Ithas been estimated that up to two million people will go to see the relics of St ThΘrΦse of Lisieux, which are currently on tour in Ireland.
Independent production company Power Pictures has been filming the tour for an RT╔ documentary, since the relics left Lisieux in France on Easter weekend. The relics are about halfway through the programme of 77 venues and the crew has to date been filming in towns and villages in Wexford, Wicklow, Dublin, Kildare, Belfast, Tyrone, Derry and Donegal. As well as filming the journey itself, director Niamh Walsh is looking for stories from members of the public about what St ThΘrΦse and the tour of her relics means to them.
Anyone wishing to share their stories with the film-makers can contact the production office in Galway on 091-569 707 or e-mail powerpix@iol.ie
The Cork-based writer, Bill Murphy, has won the top prize of £2,000 in the inaugural BBC Northern Ireland Tony Doyle Bursary Awards. His winning entry, Voyage Of The Antelope, has also recently received development funding from the Irish Film Board. The bursary was launched in memory of the late actor Tony Doyle, who starred in numerous television dramas including Ballykissangel and Amongst Women. The aim of the bursary is to encourage Irish writing for television and to forge creative links between broadcasters and writers in Ireland.
Prolific American novelist, playwright, and essayist Gore Vidal is the featured author in this week's Imprint - Writers in Profile. In a wide-ranging interview with presenter Theo Dorgan, the controversial author talks about writing, the US and himself. Vidal grew up in Washington among the social and political Θlite, and has said his upbringing left him well-equipped to attack the system from within. His love-hate relationship with the US is well-documented and he warns Europe to be very suspicious of his country and to steer clear of NATO.
On his writing, Vidal tells Theo Dorgan "Most novelists...seem to write about victims, from the point of view of victims, presumably for other victims to read. I thought it might be more interesting and even more instructive to write about the victimisers because I know them a lot better than I know the victims."
Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining Vidal's contentious decision to attend Monday's scheduled execution of Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, with whom he has been in correspondence for some time. Imprint - Gore Vidal in Profile is made by independent production company Loopline and will be shown on RT╔1 on Tuesday at 11 p.m.
THE BBC is tonight devoting an evening to the phenomenon of text messaging, with a mixture of live entertainment and true stories on BBC1 and the website BBC Online. It kicks off at 8.30p.m. with a live show, The Joy Of Text, which aims to set a new record for the world's fastest written book. Presented by Ulrika Jonsson, the show will encourage viewers to contribute text messages, which will be edited together to create a book. The Beeb has teamed up with mobile phone companies to use groundbreaking new technology that will allow a huge number of messages to be received simultaneously. The publisher of the book claims the manuscript will be completed in a manner of seconds. The book, also called The Joy Of Text, will be published by Corgi paperbacks later this month. The text theme continues on BBC1 with Text Maniacs at 8.55p.m. and X-text at 10.30p.m.
ITV IS to scale back its reality-TV show Survivor to one episode a week because of disappointing ratings. The show, which ITV executives had expected to pull in ratings of over 10 million viewers per episode in the UK, has seen its figures steadily decline since it began three weeks ago. At the moment, ITV is screening two hour-long episodes of Survivor a week. The heavily-hyped programme was expected to be one of the station's top-rating shows this year and cost over £9 million sterling to make.
RT╔'s new comedy resource website, "Raw Talent", which was initially expected to be launched last week (Broadcast News, June 2nd), will now be launched on Wednesday, June 13th. The site is designed to help anyone interested in writing or submitting comedy to RTE and can be accessed from the RTE homepage, www.rte.ie