Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? – a documentary with a name to draw in the curious, on Channel 4 last Thursday night. It was billed as an authored programme, an opinion piece, by Trevor Phillips, and despite advance warnings about bad language and racist terms, it was actually a reflective and relatively moderate programme. I…
It was a dizzying week, with more drama on Oireachtas TV than on any mainstream channel. It had all the features of fictional drama – moral dilemmas, cliffhanging tension, heroes (short supply), villains (don’t ask), the rise and fall of interlocking story arcs. You didn’t know from breakfast through lunch whether you’d still have a…
A couple of new shows hit the TV screens last week. With much advance hype one of these arrived on RTÉ2 last Thursday night. US drama This Is Us tells the interacting stories of several individuals who share the same birthday. It was appealing enough to make me want to watch another episode, but only…
With so much negative stuff in the news these days, it was good to hear an upbeat item on the Pat Kenny Show (Newstalk), last Friday. It was part of a series on the North Inner City of Dublin, a place full of history, characters and subject to what Kenny called “one of the worst…
In the past few weeks I’ve been following the English crime thriller series Unforgotten on ITV. This is series two and the high artistic standards set in series one are thankfully maintained…though really it’s the same plot with different characters – a body is found that has been hidden for years, and gradually the police…
Well, for better or for worse, for richer but hardly for poorer, it was Trump week. The dust had hardly settled on Martin Luther King Day when the media went into overdrive in anticipation of inauguration day. I can remember the hype for Obama’s first inauguration, and there were indeed some touching and emotional moments,…
Last Sunday Netflix launched a new documentary, Hostage to the Devil, about the legendary exorcist and former Jesuit Malachi Martin. My appetite had been whetted by an interview with one of the producers, Sharon Lysaght, on The Ryan Tubridy Show, Wednesday morning of last week. As documentaries go it was excellent, a fascinating story well…
I spent way too much time last Saturday glued to my screens watching the proceedings of the Citizens’ Assembly, streaming on the RTÉ News Now channel and online. It was a lot to take in. First off, I found it rather disconcerting to find an unrepresentative bunch of citizens (100 to represent four million?) meeting…
One of the most interesting programmes shown over the Christmas period was the film Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village on RTÉ 1. This documentary told the story of Knock Shrine, mainly through interviews with some of the people involved in that parish. Parish priest Fr Richard Gibbons was a central focus of attention,…
Well, there’s another year down, a year full of significant stories and media developments, with the prospects of a rather uncertain 2017 ahead. It strikes me that social stability and civilisation are fragile enough and that complacency would be a bad mistake. It was a year of high drama on the political front, from Brexit…