WHEN John Bowman welcomes viewers to Questions and Answers on Monday night it will be an important landmark in Irish television history.
It's now 10 years since Olivia O'Leary chaired the first edition, with guests Alan Dukes, Brian Lenihan, Kevin Myers and Inez McCormack discussing the issues of the day. Some aspects of the political situation of that time seem very familiar and, for some critics, the programme has hardly changed either, with the same old parade of over familiar faces.
For politicians, though, Questions and Answers has become the most important programme on television, and has given several young Turks the opportunity to make their first impact on the national imagination.
Over the years, the panels and audiences have also reflected the slow but steady increase in the number of women in public life.
The simple format, at its best, can produce good, gladiatorial television, with Bowman, who has been in the chair since 1988, acting as a stoical, well informed ringmaster. He may not have the same emotional empathy with the audience as Olivia O'Leary, but his rigorous intelligence and depth of knowledge stand him in good stead.
"Certain politicians have a tendency to make things up as they go along," says one colleague. "You do that at your peril with John. He can be a bit of a pedant at times, and he has to battle to pull himself back from being on a different intellectual plane from the panel and audience."
Despite accusations of predictability, the programme can sometimes make for riveting television, and continues to claim the scalps of the unwary, as Rory O'Hanlon of the No Divorce Campaign and Sinn Fein's Pat Doherty discovered in the last 12 months.
John Bowman lives on Pembroke Lane in Dublin just around the corner from where he was born and reared. He went to school at Belvedere College and, while studying economics, history and English at Trinity he began freelancing for RTE. He was working regularly at the station by the time he decided to transfer to a history and political science degree graduating in 1971.
His first television appearance, in 1969, was in Right to Reply, reporting on reactions to RTE's own programmes. This fascination with the Irish media has continued to the present day. He regularly and conscientiously tapes each morning's news and current affairs programmes on Radio 1.
While continuing to work in RTE and raising a young family during the 1970s, he was preparing his doctoral thesis De Valera and the Ulster Question, 1917-1973, which was published in 1982 by the Oxford University Press and has been reprinted several times since.
His media profile was at its highest during the 1980s, when he presented the daily radio programme Day by Day, as well as regularly appearing on Today Tonight. When Day by Day was wound up in 1988, and Today Tonight was reduced from four to two programmes per week, he took over from O'Leary on Questions and Answers.
According to some colleagues, he keenly felt the move as a demotion. It's a tribute to Bowman's handling of Questions and Answers that, 10 years on, the programme is regarded by many as the most important current affairs programme in the television schedules.
Since 1991, his producer has been Betty Purcell. Bowman is said to have a conservative instinct when it comes to choosing the panel while Purcell would try to push the boundaries more".
He has a staff position with RTE as a radio producer, and also presents the archive/history programme Bowman: Saturday Eight Thirty on Radio 1, but doesn't have a desk in Montrose, preferring to work entirely from home.
Not by any means a hail fellow well met type, he doesn't socialise within RTE, although a colleague insists this is not due to snobbery: "I wouldn't say he's shy, but he's definitely not a pub person. He's intensely close to Eimer and his family."
His wife, a psychiatrist, also works from the family home for much of the time, and two of their four children are still at school. In recent years, his eldest son, Jonathan Philbin Bowman, has made a name as a journalist and broadcaster.
While Jonathan's precociously brattish public persona seems light years away from the reserve and privacy of his father, John is described as being "always extraordinarily supportive" of him.
He has been president of the Irish Association for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations, and has lectured on history and politics in Ireland and abroad, as well as regularly chairing debates and conferences.
He could just as easily be a professor of history as a broadcaster, but would regard broadcasting as his career.
"I am fascinated by politics," he said in 1983. "I think I have a marvellous job."
