The scourging of Montrose is well under way and set to continue for the next few years. If the downsizing plan of its director general, Kevin Bakhurst, is fully implemented, RTÉ will shed 40 or 50 jobs a year over the next four years or so. Budgets will be shaved and in-house productions outsourced to the independent sector. None of this needs to be existential for RTÉ, but it might feel that way if you’re working there and facing the prospect of year after year of downwards pressure.
If the whole process is to yield any positive results, the national broadcaster will need to do a lot more than just salami-slice its existing offering. It will have to cease doing certain things so that it can do the remaining things better. It will need to innovate in ways it has failed to do in the past. Counterintuitively for an organisation cutting jobs and budgets, it will also need to take more risks.
What are the chances of that happening?
The Tommy Tiernan Show and The Cutting Edge felt authentically Irish and stylistically contemporary without straining to be either. Both took their creative cues from improvisational comedy without going in search of belly laughs
Bakhurst and his new management team should be honest with themselves about the fact that, despite claims to the contrary in innumerable self-promoting ad campaigns, much of RTÉ’s programming is mediocre and unloved. Montrose has too often been a cold house for creativity, wedded to tired formats and slow to develop new talent. Generations of Irish writers, performers and film-makers have achieved national and international success with little help from their own national public-service broadcaster. That represents a failure by RTÉ to fulfil what in theory is part of its remit: to act as a springboard and showcase for artistic talent. It’s also a decades-long missed opportunity that should be a cause for embarrassment and reflection as the broadcaster struggles to redefine its purpose.
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Historically, any eruption of the anarchic, the disruptive or the truly original at RTÉ too often seemed to happen in spite of rather than because of management. When such programmes did break through, they were often slowly strangled thereafter.
In addition to reflecting on its failures, though, it would be worth RTÉ’s while to look at its successes.
Last Saturday The Tommy Tiernan Show returned for a new series. If you were asked to devise a format for a prime-time weekend entertainment slot, it’s unlikely you’d come up with this. The premise is simple, the production values Spartan (even more so following the welcome decision to dispense with its studio audience): Tiernan is presented with three guests without any advance warning, and talks to each for about 15 minutes. That’s it. No whooping audience. No stupid competitions. Sometimes he turns out to have met his guests previously, sometimes he doesn’t. Some are famous. Most aren’t. Each episode concludes with a slightly leftfield music performance. (It was a spot of Mongolian throat-singing last week.) It’s Saturday-night prime time, but not as we used to know it.
For years RTÉ filled that slot with pallid imitations of The Late Late Show, its Friday-night flagship. Pat Kenny and Ryan Tubridy laboured in those thankless fields for years before ascending to the Late Late throne. Brendan O’Connor and Ray D’Arcy followed later, but the personnel was largely irrelevant. The shows were bland porridge at best, unwatchable embarrassments at worst. As broadcasters across the world were cutting back on prime-time chat of the old-school variety, RTÉ went on banging its head against that wall, doubling down during the summer months with yet more variations on the same hoary old genre. The obtuseness of the approach made you wonder whether anyone was actually thinking strategically about the winds of change blowing through television.
The premise seemed to be that Irish people enjoy chat (true). And therefore that Irish people want chatshows (not proven).
Something interesting happened about seven years ago with the launch of two new programmes, both independently produced. One was The Cutting Edge, a sort of current affairs discussion programme hosted by Brendan O’Connor with a more varied mix of guests than the usual roster in the Montrose green room, enlivened with a dash of acidic humour and zippy production values. The other was Tommy Tiernan’s show. The Cutting Edge, sadly, got the chop after a couple of seasons. Tiernan migrated in 2019 from midweek to Saturdays, where he has become an embedded institution. Both shows felt authentically Irish and stylistically contemporary without straining to be either. Both took their creative cues from improvisational comedy without going in search of belly laughs.
How did these shows originally get pitched and commissioned? Why did The Cutting Edge get cancelled? What can be learned from those experiences, and from seven years of Tommy Tiernan Shows? At a time of despondency, RTÉ might be well advised to learn from its own successes.
