A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland

“Brennan’s book does what good history writing should do: it tells compelling stories of the past, while also helping us to understand the present and look ahead to the future. The critical focus on audience memories is especially inno- vative, and makes for engaging, thought-provoking reading. This should be an essential text, not just in Ireland, but—in keeping with its ‘post-nationalist’ approach—for an international readership.” —David Buckingham, Loughborough University, UK

“This is a clever and original book which narrates the history of Irish television through the experience of its viewers. Because it is so different, and so well writ- ten and insightful, it will be of wide interest to people outside Ireland engaged in studying cultural history or investigating media infuence.” —James Curran, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

“Modern media are now so over-arching, complex, and interdependent that any fresh analysis faces extraordinary challenges. Traditional approaches generally give pride of place to the power of the media—real or assumed. This book breaks new ground, and has a sinewy, research-rich and original basis for its fascinating approach to media historiography. This not only poses a highly relevant challenge to more narrowly focused academic approaches, including the historical ones, but will enrich public understanding of the media generally.” —John Horgan, Dublin City University, Ireland

“A creative re-examination of the history of television in Ireland that describes and analyses the way this new medium penetrated into domestic life and shaped people’s lifestyles, attitudes and understanding of themselves.” —Tom Inglis, University College Dublin, Ireland

“This is an original, theoretically sophisticated and historically informed book. It identifes the shortcomings of institutional and ultimately nation-bound approaches to TV history. By giving the audience, its memories and experiences, a voice, it successfully tells an alternative bottom-up history of TV in Ireland that connects far-reaching political and economic processes (like commercializa- tion, mobility and globalization) to socially-bound and very diverse forms of TV domestication. An equally important and easily readable book.” —Susanne Kinnebrock, University of Augsburg, Germany “Since the time of Joyce’s Ulysses, there has been a growing awareness that Irish culture can be something of a laboratory in which we can gauge the crises of modernity. Eddie Brennan’s Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland is very much in this mode, and as such is much more than a book about a particu- lar national media history. With superb insight and detailed historical research, Brennan takes seriously the complex ways in which the fows of an international media culture are absorbed by a national culture, and in doing so produces a study whose interest extends far beyond Irish cultural studies per se.” —Chris Morash, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

“A wonderful account of Irish television, one which suggests new ways of writing media history, by focusing on people’s ordinary experiences of broadcasting, and by showing that ‘national’ systems are always at the same time international.” —David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds, UK Edward Brennan A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland Edward Brennan Technological University Dublin Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-319-96859-9 ISBN 978-3-319-96860-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96860-5

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019, corrected publication 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Map of the counties of Ireland. Map by Eoin O’Mahony based on Central Statistics Offce data The original version of the book was revised: post publication corrections have been incorporated throughout the book. The correction to the book is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96860-5_10 Acknowledgements

I want to thank all the people who made it so much easier to turn a tan- gle of ideas into a fnished book. Firstly, at Palgrave Macmillan, I’d like to thank Lina Aboujieb, Ellie Freedman and my anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback and, always gentle, encouragement to get the man- uscript wrapped up. I want to thank academic colleagues for their ideas and support, particularly Roddy Flynn, Anthony McNicholas, Conor Mulvagh, Michael Cronin and Stephanie McBride for their encouragement and invaluable suggestions. At the Technological University, Dublin, I want to thank my colleagues in the School of Media. Thanks to Pat Hannon for recommend- ing readings, and to Alan Pike for his technical assistance. I am grateful to my graduate students Kosidichimma Anyanwu, Robert MacDonald and Sergey Medvedev whose help created much needed time for this project. Thanks to Hugh McAtamney who, as Head of School, provided consistent moral and material support for this work. It would not have been possible without his generosity. And, I want to express my appre- ciation to my colleague Kevin Hora for his careful reading and detailed feedback. More broadly, in the Technological University Dublin, I want to thank Melda Slattery for her help. Thanks to Brian O’Neill and Noel Fitzpatrick for their support. I want to mention the College of Arts and Tourism, which awarded seed funding to pay for transcription services.

ix x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Brian Fay for his suggestions, and to Matt Bowden for his encouragement and advice on the publishing process. Thanks to Gareth Ivory, Manager of RTÉ’s Audience Research Department, for his time, his interest and his generosity in providing suggestions from his encyclopedic knowledge of past research. Thanks also to Ciarán Murray, from NearFM, for his valuable support. I want to thank my friends who provided a listening ear or welcome distraction, especially Damien Lennon, Sarah Latty and Tadhg Conway. Thanks also to Brenda Molloy, Sinead Hyland and Arran Henderson for their generosity. I am very grateful to Eoin O’Mahony too for his recom- mendations, and his speedy and generous creation of a map for the front of this book. This work could not have been completed without the help of the staff of the Daughters of Charity and Friends of the Elderly in Dublin. I cannot express enough gratitude to the people who shared their memories with me. Nor can I name them here. Their stories are at the heart of this book. Their generosity with their time and with their recollections made it possible. I also want to thank Brendan and Irene O’Leary for their interest in the work and their stories as I wrote this book. Thanks to my family, and particularly my parents, Martin and Joan Brennan, who I cannot thank enough for their endless loving support. Finally, I want to thank Jenny O’Leary, my most trusted reader, lis- tener and critic, for her love and patience. Contents

1 How Should We Write a History of Television? 1

2 A Dominant Narrative in Irish Television History 23

3 Personal Memory and Social Power 47

4 Making Sense of Television 67

5 Memories of Imported Programmes and International Broadcasts 99

6 Time, Space and Television 123

7 Recollection and Social Status 151

8 Putting the Bishop and the Nightie to Bed 187

9 Personally Remembering the Global 207

Correction to: A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland C1

Index 229

xi List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Curlie Wee and Gussie Goose Cartoon, Irish Independent, 18 September 1946 (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) 3 Fig. 4.1 The Irish Times, 20 April 1954 (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) 71 Fig. 4.2 Cartoon from The Kerryman, 2 January 1960 (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) 84 Fig. 4.3 Bush advertisement, Sunday Independent, 3 November 1963 (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) 85 Fig. 4.4 ‘This coin-in-the-slot device, which enables television owners to pay for the programmes they view, might help to make television an economic proposition in Ireland’ (Irish Independent, 3 October 1955: ‘Good Reception Creates Demand for Sets’) (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) 89 Fig. 5.1 Telefusion Comes to Dublin. Evening Herald, September 22, 1961 (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) 116

xiii List of Tables

Table 3.1 Overview of narrators by sex and education 62 Table 3.2 Narrators by age 62 Table 7.1 Narrators, occupational group, formal education and discussion of television-related discipline 182