Today I enjoyed the privilege of paying my T.V. licence and it got me thinking about RTE (The sole beneficiary of this mandatory poll tax).
Now that 2012 is over, the ruins lie all around us like the suburbs of a Syrian city, and in the rubble may be seen the remains of the grisly fiction that is public-service broadcasting – not just in Ireland, but in these islands.
RTE Sports celebrated the end of the year quite superbly, switching to an advertisement for L’Oreal (because you’re worth it) just as Katie Taylor was about to accept her award for Sportsperson of the Year (because she apparently wasn’t).
Not altogether surprisingly, RTE’s head of sport, Ryle Nugent, TWEETED an apology for the station’s blunders. Rather telling – was it not? – that he should choose to communicate via what is, in essence, a rival medium. Perhaps the only way of getting noticed.
Of course, RTE knows all about tweets: its ineptitude allowed a bogus tweet to transform the presidential election totally. Had this happened in Egypt, a million people would have filled Tahrir Square. But in poor bloody Ireland, it merely caused a broken people to sigh and turn over to Chanel 5.
The quite amazing thing about RTE is that after giving redundancy packages to 420 people, some 1,800 still work there. What do they all do? TV3 manages to get by with a staff of about three, plus a couple of asylum seekers who pedal the generator and a chap with a kettle and a primus stove who manages to double as commissionaire, gardener, security guard, director-general and head of news. And frankly, I don’t care whether TV3 lives or dies: either way, it’s costing me nothing, whereas we all have to subsidise RTE’s many extravagances.
George Lee doesn’t like life in the Dail? Give him a safe berth back in Montrose! Charlie Bird is lonely in Washington? Bring him home! Marian Finucane earns more than Obama for two radio programmes a week? So what?
This cannot continue.
TO be sure, within the broader RTE stable, TG4 has done brilliantly well; its location in Connemara, away from the sinks and stews of Montrose, is clearly justified (and thereby utterly disproving my criticisms of its siting when it was first started). But overall, RTE’s programming returns are far too small for the licence fee that we pay.
Meanwhile, the broadcasting market place is corrupted hopelessly both by these subsidies and by the unique cultural and political power that RTE thus enjoys. But where are the politicians that have the vision and the courage to do the historically overdue thing and to privatise RTE completely? Well, they’re about as invisible as Katie Taylor was when she received her award as RTE Sportsperson of the Year.
So, Happy new year to PK, RT and the rest. There is another €160.00 in the pot
