Gunnar Rugheimer: Gunnar Rugheimer, who died on February 21st, on the eve of his 80th birthday, will be remembered as an innovative controller of programmes in the early days of Telefís Éireann who resisted political and church pressures in establishing current affairs as part of the station's output.
He was also responsible for head-hunting Gay Byrne, then in British TV, to host the Late Late Show, which was to cause him and his director-general, Kevin McCourt, many headaches with the powers-that-be. He also faced some resentment that a non-national should hold such an influential position in the national television service and he left the post after less than four years.
Contemporaries recall him as good-humoured, courageous, independent and tough as he worked with limited resources to build up the service in face of competition from the BBC and ITV, whose programmes could be received along the east coast. In 1987, Rugheimer, in an interview, described his time at Montrose as like "running a four-minute mile twice before breakfast every day". After Canadian TV, he had found the Ireland of the early 1960s an introverted, conservative environment.
He told the interviewer: "I seem to have been running a gauntlet of all sorts of Establishment problems, with especially, at one stage, the then archbishop of Dublin who was very prone to interference, and with politicians who all wanted to interfere themselves and deny their opponents the opportunity to interfere."
It took him over two years to persuade politicians to appear on programmes where they would be questioned by interviewers. This was simply not the culture of the time.
He and Muiris MacConghail brought the political journalist, John Healy, into television to present Hurler on the Ditch, where other journalists discussed politics. This was followed by Division, where party spokesmen at last agreed to appear. This developed into the current affairs programme, 7 Days.
Gunnar Rugheimer was born in Sweden on February 23rd, 1923. His parents were Jewish and involved in a successful hat-making industry. He became a Lutheran and remained a committed Christian.
He did not complete his university studies in Stockholm and went to Helsinki during the second World War to be a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and where he helped smuggle Polish prisoners of war being used as slave labour out of Finland.
In the immediate post-war period he worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in northern Germany. In 1947, he went to Canada and worked first in radio and then for the Swedish service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He became director of programmes for the CBC English television network. He married a Canadian, Gillian Hessey-White, and they had three children, Iain, Bryony and Nigel. He left for London in 1960 to take up the post of European head of sales for MCA/Universal.
In 1963 he was appointed controller of programmes at Telefís Éireann, arriving shortly before the visit of President Kennedy for which he arranged for several outside broadcast units to be hired. He experimented with "vertical planning", also called "thematic" television, whereby a single topic would dominate on different evenings. It was an idea which would be taken up 20 years later by BBC 2 and Channel Four but did not work for long in single-channel Ireland. And he got broadcasting out of the studios at Montrose and down among the people. Rural programmes from Shinrone, Co Offaly, using electronic cameras, were the forerunner of the highly successful location filming of The Riordans.
He gave Gay Byrne and his director, Adrian Cronin, freedom to make The Late Late Show controversial as well as entertaining. Although he at first thought the famous "Bishop and the Nightie" incident hilarious he was forced to apologise to Bishop Thomas Ryan of Clonfert when the full weight of clerical indignation was felt.
He also felt pressure from the Irish language lobby which wanted bilingualism in the more successful programmes. While sympathetic to the call for more Irish on television, he was firmly opposed to bilingual programmes which he called "a disaster - they're neither good in English nor in Irish".
He also knocked down the notion that Irish loquaciousness meant great TV talent. "This is one of the great fallacies I came across in Ireland, that there were deposits of talent which were just ready to be mined."
In 1966, the actors' union, Equity, called for the appointment of an Irishman as controller. Eamonn Andrews resigned as chairman of TÉ the following month - tired, it is said, of the criticism from the Irish language lobby. Rugheimer left at the end of the year to become consultant to the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation. He said he had enjoyed his time in Ireland. He liked to sail and fish. One of his sailing companions was Charles Haughey, then a minister.
In 1970 Gunnar Rugheimer joined the BBC as head of purchased programmes and went on to become controller of direct broadcasting by satellite. He was remarried in 1978, to Ingrid Stahl. He went on to work as executive chairman of the Home Video Channel, in his own consultancy, and in British Satellite Broadcasting. In his later years, he became involved in laryngology.
He is survived by his first wife, Gillian, his second wife, Ingrid, his son, Iain, and his sister, Ulla. There will be a memorial service on May 2nd in the Swedish Church, 6 Harcourt Street, London, at 2 p.m.
Gunnar Rugheimer: born February 22nd, 1924; died February 21st, 2003