This was a rant just waiting to happen

Alan O’Brien’s tirade from the audience on last Monday’s edition of The Frontline (RTE1) was an outburst waiting to happen, and I’m only surprised such an expression of fury at the salaries of top broadcasters hadn’t occurred sooner — on Pat Kenny’s morning radio programme, say, or the Marian Finucane Show or Joe Duffy’s Liveline: three formats that invite people to speak their minds.

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Let’s hope TV3’s ratings success forces RTE to step up its game

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’.

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John Martyn

John Martyn died at the beginning of this year. He was only 60, but although news of his death came as a shock, for many of us who’d followed his career down through the decades it wasn’t really a surprise because, although he was blessed with extraordinary musical gifts, there had always seemed something determinedly […]

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The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years. By Clive James.

In the early 1980s, after a decade as Britain’s funniest and sharpest television reviewer, Clive James became an active participant in the medium that had so excercised his marvellous critical faculties. In doing so, as he relates in this fifth volume of his memoirs, he found himself inhabiting “the strange world where everybody knows your […]

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LIAM CLANCY

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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Liam — we still hardly know you

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.

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PODGE AND RODGE / WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

It’s now late October and, apart from The Frontline, the RTE autumn schedules haven’t provided viewers with any series, or even single programme, of substance and quality. But they have provided lots of the opposite – gimmicky antics masquerading as economic insights in RTE1’s Addicted to Money, twaddle with a solemn face in the same […]

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John McGahern’s Essays

When John McGahern died in March 2006 at the age of 71, he was the most admired Irish fiction writer of his generation and there seems no reason to alter that evaluation today. This is not always the case after a writer’s passing. Graham Greene’s reputation went into a decline on his death in 1991, […]

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LIFE IS A DREAM: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007. By Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan believes that hearing a poet reading his work aloud is crucial to appreciation of the poetry, and in his brief foreword to this volume he enlists the support of TS Eliot in asserting that “public reading is the life blood of the art of poetry.” The words on the page are not enough, […]

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Addicted to Money; Cork’s Bloody Secret…

In Tuesday night’s first episode of Addicted to Money (RTE1), David McWilliams posed the question “Who killed the economy?” and while we awaited the answer we were treated to many of the verbal flourishes familiar to anyone who’s watched previous series by this pundit – starting with the assertion that we had been “encouraged to […]

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LIFE IS A DREAM: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007

By Paul Durcan. Harvill Secker, 16.99 sterling Paul Durcan believes that hearing a poet reading his work aloud is crucial to appreciation of the poetry, and in his brief foreword to this volume he enlists the support of TS Eliot in asserting that “public reading is the life blood of the art of poetry.” The […]

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Does God hate?; Who do you think you are?…

Does God hate sex? Or women? Or science? No, but what God does hate (and viewers, too) are ideas for series that are as outmoded and naff as RTE1’s new Sunday night vehicle for Marian Finucane. Who on earth comes up with these notions? In the 1960s, when God’s existence was largely unquestioned in this […]

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THE DOGS AND THE WOLVES. By Irene Nemirovsky.

The Kiev-born Irene Nemirovsky was Jewish and in 1918 when she was a teenager she and her family had to flee the October Revolution for the safety of Paris, where in the 1920s and 1930s she became a best-selling novelist. Attempting to fit in, she tried to conceal her Jewishness, befriending and offering her work […]

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THE APPRENTICE

For most of Pat Kenny’s new current affairs show, The Frontline (RTE1), the host was content to stand back and let the audience have its say, but no such modesty marked the second season of TV3’s The Apprentice, which, like its predecessor, was unashamedly about Bill Cullen. “You’re all here because you want to work […]

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WILLIAM GOLDING: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

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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If Lynch had invaded; School Run…

As a half-hour programme, If Lynch Had Invaded (RTE1) might have been interesting, or at least intriguing. At an interminable ninety minutes, it was farcically overblown twaddle. The premise was there in the title – what if Taoiseach Jack Lynch had responded to the August 1969 police brutality in Derry by ordering the Irish Army […]

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FEAR AND LOATHING IN DUBLIN by Aodhan Madden

Aodhan Madden and I were colleagues on the Evening Press and much of what he writes about his experiences there are familiar to me. Well, semi-familiar, anyway. Here he is on subediting, at which both of us toiled for many years: “The subs desk in the Press was like a home for terminal eccentrics. They […]

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COLUM MC CANN’S TRIUMPHANT NEW YORK TIGHTROPE WALK

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 […]

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COLUM MC CANN’S TRIUMPHANT NEW YORK TIGHTROPE WALK

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 […]

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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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