing the multiyear deal would also allow RTÉ to pursue its strategy of almost doubling its post-watershed drama output to 60 hours a year, Mr Bakhurst added.
“Now that we have that, we can actually green light quite a few of the projects that were sitting there waiting to know if we had the money to make them.”
On the scripted side of the schedule, The Boy That Never Was, a four-part drama due to begin on RTÉ One this Sunday, will be joined this autumn by a second series of Ireland-New Zealand crime co-production The Gone.
Good Boy, which stars comedian Tony Cantwell as a man on a quest for an ADHD diagnosis, is billed as a “Player Original” and has no linear channel air date at present, reflecting the industry’s shift to streaming.
“Comedy is a very tricky genre, not just for us,” said Mr Bakhurst. “Most commercial broadcasters have pulled out of it, because it’s too hit and miss, and it’s expensive as well. But this should be part of our offering to audiences and having the guaranteed level of funding over the next number of years helps us take these risks.”
Sketch show No Worries If Not! is back for a second run, as is Baz Ashmawy’s quizshow The Money List, while new entertainment series To Hell & Back will see former special forces soldier Ray Goggins take Irish celebrities “on extreme outdoor adventures in some of the most inhospitable, hostile environments on the planet”.
Mr Bakhurst said he was “satisfied” that appropriate duty-of-care safeguards were in place for Dancing with the Stars as well as shows in which the public participate.
“We’ve had a number of conversations about it over the year, but particularly in light of the issues with Strictly Come Dancing in the UK. Look, I’m very satisfied, [executive producer] Larry Bass and [production company] Shinawil are very professional,” he said.
The decision to axe Operation Transformation, the weight-loss programme that had been a January schedule staple since 2008, “wasn’t straightforward”, he added, as it had still been attracting “good audiences”.
“But I think in the end sometimes you need to try to do something new and something different to refresh the schedule.”
RTÉ is understood to be planning an Irish version of The Traitors developed by Ireland’s Fittest Family makers Kite Entertainment.
Mr Bakhurst declined to confirm whether the series would go ahead, but he noted that the Dutch format was “much better with ordinary people”, rather than celebrity participants as is the case in the US.
He said the RTÉ board, which must approve projects that cost more than €1 million, had recently signed off on an unnamed new drama as well as multiyear contracts for Room to Improve and Ear to the Ground.
RTÉ stressed that its schedule had been made “in collaboration with Ireland’s independent production sector”, while Mr Bakhurst has proposed that in-house shows Fair City and The Late Late Show could be made by independent companies in future.
“While we’ll be moving some more programming to the independent sector, an awful lot, as you can see from this slate, already comes from some fantastic independent companies.”
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