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Nostalgia TV can be done well but RTÉ scrapes the barrel with Mike Murphy and Killinaskully

Pat Stacey

Time broadcaster released hidden gems from the vaults instead of same old repeats

A disguised Mike Murphy badgers Gay Byrne in a hidden-camera skit from the 70s that we’ve all seen countless times before

July 20 2022 07:50 AM

Americans love their old TV shows. Nostalgia channels that show nothing but vintage programmes all day have long been a thing over there.

Thanks to syndication, a series that came to the end of its original run decades ago can enjoy an infinite afterlife.

The chances are that at any given hour of any given day, an episode of I Love Lucy, Bonanza, Dragnet or some other beloved old favourite is airing on one American channel or another.

It’s always been a very different story in Ireland and the UK. Most programmes were shown once and then consigned to the vaults to gather dust — or worse, wiped so the expensive videotape could be used to record something else.

I don’t know what the situation is in RTÉ, but a huge chunk of the BBC’s output from the 50s and the 60s — including all but one episode of Nigel Kneale’s first Quatermass serial — has been lost, most likely forever.

Broadcasters had no idea at the time of the cultural importance of what they were making, but television nostalgia is finally having a moment in this part of the world. A major moment.

Much of this is down to Talking Pictures TV, a channel I’ve written about glowingly on several occasions.

Its mixture of old movies — black-and-white B-pictures, big studio films, 70s cult favourites — and 60s and 70s TV series such as Maigret, The Saint, Van Der Valk, Public Eye, Secret Army and The Outer Limits has proved a winner with viewers of all ages.

TPTV has almost 63,000 Twitter followers, sells DVDs by mail order, hosts conventions and mini-festivals, and has branched out into streaming with its free catch-up service TPTV Encore. Not bad for a channel run from a family home.

And it’s no longer the only one in the field. BBC4, which is earmarked for closure in the next few years due to budget cuts forced on the BBC by the Conservative government’s vindictive funding freeze, has had to become an archive broadcaster, reliant solely on old programmes.

The silver lining in this cloud is that a whole new generation of viewers have been able to watch some classic BBC dramas every Wednesday, including Cathy Come Home, episodes from the anthology series Second City Firsts, the once-controversial Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Alan Bleasdale’s magnificent Boys From The Blackstuff.

Still to come in this slot is what’s arguably the greatest BBC serial ever made: Peter Flannery’s nine-part epic Our Friends In The North.

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Tracing the lives of four Newcastle friends from 1964 to 1995, it provided breakthrough roles to future James Bond Daniel Craig, future Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston, Gina McKee and Mark Strong.

Sky Arts is also keenly aware of the value of nostalgia. It’s currently showing daily double bills of Tales Of The Unexpected and Alfred Hitchcock Presents — a great way of catching early performances by actors who would go on to become the biggest movie stars of the 70s.

But there’s a marked difference between raiding the archives and scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which brings us to RTÉ’s bewildering weekend scheduling decisions.

RTÉ1’s main mid-evening offering last Saturday was The Best Of Mike Murphy’s Home Movies, a two-year-old compilation of Murphy’s musty hidden-camera skits from his 70s shows.

On Sunday it was Killinaskully, which feels like it’s been showing on loop for the last two years. If RTÉ is going to dip into the past, there must be something better to repeat.

The RTÉ Player carries a handful of the national broadcaster’s best series, including the comedies Paths To Freedom and Trivia. Not everyone in the country has a reliably fast broadband connection, so why not give them another run-out on television?

RTÉ has done some superb drama over the years, either alone or in partnership with other broadcasters. Remember Roddy Doyle’s Family, or Mark O’Halloran and Lenny Abrahamson’s Prosperity?

If there are rights issues preventing them being shown again, then surely there are decent alternatives? Anything would be better than seeing Gay Byrne telling a disguised Murphy to eff off for the umpteenth time.

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Nostalgia TV can be done well but RTÉ scrapes the barrel with Mike Murphy and Killinaskully

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