A senior RTE executive admitted yesterday that its live television broadcast of the winter solstice at Newgrange might have been spoiled for viewers by "too much chatting".
The head of millennium programming at the station, Mr Peter Feeney, made his comments after RTE was inundated with calls from viewers angered that live pictures of the solstice sunshine from inside the neolithic tomb had been repeatedly interrupted.
RTE interspersed live coverage of the sun shining through the roof box in the 5,000-year-old burial mound with music and interviews with archaeologists, a visual artist and a Scottish Buddhist monk.
Mr Feeney admitted that the station had received more than 100 complaints from members of the public after the broadcast yesterday morning. He said staff at the station had been surprised by the number of calls from people "who were not cranks at all".
He told The Irish Times yesterday afternoon: "Maybe they are right, maybe we should have shown more from inside the chamber . . . Maybe we had too much chatting. Absolute purists would have wanted complete silence for 17 minutes, but in television terms there is no such thing as 17 minutes of silence."
However, Mr Feeney later played down the significance of the complaints after the station broadcast a statement blaming a shift in the Earth's axis over the 5,000 years since the mound was constructed for the disappointment experienced by viewers.
He said that the people who complained might have been a very small group who were familiar with Newgrange. He said that he "wouldn't apologise for anything".
Viewers were told before a second transmission of the broadcast yesterday evening: "After this morning's live transmission we received a lot of phone calls from viewers who expected to see the chamber at the end of the passageway illuminated. We'd like to point out that, as the Earth's axis has been shifting over the last 5,000 years, the shaft of sunlight that comes into the passageway doesn't actually reach as far as the end. It stops short of the chamber.
"We do hope that this doesn't spoil your enjoyment of the otherwise spectacular millennium dawn."
