As John Bowman proved, current affairs programming is essential to Irish life, writes NOEL WHELAN.
THERE WAS a queue out the door of the RTÉ make-up department on Monday night last as 14 of us lined up in preparation for our outing as panellists on the finale of Questions and Answers.
The atmosphere was giddy. We all had a sense of being part of a historic moment: the end of what, John Bowman reminded viewers, was the second-longest running RTÉ programme after The Late Late Show.
We amused ourselves while waiting by speculating who had been a panellist on the programme most often over its 23-year history. When one of the group accused me of being a contender for the top slot, I had to remind her that I was only 17 when the programme began . Questions and Answerswas more than a decade old before I made my first appearance, and that was as a questioner in the audience.
While being a panellist has been an occasional pleasure in recent years, watching Questions and Answershas been an enjoyment all of my adult life.
The programme’s strength was its topicality and the fact that it was one of the few places on TV or radio where sufficient time was given to explore issues in detail. Of course, exchanges between the panel, and even within the audience, could disintegrate into political slagging matches – but few assertions went unchallenged by an alternative perspective.
Viewers almost always got the chance to view competing propositions on three or four issues. While contributors were often challenged by Bowman and ushered on when repetitive, each got to speak, uninterrupted by a presenter’s ego.
Questions and Answersallowed space for audience participation but was, thankfully, never audience-driven. Too much of broadcast time nowadays is surrendered to open mic or vox pop-type opinionising which, while often emotionally charged, usually leaves little room for complex consideration of issues.
The Questions and Answersstudio was often the place where the week's news was set in a longer-term context. This was never more the case than in relation to Northern Ireland. A fascinating part of last Monday night's programme was the clips of Sinn Féin spokesmen trying not to condemn violence and criminality. When placed together they showed the extent to which obfuscation was part and parcel of Sinn Féin strategy.
John Bowman and the Questions and Answersproduction team were ambitious for their finale in looking back not so much at the history of the programme but at the different ways Ireland had changed in the last 23 years. Exploring recent Irish history in this way played to Bowman's strengths as a historian and broadcaster, but even with extra time and extra panellists, a single programme could only scratch the surface.
The show did throw up some interesting exchanges. The Questions and Answersarchive footage shown included the late Brian Lenihan's response when asked whether he had telephoned Áras an Uachtaráin on that famed night in 1982 when senior Fianna Fáil ministers, having just lost a vote of confidence, tried to persuade President Patrick Hillery not to dissolve the Dáil.
I had forgotten that the question was actually asked by the then chairman of young Fine Gael – and that the soon-to-be famous Jim Duffy was beside him in the audience at the time.
When Bowman sought comment on the clip from Fergus Finlay, who had been one of Mary Robinson’s campaign managers, and John Waters, who had travelled on the Lenihan campaign bus as a journalist, he ignited a fiery but frustratingly short conflict. Waters depicted the tape controversy as a tribal attack on Lenihan; Finlay saw it as Lenihan simply shooting himself in the foot.
I was a junior operative on the Lenihan campaign in 1990 and have a third perspective on those events, informed in part by a belief that the so-called "whopper" which Lenihan told was not what he said on Questions and Answers, but in fact what he told Jim Duffy on tape.
Waters also made the key point that this newspaper – in calling a press conference at which Duffy could reveal the contents of his taped conversation with Lenihan (rather than waiting to publish in its morning edition) – allowed itself to become a player in that most controversial of presidential elections, rather than an impartial observer of it.
Political junkies now wait with baited breath until September for Pat Kenny's new television incarnation. Those of us old enough to remember Today Tonightwere excited at Kenny's decision to give up The Late Lateand move back to current affairs. The informed but careful manner in which Kenny handles both breaking news and complex issues on his radio programme suggests that, if given the right format, he has the potential to join the likes of Brian Farrell and John Bowman as icons of Irish television current affairs.
It was rumoured around Montrose on Monday that Kenny's new Monday night programme would be radically different from its predecessor. There was talk of it exploiting the potential of communications tools like YouTube and Twitter. There is always room for improvement, but the enduring success of Questions and Answers, which after all still attracted 350,000-plus viewers each week, should remind us there is still an audience for old-style debate.
There are too many issues which cannot be adequately covered in a short online video clip, and there are simply too many important points which cannot be coherently made using fewer than 140 characters.