[dropcap]A[/dropcap]pparently, the Irish television industry is booming. The past decade has seen some of the most high profile series on TV filmed on our shores, among them The Tudors, Camelot, upcoming BBC drama Ripper Street and Game of Thrones. However, regular reports on how ideal our picturesque nation is as a location, our tax incentives, our skilled workforce, while admittedly refreshing, do not lessen the dearth of quality Irish drama on our screens. Our current industry seems incapable of producing successful independent programming for the Irish people, though we seem very capable of making it for the Americans and British – provided we don’t have to deal with the creative side. As ‘successful’ RTE dramas Raw and Love/Hate cling on for dear life, our national broadcaster has chosen to merge the most prevalent trends in Irish and international television in the form of RTE Format farm – reality TV for export.
Having in desperation thrown all its eggs in the reality basket, the concept is bang up to date and from a certain perspective admirable (a notable change in direction from a channel dependent on reality remakes), but it is doubtful whether such a mind-set has longevity. While providing an immediate if brief boost in the crumbling PSB’s funding, it overestimates the dominance of reality. Even more worrying are the shows themselves — one of which, Baptism of Hire, is an Irish Truman Show, with a dash of the exploitative nature of The X Factor, which particularly highlights the pointed cynicism in viewer psyche, augmented by reality TV culture.
“Our creative industry, like everything in modern Ireland, is operating and judged in a financial rather than cultural paradigm”
The question is how this state of affairs has come about. The issue of funding cannot be ignored, with only licence fees and no subscriptions there is very little money left to produce on the scale of the BBC. But Irish television was hardly a paragon of quality in the Celtic Tiger era. Nobody can dispute the economic potential of the Irish TV industry — but despite TV being more lucrative, the indigenous film industry has considerably more creative worth. TV drama and documentary have always been perceived as less prestigious. As this attitude is eroded across the world, particularly in the US, it grows in Ireland. The situation is unfortunate; television has considerable advantages over film, particularly in drama. It is a writer’s medium, with much greater opportunities for narrative and character development, and considerably more dynamism than a novel.
But while funding is an inescapable issue, it is also part of a much wider cultural malaise in Irish society. Discussion of Irish television primarily focuses on job creation and international investment. It is an entirely economic perspective; news on the television and film industries is always to be found in the business pages. A creative industry, like everything in modern Ireland, is operating and judged in a financial rather than cultural paradigm. Even the notion of a public service broadcaster itself has become archaic; the society RTE was created to benefit has abandoned the values on which it was based. Compounding the matter is a basic lack of faith in our own worth as a culture. RTE Director General Noel Curran’s comments at last month’s UCC TV50 conference, about prioritising investment in creativity, do not seem realistic; the principle is overshadowed by a government prioritising the marketing of our creativity to other countries for their social and our economic benefit.
“The society RTE was created to benefit has abandoned the values on which it was based.”
Embodying this ideology is industry kingpin Morgan O’ Sullivan. Much lauded for bringing American productions to our shores, O’ Sullivan’s ‘innovative’ approach falls in line with recession-era political rhetoric. However the raison d’etre of his Ardmore Studios-based production company, World 2000 — essentially to attract foreign investment — reveals a considerably more questionable attitude: a lack of faith in independent Irish production. O’ Sullivan operates on the assumption that American dominance of the industry is inescapable, and that the most we can aspire to is to become a branch office to LA.
