Resistance to the box in the corner proved futile for politicians who came to see it less as a threat than an opportunity
A 1960s film sequence found in the RTÉ archives and included in Battle Station shows politicians visiting the television studios for a familiarisation tour: they look as mystified as a group of schoolboys on an outing to an archaeological site.
Like politicians in most western democracies at the time, they were in awe of a medium that experts were predicting would transform the nature and style of political communication.
On television it was a speaker’s bearing, gestures and mannerisms that mattered: everything came down to the viewer’s personal assessment of the calibre and trustworthiness of the politician on the screen.
Television, the warning then went, held particular terrors for politicians. Harold Macmillan had famously likened the studio to a torture chamber. In an early broadcast he introduced the audience to the instruments of torture – “the camera’s hot, probing eye”, which he had been advised to ignore, while imagining himself talking in one viewer’s sitting room.
Television was also winning a reputation for being a potential game-changer. There was a widespread belief that in the US presidential election in 1960, Nixon lost the TV debates with Kennedy because nobody had advised him to shave just before the broadcasts.
Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow” had alienated viewers, while listeners to radio had reckoned him the winner. And had not Kennedy given a telling verdict on television’s impact? “We wouldn’t have had a prayer without that gadget.”
“That gadget” was about to begin its transformation of Ireland. Of course the sheltered country of the 1950s was already destined to change, but television greatly accelerated that change and the Irish establishment who were so dominant in 1960 – whether politicians, churchmen or Gaelgeoirs – scarcely saw it coming.
What they failed above all to appreciate was the democratising effect of the medium itself. Television abhorred the status quo. The Late Late Show made its extraordinary contribution to Irish life by invariably preferring the challenger, the dissenter, even the heretic.
Seán Lemass had shown little interest in television’s probable impact. When his government had initially decided not to exercise “direct control”, it had appreciated the “calculated risk” involved. And he sometimes warned that he would not be averse – if pushed – to revisit the legislation under which the new service had been established.
Lemass was in a hurry. He had inherited power late, sensed that his health was not good and was attempting to transform de Valera’s Ireland into a modern, open economy. He expected the new station to offer support, not a critical evaluation of his efforts.
A regular viewer in the early years, he became ever grumpier at what he thought were too many cranks and whingers on the box: it was time, he said, for RTÉ “to take the whine out of their voice”.
Another dissatisfied member of the Irish establishment, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, sought a meeting with Lemass to complain about personnel at the station. The gap between the cosmopolitan culture at Montrose and the narrowness of the Irish political establishment is reflected in the account that Lemass’s press secretary, Pádraig Ó hAnracháin, prepared for the taoiseach in the wake of this meeting.
McQuaid – accompanied by Archbishop Thomas Morris of Cashel – had brought a blacklist of broadcasters whom they considered especially dangerous.
Ó hAnracháin was instructed to make inquiries. He reported back to Lemass that Jack White – then head of public affairs at the station – was an individual with no “firm beliefs about anything” and who would “think of Ireland as a place where those, like himself, who are ‘liberal’ in outlook must suffer as best they may”. Ó hAnracháin’s impression of Proinsías Mac Aonghusa was that, of those mentioned on the bishop’s blacklist, he was “undoubtedly the most undesirable generally”.
And his report concluded that he reckoned it “amazing indeed that such a rare crew as those mentioned – and some others – could get such a toehold in Telefís Éireann in so short a time”.
But that “rare crew” were just a few among a highly talented group of pioneering broadcasters who, because of competition from British channels, had to deliver a programme schedule far more ambitious than comparable start-up stations elsewhere.
What Lemass failed to appreciate was that television would prove to be his greatest ally in modernising Ireland. He seemed unaware that the public thoroughly approved of the incremental expansion by RTÉ of an ever more independent role. Any threat to revisit the legislation was too late. Viewers – although some could complain about rude questioning – particularly approved of television’s ability to hold politicians to account.
The two Battle Station documentaries reveal these early power struggles between the broadcasters and those politicians who thought of RTÉ as “an instrument of public policy” and expected it to be a cheerleader for government.
Perhaps a tipping point was the altercation in 1967 between the incoming director general, Tom Hardiman, and Charles Haughey, the then minister for finance.
Haughey had sought Hardiman out and proceeded to complain about “left-wingers” in Montrose “who didn’t know their place”. The station should stick to entertainment.
Hardiman – who relates the encounter in these documentaries – found himself grabbing the lapels of Haughey’s suit to tell him he was “a Christian Brothers boy like yourself” and would carry out his duties in accordance with the Broadcasting Act.
The documentaries also explore the tensions over Northern Ireland.
In their contributions, Gerry Collins and Desmond O’Malley do not hide the contempt that the Lynch cabinet reserved for RTÉ’s initial inclusion of IRA voices in its Northern coverage. Their response through section 31 and the ensuing debate is covered, as are the accusations of a Workers’ Party bias at the station in the 1980s.
Younger viewers will be bemused by how the infamous “Bishop and the Nightie” debacle was handled on the Late Late Show. Now long forgotten, the programmes include an archive recording of the exchanges that so offended the bishop of Clonfert.
Many of these controversies are now confined to history. But, of course, the documentaries also bring the story up to date, covering the crisis at the station arising from last year’s Prime Time Investigates libel.
Perhaps nothing captures more the change in the relationship between politicians and broadcasters than the fact that when Ryan Tubridy presented his first Late Late Show in September 2009, his first guest was the then taoiseach, Brian Cowen.
Some 42 years before, in November 1967, Gay Byrne had telephoned the taoiseach’s office requesting a meeting with Jack Lynch to discuss the possibility of ministers appearing on The Late Late Show.
The archives show that Lynch treated the approach with disdain, objecting that any such suggestion had even been made to his office.
Interviewed for these documentaries Gerry Collins recalled that in those years, ministers would give no consideration to appearing “on a talk show as it would demean the office”; they failed to realise that it was”a way of communicating with the people”. For the politicians, television proved to be a case of “If you can’t beat them, join them”.
Battle Station, presented by John Bowman and produced by David Nally, will be broadcast on successive nights next week on RTÉ 1 television on Monday and Tuesday, July 23rd and 24th, at 9.35pm. JOHN BOWMANis author of Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television, 1961-2011, published by The Collins Press.