RTÉ, where did it go wrong?

Sheesh there used to be a good lineup of programs and sport on a Saturday afternoon at 2.30pm. now poor OP can only resort to starting a rant AH thread.

NIMAN wrote: »

Just because me and you don't have any interest in them, it would be madness for anyone running a TV station to ditch them.

It would if we had a national broadcaster that wasn't intent on wasting money on light entertainment and ridiculous salaries.

RTE should go down the NPR route, including collaborating with other state/ public broadcasters.

It does not need a pop station, it does not need to broadcast Home & Away twice per day, nor all the other soaps it broadcasts either. It needs to be pared back to its original intention as a force for public information, politics, arts and culture. Those other items are commercially viable -- so let the private broadcasters undertake them, and not detract from RTE's remit.

It wouldn't be a commercial success, necessarily, but that's why we're already paying the licence fee.

100% agree with the OP. There were brilliant, culturally Irish, distinctive, educational RTÉ programmes - Come West Along the Road and Hands spring immediately to mind. There are still some high quality RTÉ programmes on radio, Documentary on One, Sounds Traditional, and loads of the Lyric FM stuff from Trish Taylor, Niall O'Carroll etc (arch waffler Marty Whelan and his pop and country music has singlehandedly destroyed Lyric as a musical/spiritual haven from commercialism and waffle).

There are also quality television programmes, Prime Time and Nationwide being two of the most obvious, and in fairness Dermot Bannon's architectural stuff is educational. But they are asmall minority now. They are all drowned by that "reality" rubbish now that can be accessed anywhere else in the Anglophone world. Sameness, everywhere, while TV3 is essentially a British channel (with its British owners getting economies of scale by using it to broadcast its own British soaps, etc). The recent enough Abhainn was a breath of fresh air, tracing rivers around Ireland and their histories with great aerial film. RTÉ definitely has the ability and talent to do quality programming, but for financial reasons it's choosing to produce commercial rubbish. I'd love an RTÉ station full of Irish cultural/historical/educational etc interest, and for RTÉ to ship the reality stuff off to a new station named RTÉ Pleb. I'd very willingly pay for the former; the latter couldn't pay me enough.

I paid the TV Licence two weeks ago, even though I cancelled the TV service from my Virgin subscription the week before. I still have the tv, which I will use entirely to cast stuff from online or from RTÉ Player/TG4 Player. I took out a Netflix subscription instead, so we'll see how that goes.

It was, quite simply, far too disheartening to wade through 100 channels of ineffably vacuous, superficial echo chamber stuff (and a million tv ads) to find a programme in which I had interest. And 15 minutes into that programme, they'd break to try and brainwash me with more ads. Back when Sky first came into Irish homes, I'm almost certain one of its selling points was that for your subscription you were promised no ads. Is this true, or am I misremembering? Now, the greedy bastards manage to charge you a subscription, and push ads.

I remember the Evening Press well. It used to be a great paper, and was always bought in our home rather than those Blueshirt comics. However, in its final years it was nothing more than an advertising sheet with very little quality news and loads of ads. It was, at the time, plainly dying. Subscription TV and its reality/vacuous/commercial "sport" stuff is about right there now. There are more quality ways to unwind/be distracted on an evening.