Seamus Heaney wrote down an old story about the art of joke-telling. A group of people tell the same jokes to each other so often they decide to use numbers instead of going through the whole shebang from scratch. "Eleven," somebody says, and everybody laughs."
An outsider arrives and wonders at the hilarity each time a number is called. They explain, so he tries it out himself. "Eleven," he cries out, and nobody laughs. "And why?" writes Heaney, "because, as one of the non-laughers explains, it was the way he told it."
Heaney uses this tale as a parable about why the most powerful art is the least literal. "The fact of the matter," he says, "is that much art does little else than call the numbers - and with about as much success as the newcomer in the story. You end up . . . saying yeah, yeah, yeah rather than exclaiming with Molly Bloom-like ardour yes, yes, yes."
Those yeah-yeahs have greeted most of RTE's recent attempts to mediate any and all works of the imagination. Like the joke the outsider tells, the programmes succeed in finding the subject without hitting the target. New grange? Eleven. Messiah? Eleven. Millennium Show? Yeah, yeah, we got it, but we're not about to laugh.
I remembered Heaney's "Eleven" while standing on top of two telephone directories in the Natural History Museum last week. It was the last shoot of the last Cursai Ealaine; D'Unbelievables had been engaging in fortune-telling about Us and Our Future, and I had just been called to "folly that". (The phone books were intended to help me mimic a garda's height, which in turn created a better camera shot.)
Inside those books lay the Holy Grail for RTE executives: A-Z lists of TAM-producing viewers who could endow ratings, give approval and dig the institution out of the hole it seems to feel we've placed it in. It's in their names that RTE has cancelled all its arts programming, without having a new segment ready to go. As a contributor, I will lose out, so there's my vested interest. As a viewer, I'll lose even more.
Through some alchemical process, arts and culture programmes have been determined as unsuitable to viewers' needs. You can maintain some rock and film shows because huge marketing budgets from the commercial sector help build audience shares that make you feel safe. Otherwise the spirit of Mr McCreevy's first version of the current Budget holds true: if it don't talk politics or economics, it just can't sing.
ALL television programmes have their day - some last even longer - so change is no bad thing in itself. But arguments made in support of other RTE decisions simply don't hold true for the removal of virtually all arts TV programming. For a start, there is no competition.
If you are interested in the work of a writer like Anne Enright, an artist like Kathy Prendergast or a musician like Gerald Barry, you are practically guaranteed not to hear about them elsewhere in multi-channel land. Such artists haven't reached the near bullet-proof status of a Frank McCourt - and may not want to.
Even the term "public service broadcaster" is starting to sound exhausted. RTE is a trustee of the living arts, not a patron of them, but having-its-cake-and-eating-it means RTE can decide when and how it exercises this role. If TV3 announced a series of 15-minute segments on aspects of the Irish imagination, aka in 20th century parlance the Irish soul, RTE would doubtless discover itself as a major imaginative provider. If TV3 were then to pioneer a way of making arts programming which kicked out RTE's habitual need to fill in the dots, even when no one can see them, RTE would counter instantly with a series that let silence speak without feeling the need to gabble right through it.
What is it about contemporary art and artists that makes RTE so nervous? In Heaney's sense, the best of their work is neither literal nor expository, which could be why it gives the programmers such jitters. Good contemporary writing or art or music won't hit you over the head with a definitive answer to life as we don't know it, and won't illustrate a thesis about sectarianism in Northern Ireland or why republican socialism did matter all along. Bad stuff will.
In this safe new world, where nothing is worthwhile unless it has been proven, second-guessing must become the order of the day. Ask not what you can do for your culture, ask what you think your culture can do for you.
If the answer is not clear, as it can't be, copy the nearest idea to hand. So if the dominant public perception is of a changing place, with changing tastes and appetites, don't trust anyone's instincts about new ideas and new ways of working (that means risk), settle for the oldest solution around.
Which returns us to the arts. In the happening world, even the Government has made the arts a political and financial priority. I use the word "even" not to disrespect it, but to emphasise that public policy is one of the last indicators of how a culture moves. Thus, if the energy and professionalism have stretched that far, we can conclude that the arts phenomenon is real. More than 25,000 people now work in the arts and arts-related industry, supporting a culture whose vitality has other countries asking how?
Some day someone will decide their work makes worthwhile home-produced television, but until their version becomes part of a canon, it's unlikely we'll get to hear about it in mainstream television land - at which stage, RTE may decide to commission a documentary, which is to public service broadcasting what closing the stable door is to bolting horses.
You won't find the answer to the question "What do viewers really want?" in the phone book even if you manage to contact every single person listed there. Numbers only get you so far. Even if by some alchemical process you did manage to work them out, add them up, subtract them, perform a cost-benefit analysis and publish a three-year plan, you still risk cracking that old joke about "eleven" and finding no one gets the punch-line.
e-mail: mruane@irish-times.ie