Niall Cogley is series producer of The Premiership, a new soccer programme on Network 2 on Saturday evenings, head to head with the BBC's long-running Match of the Day.
We would have quite a different agenda to the BBC. For one, our commentary would be more straight-up, we'd have a more dispassionate view, and we target our audience differently. We won't pretend things didn't happen - if it's a crap game we'll say so. The studio panel, Eamon Dunphy and Johnny Giles, look at the main matches live as they are sent over from England and put their commentary together independently of the editing team.
Irish audiences want to be treated differently. They obviously have more interest in the Irish players on the team, for instance. We've gone head to head with the BBC on other occasions, such as the World Cup, and beaten them three to one, so we expect to do well. I get in on a Saturday morning at about 10.30 a.m. I spend the first few hours checking schedules for the various participants. We've a team of about 30 working on this programme. My day ends 10 hours later, so it's very long and gruelling. But this is our hobby - lots of people would give their right arms to do it.
It can be quite stressful, but that's only when things start to go wrong. Otherwise, it's very demanding, but it's more of a buzz. We only got the rights to the pictures a couple of weeks before we went on air. With something like the World Cup we had about three months to prepare, so we didn't get as big a run up to The Premiership as we would have liked, but so far it's gone more or less according to plan.
Anyway, on Saturday, every match in the Premiership is filmed, but only three of them are shot with multi-camera set-ups. The BBC chooses those three matches and sells us the footage, which is fine because, unlike Sky or UTV, the BBC doesn't have a market here. We're free to decide which one of those matches we want to feature most prominently, and we also edit each match ourselves to highlight aspects which we would consider important - from 90 minutes down to roughly 20 minutes each. The whole thing is quite complicated. We send over our own commentators on the Friday evening to set up interviews, with an emphasis on Irish participants. Then on Saturday we get the commentary over on a land line and the pictures over by satellite, and the whole lot has to be synchronised. We also have our own graphics to edit in so that it all looks suitably sophisticated.
I tend to spend the day floating around making sure everyone is doing what they're meant to be doing. There is such an amount of people and technical equipment involved. As the weeks progress we'll be able to think more about keeping it interesting; right now it's all about keeping it error-free!
We only get our studio in RTE after 8 p.m., two hours before we go live. We've quite a big lighting rig and very little time to rig the whole set, so that can be stressful. When the programme ends at 11.45 p.m. our minds are racing. We meet to talk about how it went and what we need to sort out. It takes a while to wind down; you can't turn yourself off like a tap, so, no - I wouldn't say I was in bed and asleep by midnight every Saturday.
In conversation with Jackie Bourke
