TV3: lots of Heartbeat, but there's little pulse
Saturday January 21 2006
Logging on to the TV3 website is an interesting experience. Enter the 'Media Room' and you'll find page after page of faithfully logged press releases dating as far back as New Year's Day, 2001, by which time TV3 had been on air for a little more than two-and-a-quarter years.
Taken together, they provide a useful - if uncritical - thumbnail guide to the tangled history and constantly shifting fortunes of TV3. Those fortunes are set to change again as UTV, ITV and Irish-owned Setanta Media compete to get their hands on the 45% stake in the channel that's been put up for sale by Canadian company CanWest Global.
The smart money is on ITV, which Paddy Power bookmakers quote as the 1-3 favourite to win out. ITV, which already owns a 45% share of TV3, is refusing to comment at this point.
However, it's believed that the network has pre-emption rights to the shares, meaning CanWest will have no option but to offer its stake to ITV before it can accept a bid from another party.
Becoming a 90% shareholder (the remaining 10% is still in the hands of the original TV3 consortium) would make perfect commercial sense from ITV's point of view. The network already provides the lion's share of TV3's most highly rated imported programmes - including Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Heartbeat and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! - and knows a lucrative proposition when it sees it.
And make no mistake: despite being regarded with indifference by most television reviewers and something beneath contempt by RTE, TV3 is a highly lucrative proposition.
At one point during the first series of I'm a Celebrity, the jungle-based reality show hoovered up 53% of the available audience, despite being simultaneously broadcast on UTV.
ITV will also have been heartened by the news that the only programme to disrupt RTE's dominance of the domestic viewing public during Christmas was an episode of Coronation Street on TV3, which came in at a very respectable ninth in the list of top-rated festive shows.
In a sense, the Christmas viewing figures almost define the place of TV3 in the public consciousness. Since arriving on screens with a sneer in the direction of RTE on September 20, 1998, TV3 has become part of the television furniture.
We've grown used to having it around, even if few of us ever appear to be wildly enthusiastic about it. For its own part, Ireland's only wholly commercial channel appears to have settled for this modest place in the hearts of the viewing public.
Its news programmes, which are positioned around RTE's to avoid direct competition, still lack substance but nonetheless work small miracles on even smaller budgets. Newscasters like Alan Cantwell and Claire Byrne, who filled the gap left when Grainne Seoige defected to Sky News, have proved popular with viewers, as has quirky weatherman Martin King.
TV3's single biggest and most expensive home-produced programme, the breakfast show Ireland AM, has picked up a loyal following; though the fact that it's the sole Irish occupant of a place in the market that RTE appears to have no interest in exploring may have something to do with it.
The Political Party, hosted by Ursula Halligan, is an excellent, unfairly overlooked series, while football magazine The Offside Show - hosted by Today FM's Ger Gilroy - has proved a welcome homegrown success.
But TV3's newest homegrown offering, The Brendan Courtney Show, taped on the cheap in a pub and looking it, has turned into a walking disaster. The first edition did extremely well, yet viewers have been switching off in their hundreds of thousands since. Worse still, Courtney's camp, vulgar, sub-Graham Norton style has drawn the ire of some members of the gay community.
But to talk about TV3 without mentioning Eamon Dunphy would be like ignoring the elephant sitting on your lap. Getting back to those press releases, it's odd to trawl through the archives and be reminded of how The Dunphy Show - both TV3's most ambitious production and its most high-profile failure - was launched in a swagger of cheekily arrogant publicity back in 2003.
I vividly recall watching Dunphy's first show, on which he unleashed Roy Keane, his not-so-secret- weapon in what promised to be a thrilling chatshow battle with Pat Kenny and The Late Late.
There was a genuine buzz of excitement about the whole evening - heightened, in my case, by the fact that I was writing a 'live' article about Dunphy's debut for the following morning's paper.
It's a little poignant to contrast the blizzard of bluster and hype that surrounded the first show with the deflated TV3 press release of December 5, '03, announcing the inevitable: that the phoney war was over and that the next edition of The Dunphy Show would be the last.
"The enormous licence fee increases in the last two years have had a massive negative impact on the opportunity to invest in Irish programming by independent broadcasters like TV3... In the current marketplace, it has proved impossible for TV3 to continue The Dunphy Show beyond December 12, 2003."
TV3 put all its eggs into Dunphy's basket and has never really recovered from the wound inflicted by having to cancel the series midway through its scheduled run. Looking back at 2003 from a safe remove, it's remarkable that the decision to run Dunphy up against Kenny on Friday nights wasn't given a little more thought.
The success of Tubridy Tonight on Saturdays has proved (but too late for TV3) that the weekend is big enough to accommodate two chatshow gunslingers. But then the story of TV3 has always been about big plans, small triumphs and mostly thwarted ambitions.
Even its birth was a difficult, convoluted process that took almost 10 years from planning stages to opening night. The IRTC granted the original TV3 licence in 1990 to a consortium that included members of U2. Delays in getting TV3 off the ground resulted in the IRTC revoking the licence. Following a court battle, it as restored in 1993.
Then UTV, which has the third largest audience share in the Republic, bought a 49% stake. Given the reluctance of Irish cable and MMDS carriers to ditch UTV and replace it with TV3, the new shareholders pulled out in 1995.
Next into this dizzy dance came CanWest, which bought a major stake in 1997, and TV3 finally went on air the following year. By then, though, Ireland's much-trumpeted third channel had been relegated to fourth place. T na G, since rebranded as TG4, had beaten TV3 onto the airwaves by two years.
Because of its heavy reliance on Champions League football, movies, British soaps and bought-in sitcoms and dramas, TV3 has never fully managed to develop a distinctive, clearly Irish identity. It still looks like a work in progress.
If, as now seems likely, ITV win the bidding war, there's nothing to suggest this will improve the viewing package. Expect plenty more Heartbeat but no real sign of a pulse.
