In Douglas Hyde's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, we find the story of "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse". Teig is carrying a corpse on his back to bury it, when the corpse speaks.
"What's that?" said Teig, and the sweat running from his forehead. "Who spoke to me?"
"It's I, the corpse, that spoke to you," said the voice.
"Can you talk?" said Teig.
"Now and again," said the corpse.
It is not the wonder of a speaking corpse that engages me. Rather, it is the grim certainty that, if asked whether it could talk, no other corpse but an Irish one would reply, "Now and again."
In those words are the half-revelation and all the cunning of a certain breed of Irishman, an outsider even unto the grave. He brings to mind words from an Honor Tracy novel about Irish fellows "sitting at the crossroads, of a Sunday, waiting for cars to crash". It is this slant-eyed view of life, this "now-and-again" class of interplay, that occurs on the set of the "Irish" version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? - as "Irish" as any other copycat production of the programme, anywhere else on our shrivelling planet.
Quizmaster
The contestants are cast as speaking corpses, lumbered on Gay Byrne. And the quizmaster is cast as Teig O'Kane, searching in the dark for a grave in which to bury them - except when he is playing brother Al, sage head of the family, known to older RTE viewers for the steadiness of his ways under the lights.
Gay Byrne is hog-tied on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Hog-tied by the format, devised and rigidly controlled by those who own it; hog-tied by the formatted language he must use; hog-tied by the studio layout and impedimenta which consign him to the circular path of the caged tiger; hog-tied by everything that runs counter to the tiniest quiver of originality or spontaneity or "Irishness". Such are the torpid devices of globalized television culture, increasingly espoused by RTE.
RTE acquired the programme, Byrne says, when he took lunch in London with Colman Hutchinson (we remember him, don't we?). After lunch, in Byrne's words, he "rang Joe Mulholland, who was then controller of programmes at RTE . . ." All fine and dandy, except that Mulholland sported the title of managing director, television - on which a retired senior RTE executive commented, in my hearing, "How can one be MD of an institution with no shareholders?" Mystified, I can only pass on the question.
Mr Byrne was not "pitching" for the programme, he said. "It doesn't matter who's across it, as long as we're doing it."
Vogue words
"Across it." Where did that locution come from? Out of that garbage-can of cliche and cant and jargon and vogue words that you hear, nowadays, when you tune into RTE - from talk shows to newsroom to continuity. Listen to some of them: "Chill out." "Downsize." "Tad." "Media" and "criteria" used as if they were singular. And let us not forget "brokering" when they mean "broking". As for "injuncted", try explaining that "enjoined" is the word and see where it gets you. RTE doesn't give a rattling damn about language any more.
Anyway, Mr Byrne passed on the word that Millionaire was available - not just available but avid - and that same spirit of trendiness and sloppy thinking that gave us amateur weather forecasters (unceremoniously relegated after a popular uprising) went into action. Soon, in Mr Byrne's words, "Eircell came on board."
In those words we have the key to the whole enterprise. With commercial sponsors "on board" there can be an exact copy of Millionaire for everyone in the globalised audience. "Your final answer?" the Babel voice asks, from oil-soaked Dallas to desiccated Timbuktu. "Can I ask the audience?" the pole-axed contestant gasps, in whatever language, in whatever democratic or pseudo-democratic or non-democratic corner of the commercialised world. "Take your time," say Chris Tarrant and Gay Byrne and all the world-wide presenters. "There's no hurry." Which means: "We have the sponsorship `on board' and everything is tickety-boo. All I'm doing is waiting for you to commit yourself, so that I may go into a break at the commercially most acute moment in this daft money-spinning game. And how - as we say - is your father?"
On his own
According to mythology, Gay Byrne always defers to big brother Al when the chips are down. But when he stands between the jaws of the set - which look like a broken, Ozymandian mock-up of the Colossus at Rhodes - he is grimly on his own. And when he asks contestants to put four items in reverse order of size, or time, or age, or whatever, there is a glazed look in his eye. He is clearly not at ease. As he knows better than most, the camera gives the game away.
Gay Byrne is shrewd, according to those who know him at close quarters. If that be so, then he must perceive that Millionaire is a prefabricated piece of multinational junk television, accorded him by vain trendies in RTE who take off down the road after every passing caravan, like Leannamachree's dog. How safe in their hands is the soul of Ireland?
Writing about Douglas Hyde, Yeats quotes an old saying: "The lake is not burdened by its swan, a steed by its bridle, or a man by the soul that is in him."
Amplified by RTE, a message is tom-tommed from the heart of darkness: "Mistah Hyde - he dead."