Is there a more amenable presence on the airwaves than John Creedon? The Cork presenter is a human chill-out room – RTÉ's very own stress ball. With just a few minutes in his company, you can feel your anxieties drift away.
His superhuman levels of avuncularity are front and centre of his agreeable new series, Creedon’s Musical Atlas of Ireland (Sunday, RTÉ One, 6.30pm). It tackles the hefty subject of Ireland’s relationship with music, but Creedon never comes across as self-important and does not slip into the po-facedness often a feature of arts coverage on television. He’s a fan, not an expert, and his affable curiosity is hugely appealing.
If there’s a downside to his presenting style, it is that it’s largely fuelled by banter and amiability. This is a shaggy dog ramble around Ireland rather than a definitive chronicling of our musical history. You’re hanging out with John Creedon rather than receiving a crash course in the country’s music heritage.
For that reason, it has a slightly making-it-up-as-you-go quality. Creedon starts in Galway, where Simon O’Dwyer of Ancient Music Ireland leads a procession of musicians playing distinctive iron-age trumpets that coil menacingly in the air like huge metallic serpents. An American tourist thinks they’re “a religious or military band calling locals to gather and protect Galway”. One pictures a Helm’s Deep-style stand-off, with the defenders mounting a last stand at Supermac’s on Eyre Square.
Then it’s off to the Dingle Peninsula, where musical folklorist Billy Mag Fhloinn toots a fearsome-looking metal side-blown horn that sounds like something from the Assassins’ Creed video game. Creedon’s travels also take him to west Cork’s Ballyvourney Gaeltacht, where sean-nós signer Iarla Ó Lionáird talks about the cultural cringe that historically impacted our attitudes to traditional music.
Ó Lionáird recalls going to college in Dublin and locals reacting with bafflement to his passion for ancient Irish music. “I had a self-identity as a sean-nós singer,” he recalls. “I got tired of explaining.”
But times have changed, and younger traditional musicians feel no embarrassment about Irish music, he says. “They don’t have the fear of criticism we might have had when trying to imagine new pathways for a very old tradition.”
Creedon next attends a session featuring Sharon Shannon on button accordion and fiddle player Martin Hayes, who explains the difference between formal concerts and the traditional “seisiún”.
“In the session, we are communicating with each other,” he says. The host also natters with Mike Scott of The Waterboys, a Scotsman whose landmark album, Fisherman’s Blues, is a valentine to Irish traditional music. “It’s the land of my soul,” says Scott of Ireland. “This is where I’m meant to be”.
Scott is passionate about Irish music – as are the other contributors. Creedon, for his part, brings a satisfying chipperness. His new series is more ramble than deep dive. Yet while Creedon’s Musical Map of Ireland is a bit all over the place, it nonetheless makes for wonderfully cosy viewing. RTÉ gets some things wrong, but this is top-drawer comfort telly.
