I’m left pondering the meaning of Rte

Gay Byrne returned to our screens on Monday night with a second series of The Meaning of Life (RTE1), but having spent the three weeks since New Year’s Day waiting for our national broadcaster to transmit one programme of real substance, I feel more like pondering the meaning of RTE.

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TV3 aiming to hit home run with latest line-up

ACCORDING to the press release announcing its spring schedule, TV3 has had a “fantastic autumn”.

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COLLECTED STORIES by William Trevor.

The Stories of William Trevor, which comprised his first five collections, was published by Penguin in 1983. Nine years later, Viking published the Collected Stories in a massive, physically unwieldy volume that ran to 1,260 pages and that contained the 87 stories from his his first seven collections. Now we have a new Collected Stories, […]

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TV Review

Everything’s a reality show on RTE these days and now you can’t even go to school without being forced to run a gauntlet of camera crews. School? We’ve all been there. It’s got teachers, it’s got pupils, it’s got classes. It can be dreary, it can be enlightening. Some pupils do well at certain subjects, […]

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COLLECTED STORIES by William Trevor

The Stories of William Trevor, which comprised his first five collections, was published by Penguin in 1983. Nine years later, Viking published the Collected Stories in a massive, physically unwieldy volume that ran to 1,260 pages and that contained the 87 stories from his his first seven collections. Now we have a new Collected Stories, […]

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RTE promises comedy, talent and Charlie Bird

Announcing its January schedule, RTE promises us “a wealth of home-produced programming” that will “get 2010 off to an entertaining and energising start”.

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Tv of the Decade

It was the decade in which there were more programmes than ever to watch, though just as few worth watching. Indeed, more invariably means less, and so when the very finite number of good programmes capable of being made are spread over 187 channels, they hardly register amid the gunge that surrounds them. There’s only […]

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TV HIGHLIGHTS OF 2009

It was the year of Susan Boyle and The X Factor, for those who care about such things. It was the year in which Michael Jackson’s death caused even the most sober of broadcasting organisations to lose all sense of balance and perspective. And it was the year when economic realities should have put paid […]

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TV Review of the Year 2009

It was the year in which RTE’s marketing gurus vanquished and routed serious programme makers. Certainly, I can’t think of a twelve-month period in which RTE made fewer programmes of substance or quality, but, hey, who needs programmes at all when you can marvel at Montrose’s mission to turn every  nonentity on its payroll into […]

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Killers; Lolita; Delia’s Christmas; The Apprentice

Killers, which RTE1 screened on Sunday night, was essentially an hour-long version of those murder-scene reconstructions you get on the same channel’s Crimecall, except that on Crimecall they’re invariably followed by pleas for assistance from the public in catching the criminal while here the perpetrator had already been identified, arrested, charged, convicted and locked up. […]

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Shane McGowan; Alan Bennett…

RTE seems to have reached the sorry stage where the mere notion of celebrity is enough to get a programme made. How else to explain Tuesday night’s RTE1 documentary, Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own? The Shane in question was Shane McGowan and the Victoria was Victoria Mary Clarke, and whereas the former is deservedly […]

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Budget news coverage: It will go down in history but presenters couldn’t live up to the sense of occasion

THREE hours before Brian Lenihan delivered his Budget, RTE radio’s Sean O’Rourke had deemed it “possibly the most leaked document of all time”, an opinion shared on Newstalk by pundit Mark Mortell, who thought it “leaked to a phenomenal degree”, and a little later by RTE1 anchorman Bryan Dobson, who felt that perhaps it had been “leaked to soften us up”.

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The Savage Eye; Battle of the Sexes

Am I imagining it or have Podge and Rodge curbed their enthusiasm for potty talk in the last week or two, and if so could this be due to the dismay expressed by myself and a few others at the duo’s recent inability to distinguish the ribald from the rancid?  Given RTE’s unwillingness to heed […]

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One extraordinary storyteller with a real passion for life

It was through my colleague and great friend Joe Kennedy that I first met Liam Clancy. That was 23 years ago come New Year’s Eve, although of course I’d known of the man throughout all of my adolescent and adult life.

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Liam Clancy

It was through my colleague and great friend Joe Kennedy that I first met Liam Clancy. That was 20 years ago come New Year’s Eve, although of course I’d known of the man throughout all of my adolescent and adult life. Indeed, for an Irish teenager in the early to mid-1960s it was impossible not […]

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A ho-ho-hum as RTE’s ‘cracking’ festive schedule is a real turkey

LAST night I dreamt that TV3’s Christmas highlight would be a panto featuring Bill Cullen as Scrooge, Jackie Lavin as the Widow Twanky and Vincent Browne as the Wicked Curmudgeon of the West, with TG4 showcasing Daithi O Se as Puss in Boots along with a chorus line of minority-language weather babes — both of which sounds more fun than the “cracking Christmas schedule” just announced by RTE.

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MIRIAM O’CALLAGHAN

For a brief period back in the 1990s, though it now seems like the 1890s, Clare McKeon was RTE’s chosen presenter of girl-talk shows. I can’t recall whether this was before or after our national broadcaster’s equally fickle infatuations with Bibi Baskin and Carrie Crowley, but for a while Clare was its darling, fronting a […]

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Miriam and sisters didn’t do it for me

For a brief period back in the 1990s, though it now seems like the 1890s, Clare McKeon was RTE’s chosen presenter of girl-talk shows. I can’t recall whether this was before or after our national broadcaster’s equally fickle infatuations with Bibi Baskin and Carrie Crowley, but for a while Clare was its darling, fronting a succession of shows in which women fretted about love, pain and the whole damn thing — and in the process talked an awful lot of twaddle.

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2666. By Roberto Bolano.

Is this the great novel of our time? Before his early death in 2003, the Chilean-born Roberto Bolano was widely admired in Spanish-speaking countries, but it was only when he was translated into English that his fame became global and he is now routinely written of as one of the most important literary talents of […]

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In the Footsteps of American Giants

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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