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Letters
Colm McCarthy comments on screenwriter Tony
Philpott's article Television Sucks (Film Ireland
96). Read the article in full here.
Colm McCarthy
c/o Fantastic Films
4 Windmill Lane
Dublin 2
+353 87 232 1107
colm@prodigyfilm.com
Dear editor,
I have never written to a magazine or newspaper
before in my life, however, I feel that I have to vent after
reading the article Television Sucks by Tony Philpott
in this month's Film Ireland. I am surprised that an
article so bitter and personal was given space in your magazine.
In a commissioning round that has seen RTÉ finance
three new and all very different drama series (Proof, The Clinic and The Big Bow Wow - on which project
I was lucky enough to work as a director), I think we are
seeing the most exciting time for Irish television drama in
decades. Yet reading the article you would believe that the
only Irish drama was Fair City. Fair City is
not my cup of tea, just as it is clearly not Tony's, but it
is there to serve an appetite amongst the RTÉ viewers,
one that it must be satisfying to some extent or people wouldn't
watch. There are after all alternatives. Three series of Bachelors
Walk have greeted our screens in recent years. Still not
smart enough Tony?
The thing that really got my goat, however,
was the grumpy old man style of the article. Harking back
to a "golden age" of television is extreme folly.
Most television has always been crap. The Black and White
Minstrel Show, anyone? Spot of Bullseye? Come
Dancing. In the name of sweet baby Jesus, nothing could
ever be as bad as Come Dancing.
Great television that breaks the rules is rare,
mostly because it is very hard to achieve. The reason that
we all remember Boys From The Blackstuff, Twin Peaks, Cracker etc. is because these programmes were shocking
when they appeared (not just in content, but in how they were
executed). Recently enough we've seen Queer As Folk, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos becoming big
hits from left field. All of these are intelligently written
and display bravely articulate storytelling.
Then Tony starts in on reality television. Well,
certainly there is a lot of crap in that particular field.
We live in a consumer society and have done for a long time.
If somebody finds something that sells, they sell it. There
is nothing new here. Gameshows have illustrated this since
the dawn of television. So why do people want reality television?
Well there are big sociological reasons I am sure, but mostly
because some of it is really entertaining. I personally found Faking It and Wife Swap great television. What
these programmes are NOT indicative of, however, is lack of
balls or imagination on the side of broadcasters. Channel
4 might not be the insane anarchists of the television world
that they once were, but at the moment they are screening
a comedy/drama series (Peep Show) where the entire
programme is shot in constantly shifting point-of-view shots,
we are always seeing the world through a characters eyes and
we hear that character's thoughts in voice over while we are
in their head. This is, so far as I know, a completely new
way of doing television drama, and whilst I wasn't mad about
the result, I thought the balls displayed in executing something
so fresh were admirable.
I really think television is as good as it ever
was. Perhaps the thing that has impacted recently most on
the medium is digital broadcasting. Multiple channels means
that broad entertainment channels are less likely to show
diverse or specialised programming and this is a shame for
those (like me) yet to get a full digital package. BBC has
put most of its arts programming onto its arts channel. There
is still good programming of this type in the schedule, however
(an excellent documentary about Rodin's Kiss kept me
from washing the dishes the other night). If Tony is really
finding it hard to discover television to identify with perhaps
I could direct him to one of BBC's recent docu-tainment series
- Grumpy Old Men.
Regards,
Colm McCarthy
If you would like to voice an opinion about
any aspect of Irish film culture, please e-mail letters@filmireland.net
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