The Continuing Story of Irish Television Drama: Tracking the Tiger Helena Sheehan published by Four Courts Press 2004 ISBN 1-85182-688-2 hbk ISBN 1-85182-689-0 pbk © Helena Sheehan Professor Helena Sheehan http://webpages.dcu.ie/~sheehanh/sheehan.htm e-mail: [email protected] The Continuing Story of Irish Television Drama: The Time of the Tiger Helena Sheehan Contents Forward List of illustrations Preface and acknowledgements Introduction The times: from 1987 to 2002 RTE from 1987 to 2002 RTE drama single plays experimental drama sitcom and satire contemporary drama historical drama detective series soap operas TnaG / TG4 drama RTE, independent production and co-production troubles drama historical drama contemporary drama RTE 2001: a new start ? British production of Irish television drama Conclusion Appendices Index Preface Irish Television Drama: A Society and Its Stories appeared in 1987. It was a story about storytelling. It was a narrative about a society in a process of transformation, about how that drama played itself out in television drama. That story began in 1962 with the advent of indigenous television, when Radio Telefis Eireann came on air. It moved through 25 years of tumult, of a struggle to define the nature of our society and the role of television drama in relation to that. This book is a sequel to that one. It advances the story another 15 years. It takes us into the time of the tiger. The tiger in the earlier years was just a feisty cub, smaller and poorer than the rest, but quick to maximise its assets in the game of globalisation. Then came the boom and the flow of milk and honey, cocktails and cappuccinos, megabytes of e-mail and the never ending ringing of mobile phones. There was pride and plenty, but there was also crassness and confusion and exclusion. Living it was one thing, not always as simple as it seemed, but conceptualising it and narrating it were more complex still. Television drama struggled to come to terms with the times, often with considerable confusion, but occasionally with moments of piercing clarity. In these years much was happening in the world, raising many questions about the relationships of waves of world historical events, the daily flux of experience and the flow of television drama. There have been significant changes, for example, in the climate surrounding broadcasting and in its structures of storytelling: a shift from centralised in- house production to decentralised outsourced production and co-production; an intensified challenge to public service broadcasting from more commercial forces; the impact of new technological developments such as the internet and digitisation. In Irish Television Drama there were chapters on the nature of narrative and its role in human experience, on television as a medium of drama, on criteria for judging television drama, on contrasting approaches to media studies. I described and defended my theoretical approach as well as my concrete research methods. Subsequent chapters went through each decade, first setting out the temper of the times, then sketching the climate of broadcasting and finally looking to television drama as the stories this society was telling at this time and place in its development. I have taken as read, rather than re-iterating, my theoretical arguments and my explanation of my research methods. I have basically taken the same approach to the last 15 years as I did to the previous 25 years. There have been some changes in my methods of research in the intervening years though. There was good news and bad news. The good news was computerisation. In those years I got into computers in a way that I never imagined when I was writing my earlier books by hand. First it was word processing for writing my books and articles. A few years later I was creating websites and multimedia productions. The internet.has become basic to my connection to the wider world. For this project I found at least some information that I needed on the web. E-mail too was a valuable means of making arrangements and checking facts. The bad news was RTE restructuring: the chopping and changing in organisational structures and a scrappy pattern of drama production during this period. The absence of a drama department from 1990 created a sense of discontinuity and made it very difficult in research terms to check facts, trace files, locate continuity of institutional memory and responsibility. Somehow I made my way and found out what I needed to know. I had to learn to find my way around RTE again and that was interesting on many levels, from noting new buildings and tracking careers to discovering the story behind the scenes of what I had been watching and catching up on years of showbiz gossip. There were still the old methods of research, of course. I had watched almost all of this drama on its original transmission and read (and sometimes wrote) the reviews. I had kept up with research in television studies. I gave papers analysing television drama at such events as the International Television Studies Conference in London in 1988 and at the Imagining Ireland Conference at the Irish Film Centre in 1993. I participated in many other such events over the years and benefitted from such interaction as arose. I taught a course on social history and television drama at Dublin City University. When it came to getting down to business on the new book, I made lists, organised interviews, read scripts, reviewed tapes and started writing. While I was writing, there was more drama in production than in many years. I looked in on Fair City and No Tears when time and circumstance allowed. Conveniently No Tears was shooting at DCU. The publication of the first book has fed back into the feedback loop for the new book. The book was widely reviewed in newspapers and on the airwaves as well as in academic journals. I also got much response to it in conversations and letters. It has had a long shelf life, being cited in subsequent books, used as a reference source for programme makers and critics and as a text for media courses. It has been a text for one of my own courses at DCU. Each year there were a new set of students before me, which has kept me alert and involved in a process of communicating across generations about television, about our society, about the meaning of life, about the passing of time. With every onrushing year events and trends that were matters of contemporary memory have come to be perceived as more distant history. Students read with near disbelief the story of The Spike and find it hard to imagine the RTE or Ireland of those times. All the more important then that there should be a written record. I had another reason to remember The Spike recently when I was on sabbatical at University of Cape Town and I witnessed something very similar happening in South Africa. Yizo Yizo was a television drama set in a township school. A controversy broke out over a sex scene and there were cries from individual viewers and official bodies for it to be taken off the air. Much more than the sex scene was involved, as with The Spike. It scrutinised the education system and the society in many aspects. The difference was that times have changed. Also the SABC and the minister for education as well as students and many viewers defended it. Perhaps RTE will go again into our schools and even into our universities as well as other such vital institutions of our society and do something courageous and creative with the drama pulsing there. There is a shift of voice in this book. In the previous book, I used the 1st person only in the introduction and footnotes. When I was writing about Irish television in the 1960s, it was easier to write entirely in the 3rd person, as I was not living, viewing, working in Ireland during that time. I continued as I started, even though I was living and viewing here during the 1970s and 1980s. When it came to writing about the post-1987 period, it became unnatural. This book itself has been part of the public discourse about television drama and as its author I was often involved in reviewing new television drama as well as participating in various programmes and panels on the state of television drama. This is a difficult country for a critic. It is inevitable that we review and are reviewed by people we know. Too often it degenerates into mutual backscratching or backstabbing. I have tried to set out my critical criteria and to adhere to them rigorously. I found it interesting after the publication of the previous book to find that some took this in the spirit in which it was intended, while others, whose work wasn’t even so severely criticised, were angry with me for not dealing with their work as they would have wished. Others weighed my arguments and allowed me to believe they were having some impact. My methods of research involved mixing with people whose work I was analysing. I tried to make it clear all along that I was not writing an anecdotal account, a name dropping list of actors and directors celebrating their performances, nor a glossy coffee table book taking a nostalgic trip through the archives as a PR exercise for RTE. It was and is to RTE’s credit that they commissioned the book with the clear idea that it would be an independent and academic critique.