with Michael Wolsey
What is the point of UTV Ireland? What, apart from another channel, has it added to the scope or scale of Irish television? The first question is a matter for debate. The answer to the second is that, like its Ulster Television parent, it has contributed little or nothing of substance. I was a child in Belfast when Ulster Television was launched in 1959. The highlight of its home-produced content was a programme called Tea Time With Tommy in which a man called Tommy James played requests on the piano. Sometimes the viewers got to appear on the show and do a bit of performing on their own account but the main attraction was in having your name broadcast on television. It would have been cheaper if Tommy had read out the telephone directory. And just as entertaining. Those were simpler times, of course. But not so simple that playing requests on a piano would ever have been regarded as cutting-edge television.
Ulster Television was part of the Britain’s independent television network, a confederation of stations for the regions of the United Kingdom. They have now mostly been subsumed into a company called ITV plc. But originally, and for many years, they were separate entities with such names as Granada, which served the north west of England, Tyne Tees Television (for the north east) Anglia (for the east) and Associated-Rediffusion which served London. They each supplied some local content – news, current affairs, a bit of light entertainment – and competed at providing programmes that would be broadcast across the entire network. And excellent programmes some of them were. Granada is probably best known as the home of Coronation Street but the station has also give us such fine dramas as Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown and Cold Feet and some of the very best TV crime fiction, including Prime Suspect and Cracker.
Yorkshire Television gave us A Touch of Frost. Associated had a huge hit with The Avengers. Thames gave us The Bill, repeats of which are still running on a number of channels. ATV produced The Muppets, a series that crossed the boundary between adult and children’s broadcasting more successfully than any before or since. The company names have mostly gone – Ulster is one of the few survivors – but the tradition of regional programme-making lives on. Check out any successful ITV programme and you will invariably find that, if it hasn’t been bought in from America, it has been made by one of the network companies or its successor. You won’t find much mention of Ulster Television on that list. Indeed, except for a quiz show called Password and a few co-productions with other ITV companies and RTE, you won’t find it mentioned at all.
While other companies were making the likes of Queer as Folk and Dr Zhivago for the network, UTV was delighting us with a man playing requests on the piano and a number of programmes of the Down Your Way type where a TV crew would patronise the residents of some small town or village. UTV became a success in Northern Ireland not because of the programmes it made but because of the programmes it aired, which somebody else had made. If you wanted to watch ITV, Ulster Television was the only way to go. When the company’s signal became accessible south of the border, the same rule applied. If you wanted to watch ITV then, by and large, Ulster Television was the route you had to take.
When the company launched UTV Ireland, I assumed it would be providing something different – a stand-alone television station which would at least attempt to rival RTE and TV3. Instead it has stuck with the Ulster formula of British network programmes interspersed with some local news and current affairs. The schedules of UTV and UTV Ireland hardly differ and the few variations seem to have been chosen randomly, not selected for an Irish audience. For instance, on Tuesday July 28, when UTV was showing a travel programme called A Great Welsh Adventure, UTV Ireland was showing a travel programme called Britain’s Best Canal Journeys. Later that night when UTV was showing a repeat of Murder She Wrote, UTV Ireland was showing a repeat of the Jeremy Kyle Show USA.
Since it started in January, forecast losses at UTV Ireland for 2015 have almost quadrupled to more than €16m and audience growth has stalled. Viewers who like the UTV offering are continuing to watch it direct from Belfast, as they always did. In a recent interview UTV Television’s managing director Michael Wilson mused on its problem. “I think the audience has been confused,” he told the Journal.ie.“We said we were going to offer a new station and I think some of the audience feel that they haven’t got a new station, they have got something that has been rehashed”. At least he sees the problem. Will he now provide a solution?
