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Never Playing It Safe 

My maternal grandfather died eight months before I was born. He was 57. I was reminded of this recently when Charlie Bird mentioned him an Irish Times article about the recent agitation in RTE. He got his name wrong in his report, but I knew who he meant.

Jack Dowling was a heavy thinker. Some would say he had a think problem. He spent all his money on the think, buying what amounted in the end to a private library of books and giving his wife and children some pretty hairy financial times along the way. He had been an army man, before the think got him. He was a great believer in modern technology, and believed that computers (or business machines as they were then known) would eventually change all areas of work.

He turned to philosophy, and fell in with certain sections of the Jesuits. My grandmother told me that when stuck for any better final argument, he would fall back on Saint Paul's assertion that in disagreements between a man and his wife the woman must defer to the man. Her response to this was less than convinced.

Then one day a unique thing happened. An intelligent man, suited for apparently nothing in particular in the world of work suddenly found an entire industry created overnight with a desperate need for people with exactly his skills. The government of the day established a national television station and advertised for staff. Central to these needs were producers. In RTE, the Producer not only organised the programme, but had to invent it as well. This required people who had to mingle military levels of organisation and improvisation with an ability for ongoing creative and original thought. He stepped into a post he had been unknowingly preparing for his entire life.

I know almost nothing of my grandfather's early programming experiences. He doesn't let much slip personally in 'Sit Down and be Counted', the book he wrote with Lelia Doolan and Bob Quinn. I know that he was involved in religious programmes, one of the areas in RTE, then and now, outside the interest of what I always thought of as the Committee for Preventing Good Stuff. In his book he refers to the Management with the same kind of tone.

His ability to coax interviews on weighty topics from monks sitting in studios filled with frantic, understaffed activity must have impressed someone, as he was later moved to a post producing socially improving programmes. At this time, programmes which merely entertained could not be permitted. Every piece of home-grown output had to have a clear social value. So, under cover of providing Irish housewives with frugal tips for thrifty living, Home Truths was born. It was in fact a subversive piece of socialism besmirching the national consciousness. Not that many people watching it would have noticed.

Home Truths was a consumer programme, on a channel funded significantly by advertising. It warned against shoddy goods and it investigated the kinds of casual frauds perpetrated in almost every corner of the retail world at the time. It did this in a manner pleasing to the viewer's sense of the dramatic. Its most celebrated image was of the female presenter holding up a fish, and gradually chopping off pieces, representing portions of the price which were taken by middle men, until she was left with only the tail in her hand.

The same format would be used decades later in the BBC's Watchdog programme. The difference there was that the BBC never had to worry that the Fishmonger's Guild would threaten to withdraw its advertising.

RTE was established using a bastard finance method. It was to be independent of the government, but overseen by an Authority appointed by them. It was to be a public service broadcaster, but it had to make a profit. It was permitted to take monies from a licence fee, but the fee level was set deliberately low so as to make it reliant on advertising to survive. And it was that impossible balancing act which ensured that Home Truths was silenced following complaints from advertisers. Even those who had not yet been investigated were disturbed by the notion that their money could be used to fund such a dangerously loose cannon. Eventually the Controller of programmes protested that Home Truths was costing the station money. While nothing the programme said was untrue, he said, the station could not afford to expose the kind of truth the programme was transmitting. Jack refused to compromise and was supported by Mary Murphy, the programme's presenter. He was moved to Art programmes, and her contract wasn't renewed.

After this commercial interference in the making of a socially useful programme, Jack made common cause with Lelia Doolan, who had been producing 7 Days, an Ur-Prime Time. Her difficulties stemmed from interference from the other paymaster in RTE, the Government.

The News team had decided that they weren't really able to report on one of the biggest stories of the day, the Vietnam War, because all their information was coming from sources whose agendas they might not share. So they decided to fly out there themselves and film what they found. When he heard about this , the Minister for Foreign Affairs was sent scrambling for the phone to the RTE Authority. A few words in the right ears and the crew were pulled off the plane and sent back to RTE headquarters in Montrose. After all, we didn't want to upset the Americans by butting in on their war.

