And so, another RTE effort at the Monday Night Current Affairs show has reached the end of the line. Yesterday afternoon, the broadcaster announced the cancellation of “Upfront with Katie Hannon”.
A brave face was put on it, of course: It is widely speculated that Hannon will be moving back to radio, and will be Joe Duffy’s replacement on the weekday phone-in institution that is Radio One’s Liveline. But there’s no particular reason why she couldn’t have done both: Many of the station’s top broadcasters have managed that over the years, with Gay Byrne and Ryan Tubridy both doing weekday radio shows and also sitting in the big chair for the Friday Night Late Late Show.
RTE also tried to sell us on the viewership figures: When Upfront came to an end, it did so with an average weekly viewership of 198,000 people, up from 168,000 in the previous year. But two facts were omitted from that: That the current season encompassed a general election, where current affairs viewership might be expected to rise dramatically. Second, that the long term trend is massively downwards.
Don’t believe me? Consider that the show that Upfront replaced, The Frontline, used to regularly command audiences of over 400,000 people. In 2009, it was considered disastrous for RTE when the viewership fell to 330,000, and was outmatched by The Apprentice, on what was then TV3.
Put in that context, and taking account the substantial population rise, the figures are vastly less impressive. The trend cannot be denied just by pretending television started in 2023.
Some of that, of course, is due to the general fall-off in popularity of terrestrial television. But a bigger part of it is that RTE’s current affairs offering is just…. No good.
Eric Bischoff, the legendary former Wrestling Promoter who took World Championship Wrestling to the brink of victory – and then crushing defeat – in that organisation’s television ratings war with the World Wrestling Federation in the late 1990s, used to use a phrase about what made good TV: “Controversy”, he said, “creates cash”. He later made it the title of his autobiography.
Somewhere along the line, RTE has forgotten that television watching is ultimately a communal experience. People watch things because other people watch them. They watch them because they do not want to be the annoying person in the office saying “no spoilers please” when everybody else is discussing the latest episode of Game of Thrones or Succession or whatever it may be.
You watch television for drama. You watch Current Affairs in particular because you want to be grabbed by an argument, or a discussion. Or because you want to be outraged. Current Affairs television can do this one of two ways: By offering a challenging presenter (think Vincent Browne, or Jeremy Paxman, or Andrew Neil) or by offering actual debate with actual clear lines of division.
RTE is increasingly interested in offering neither.
Consider, if you will, the case of Tommy Robinson. Robinson – born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is a UK anti-immigration activist about whom RTE news has published fully thirty-five stories over the past three years. Each of those stories refers to his views on immigration, his prominence in the debate, his controversial views, and his imprisonment. He is now a free man.
If RTE was interested in producing current affairs television that people wanted to watch, he would be on their current affairs programmes. They would have interviewed him at least once. Heard what he had to say. Challenged him robustly. Left open the possibility that he might get the better of them. Given people something to talk about, or a reason to watch, whether it was because they loathed Robinson or loved him.
But RTE would never do that. The objective of RTE current affairs is to play things safe, and to ensure that nobody ever criticises them for their guest choices. They would sooner be boring and dull.
This even applies to their audience choices for their current affairs shows. There’s never even the opportunity for non-scripted drama there: Audiences for shows like Upfront are carefully pre-screened in advance. Researchers know roughly what every audience member will say before they are called upon. Most of the audience is sourced from lobby groups, NGOs, and community groups, instead of letting the public apply for tickets in a lottery system. This means that any interaction between a politician and a member of the public on television is essentially RTE’s responsibility: If a Minister is flayed on television by an angry citizen, RTE will have known in advance, making them complicit. They do not wish to be complicit.
The result is boring, scripted, drama-free television which is increasingly watched by the politically obsessed, and nobody else. A new presenter and a new format and a flashy new studio is not going to solve the ultimate problem, which is that RTE is entirely uninterested in making current affairs programming which the public actually want to watch.
Good luck to them trying to reverse a trend they can’t even recognise.