Increasingly irrelevant RTÉ is a gift to streaming services as it serves up another helping of Christmas turkeys. Fancy a Meat Loaf documentary, or a touch of ‘Dallas’? No, me either
PAT STACEY
.
If RTÉ’s Christmas and new year TV line-up were a meal, it would be the kind of dry, stodgy turkey dinner Irish housewives used to cook in the 1970s.
The whole thing seems aimed squarely at the middle-aged to elderly audience that tend to loyally watch RTÉ all year round, with little to appeal to the viewers in their 20s and 30s broadcasters are supposedly so desperate to win back.
Put it this way, when one of the highlights is a documentary featuring a septuagenarian American television actor whose name will mean nothing to several generations, it’s obvious no one inside the national broadcaster endured brain strain from putting the package together.
The documentary in question is Duffy’s Pub, in which Patrick Duffy, who played Bobby Ewing, the blandly nice brother of Larry Hagman’s dastardly JR in Dallas four decades ago, and his actor partner Linda Purl take a pub tour around Ireland, stopping off at as many hostelries called Duffy’s as they can find and drinking in the atmosphere and local colour.
The hook is that Duffy, who grew up in a bar-owning family in Montana and now owns an establishment of his own in Hollywood, is third-generation Irish. Frankly, so what?
Similarly rooted in the past is Meat Loaf: From Hell and to Connacht, a documentary about the beefy singer’s series of gigs in Ireland in 1990.
The Bat Out of Hell belter’s star had dimmed considerably by the time music promoter Tommy Swarbrigg (one half of the sibling duo that twice represented Ireland at the Eurovision in the 1970s) took a gamble on him. The result was a chaotic two-week tour around some of the country’s unlikeliest venues that helped put Meat Loaf’s career back on track.
The latter has a certain quirk value at least, but what on earth is Daniel O’Connell: The Emancipator doing here? There’s certainly a place in the schedules for a heavyweight documentary marking the 250th anniversary of O’Connell’s birth, but Christmas, when most people are in the mood for something a little more upbeat and less taxing, is hardly the ideal time for it.
The same goes for Mary O’Rourke: The Mammy, an episode of the Cloch le Carn series about, according to RTÉ’s publicity department, "the woman who shaped Irish politics for generations”. OK, if you say so.
One of the few concessions to the under-50s is the travel show High Road, Low Road, which pairs social media personality Kayleigh Trappe, who’s apparently known for lip-syncing to videos of celebrities, with chef Kevin Dundon on a Christmas trip to Austria.
Kicking off with ratings juggernaut The Late Late Toy Show this Friday, the festive schedule overall has a distinctly seen-it-all-before flavour: Christmas in Kilmainham, the usual two episodes of Mrs Brown’s Boys, a raft of arthritic music specials (Elton John, Billy Joel, ABBA), the annual bout of toothless satire that is Callan Kicks the Year, a pre-recorded Late Late on New Year’s Eve and a Westlife concert.
If previous experience is anything to go by, Christmas Day will consist of wall-to-wall movies on both RTÉ channels, interrupted only by Fair City and the aforementioned Mrs Brown’s Boys, which continues to be the centrepiece of the evening’s viewing.
This is in sharp contrast to comedy’s reduced status on BBC One, where it’s been shunted to the bottom of the day’s schedules for the last two Christmases, its audience having dipped to a fraction of what it used to be.
The best thing you can say about RTÉ’s line-up is that it’s superior to Virgin Media’s. Then again, that’s a pretty low bar to clear.
The commercial broadcaster is mostly showing the same light entertainment shows as ITV (which gave up trying to compete with the BBC on Christmas Day several years ago), though not necessarily at the same time.
Even allowing for RTÉ’s tight financial situation, which has been worsened by the turmoil of the last two or three years, this is a festive schedule with a startling lack of imagination or anything remotely resembling ambition.
There’s absolutely nothing here to tempt viewers away from the streamers or, for that matter, the BBC.