Sir, – Diarmaid Ferriter's recollection of my conversations with him some years ago ("I recall a commissioning editor in RTÉ telling me what was required in history documentaries were 'broadsheet thoughts in tabloid headlines') is generous in that he remembers the remarks at all ("Representation of the Rising – Projecting drama into the past", Opinion & Analysis, February 20th). But I think that even within a typically thoughtful and engaging article, he has got it slightly wrong.
In discussing with him some plans for TV projects, I had made the point that my move from a decade of newspaper journalism into television documentary production and scripting had taught me that the language of an effective television script – complementing pictures and sound, as it must do, rather than standing alone – had to be terse, lean and stripped back in order to be effective. You write in sentences rather than paragraphs, and don’t string out clauses, or elaborate phrases, without risking losing the viewer. Patient readers may choose to reread a dense or challenging paragraph; they won’t thank you if they have to rewind your documentary to absorb what you should have expressed clearly in the first instance.
So the style and feel of a good documentary script may necessarily be closer to tabloid journalism. My point to Diarmaid was that nevertheless the broadcaster and producer should aim high in content and intellectual terms, respecting the viewer and setting up a constructive tension between simple language and strong ideas and argument. So “broadsheet thoughts in tabloid language” was the phrase.
At that time, when I was commissioning editor for RTÉ TV documentaries (1999-2009), the boomtime surge in revenues into RTÉ was deliberately and strategically channelled into a significant increase in history documentary funding, among many other strands of output. Accepting my contention that the Northern Ireland peace offered us an opportunity to revisit the difficult period from 1915 to 1930 with targeted documentary programmes, RTÉ’s TV division heads funded an attempt to engage with subjects and individuals from that formative period, which for many of us had been skirted over in our school history books.
Thus, over several seasons, leading producers like Steve Carson, Michael Hewitt and Dermot Lavery, Alan Gilsenan and John Murray, Anne Roper and Niamh Sammon gave us new documentaries on Pearse, Casement, Cumann na mBan, de Valera, Lemass and sectarian killings in 1921 amongst other topics. Diarmaid himself authored a challenging and important series, The Limits of Liberty, with Philip King and Nuala O'Connor; it typified the effort to open out that dark, dense period and in doing so to tell us much about the nature of the nascent independent Irish state. (The doyen of Irish documentary and history producers, Seán Ó Mórdha, meanwhile, crafted landmark pieces like the Seven Ages series without reliance on a narrative script at all.)
The continued appearance of Diarmaid and others in the new 1916 programming, commissioned by RTÉ’s current content heads against a more difficult resource background, is a testament to the contribution that television can make to the understanding of our very recent past. The medium, which so easily skews towards the shallow and trivial, can, when expertly deployed around substantive subject matter, deliver powerfully on behalf of the wider public which owns the broadcaster. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN DAWSON,
Dublin 14.