THREE nights ago, 333,000 viewers saw Pat Kenny being abused about his salary by a member of RTE1’s ‘The Frontline’ audience. A few minutes earlier, 493,000 viewers had been watching as Bill Cullen fired Ruth from TV3’s ‘The Apprentice’, and later 297,000 ignored ‘The Frontline’ to observe Ruth’s non-appearance on TV3’s ‘The Apprentice: You’re Fired’.
Reputations
Edited down from a film shown in cinemas earlier this year, Alan Gilsenan’s The Yellow Bittern: Liam Clancy’s Life and Times (RTE1) was an oddity, not least because in March 2006 RTE had already screened the same director’s two-part documentary The Legend of Liam Clancy. In the words of its own press release, that two-hour […]
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By John Carey. Faber & Faber. You can tell a novelist is out of fashion when his publisher feels obliged to subtitle a biography of him with the nervous declaration “The man who wrote Lord of the Flies.” In a postscript to this book, John Carey defends the subtitle as “ironic and purposeful,” hoping it […]
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Although only published in Ireland this weekend, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin has been on the bookshelves in America since June, where it has been attracting the kind of attention most writers would die for. “The first great 9/11 novel,” Esquire magazine raved. “One of the most electric, profound novels I have read […]
On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe — if we’re Francophiles — the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]
Despite the promise of its title, there’s nothing remotely amusing about the current RTE1 series A Little Bit Funny, in which various over-exposed comedians are given free rein to tell viewers how great they are. First up was Twink, a woman whose thirst for self-publicity far exceeds her pantomime talents, while this week it was […]
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Much as some of us cherish the poetry of Seamus Heaney, RTE’s celebration of his 70th birthday seemed just a teensy bit over the top. As someone who contributed his own tuppence worth to the occasion in this newspaper, I still couldn’t credit that the people in charge of RTE radio set aside one hour […]
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Despite his tousled mass of silver hair, it registers as a small shock that Seamus Heaney is now seventy – despite his status as grand old man of Irish poetry, it’s his infectiously boyish openness to both life and literature that has always distinguished him from his peers. Yet grand old man he is and […]
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This week, an international survey revealed that, of 19 countries polled, the Irish had by far the gloomiest view of the current economic crisis – and right on cue along came RTE’s George Lee to tell us that the country’s banjaxed. George, of course, has been droning on about this for years and though he […]
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Hugh Leonard was a notable dramatist and a very successful television scriptwriter, but he always saw himself as an outsider among his peers and was quick to take offence at perceived slights from critics or fellow playwrights. Indeed, in his long-running Sunday Independent column (and before that in Hibernia magazine), he was adept both at […]
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On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe – if we’re Francophiles – the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]
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So the first stage of an incredible, awe-inspiring adventure is now fulfilled – an adventure that has led one man from humble beginnings and years of sefless service on behalf of his community to the pinnacle of the world and all the challenges that represents. No, I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s inauguration as US […]
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Brian Friel’s distinguished playwriting career over five decades has been notable for its range and diversity. His concerns have encompassed the history and politics of Ireland, as well as its social and religious divides, and these have been memorably addressed in such plays as The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, Translations and Making History. Yet […]
The first genuine books I ever read – not The Secret Seven, not Biggles Sweeps the Desert, not even The Wind in the Willows, but real books with adult thoughts and feelings – came courtesy of Rathmines public library, where I spent too many evenings of my teenage years. Yet even though a library is […]
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Brian Friel’s distinguished playwriting career over five decades has been notable for its range and diversity. His concerns have encompassed the history and politics of Ireland, as well as its social and religious divides, and these have been memorably addressed in such plays as The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, Translations and Making History. Yet […]
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Mention the name of Kenneth Grahame to most people and, if they recognise it at all, they’ll think of The Wind in the Willows, which was published a hundred years ago this summer. And a lovely book it is, too, one of the most imaginative and enduring of children’s fantasies in the English language. Grahame, […]
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You can’t go home again, the American writer Thomas Wolfe declared in the title of one of his most famous books. John McGahern would not have agreed. After years spent in Dublin, London and further afield, he returned three decades ago to the countryside of his birth and remained there until his untimely death yesterday. […]
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RTE RADIO One is all talk, and its plans for next year, which are due to be announced on Friday, will ensure that it remains so.There’s nothing wrong with talk, of course, especially on radio, which is a talker’s medium, and it’s certainly preferable to the non-stop barrage of bland playlist pop that’s 2FM’s sole raison d’etre, but too often the talk on Radio One amounts to little more than blather a situation that the new schedules, from what’s been leaked about them, seem unlikely to correct.
DOWN IN Ballykissangel last Sunday night, Assumpta’s pub was up for sale, and the locals were understandably worried. “The worst thing that could happen,” one of them said, “would be for someone to buy it and turn it into an Irish pub.” His companion pointed out that all pubs in Ireland were Irish pubs. “No, I mean an IRISH pub,” he replied witheringly.I know exactly what he meant, and I know, too, what Quigley meant in the same episode when he envisaged the village’s sacred drinking-house being taken over by “some Johnny-come-lately with a ponytail and fifteen different words for a cup of coffee.”
WHAT DO you do when a man is down? You make money out of him, that’s what. It’s the American way, and everywhere you look stateside these days hucksters are cleaning up, which at least is more than Monica did. WHAT DO you do when a man is down? You make money out of him, that’s what. It’s the American way, and everywhere you look stateside these days hucksters are cleaning up, which at least is more than Monica did.