Answering criticism of this, Sean Lemass rejected "the view that RTE should be, either generally or in regard to its current affairs programmes and news programmes, completely independent of Government supervision." 7 Days responded with a week of programmes on Government interference in broadcasting around the world. It didn't endear them to Lemass or his ministers.

It all might have degenerated into nothing more than office politics and departmental turf wars if Jack hadn't had his thinking problem. He saw the difficulties that he and others had had as symptoms of a bigger problem. The original Act under which RTE was established had been fatally flawed. A government would never be able to resist the temptation to interfere in the internal workings of something as powerful as a national television station, and any station reliant on advertising to pay for its programmes would be unable to meet its obligation to fully and freely inform the public.

At base, of course, Jack was a romantic. He felt that Irish culture was unique and that RTE represented the best opportunity to preserve and develop that culture for the nation's people. The Late Late Show has been described as the nation talking to itself, but he passionately believed that the entire output should represent that kind of dialogue. It was this passion which drove the resistance he led to what he saw as a betrayal of Ireland's need for an independent, creatively free broadcaster. What he might not have be able to see is that the nods and winks, the political clientism he fought against were as much a part of the nation's culture as anything else.

What he did see was that the control to be exercised over the creative staff in RTE would come in the form of a deadening bureaucracy, designed to separate and stifle the dissenting, dangerous voices which had emerged then and might re-emerge in the future. He warned that this would result in a numbingly mediocre programme schedule. With nobody taking any risks, and originality quashed by the need to only do what had been done before, he saw a future of trivial and derivative programmes.

Looking back on RTE's output between Jack's eventual resignation (he refused to silently endorse what he saw as a betrayal of the nation's culture) and now, it is clear that his insights were correct. The explosion of creativity which characterised its early years were replaced by a dully conservative flow of inanity. As I grew up, people who only had RTE, who lived in two channel land, were to be pitied. It has only been in recent years that the channel has let new ideas crack through the surface and make it to the screen. Jack resigned from RTE in May 1969. It seems odd that after more than 30 years there is almost the same debate about the purpose of RTE in the public sphere, and its staff are calling meetings in the canteen again to try to formulate a sense of purpose to place in opposition to the Government's willingness to see them become another channel amongst the hundreds of commercial digital channels, showing a thousand variations of Star Trek.

Reading Sit Down and be Counted now is a painful exercise, as the tightly controlled rage at injustice and wasted opportunity burns off the page. It is more painful knowing that Jack would die of cancer six years later. He had smoked since his early teens, but it difficult to dismiss the idea that the events of those times and the fury he would have felt at the way the organisation sacrificed some of its most imaginative programme makers to ensure the survival of a bureaucracy played no part in his illness.

Trying to write this, I was struck by the difficulties in recreating a sense of a person you've never met. It is like coming into a room where there are signs of a massive struggle. You see iron bars bent and furniture smashed and have to try to imagine the forces which could have done it. Jack was influential in shaping the arguments and thinking of a group of people including Eoghan Harris and Lelia Doolan. Neither of these have characters you can easily imagine as followers. It is strange to think that a man who had that force of character could become a misprint in a newspaper article.

Digital television means an explosion of new viewing choices. But it also means a significant increase in the ability to take risks with programmes. When your audiences are smaller anyway, you can afford to give a programme a chance to work. But only if you have enough money to commission programmes, and for that the station believes that it has to persuade a hostile government to cough up with extra licence fee money. It seems odd that after all those years of behaving themselves that RTE find that they are to be rewarded by being kept on an even tighter leash than ever before. It would make me wonder how things might have been different, if things had taken a different course, a life-time ago.

To see this article as it appeared in the Irish Times click here

by Simon McGarr
27th August 2001

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