It’s great to see the idea of pilgrimage becoming more popular in recent years but sometimes it just becomes a secular or self-improvement exercise, with the spiritual side vague or side-lined. Pilgrimage: Road to the Scottish Isles (BBC One, Sunday) is the third outing in this series from BBC. The formula is the same –…
Late at night (late for me!) I tend to dip into the newspaper review programmes on the British channels – it’s a good snapshot of what’s coming up on the next day’s headlines. Press Preview (Sky News) and The Papers (BBC News) still have their guest reviewers joining in remotely, while Headliners (GB News) seems…
On a media training session for politicians the advice would include being on top of your brief, knowing your facts. You’d probably be schooled in the skills of dodging – learning to answer the question you’d like to have been asked instead of the one you were asked. You’d be told to stress how ‘clear’…
I’m not a great fan of most Irish comedians. I find many of them loud, crude and unfunny, but I do realise these are subjective matters…to a point. I wouldn’t be rushing to one of his gigs, but I was impressed by the host on the Tommy Tiernan Show (RTÉ One, Saturday) when he interviewed…
Very often TV series from the 80s don’t date very well but a select few are as engaging and relevant as ever. Yes, Prime Minister, currently on repeat (BBC Four, Wednesdays and Saturdays), is as fresh as ever –the political satire still bites sharply. Last week’s episode ‘The Bishop’s Gambit’ is one of the funniest.…
And so, we got another week of intense coverage of the war in Ukraine – absorbing, disturbing and frequently heart-breaking. On The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk, Thursday) we heard the latest fighting words from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – he said the Russians may bomb their cathedrals but they won’t make Ukrainians give up their country or…
I thought Vladimir Putin might have been happy for now to annex the two breakaway republics in Ukraine and hope to get away with it as with Crimea. Tuning in to early news bulletins last Thursday I found I was wrong. It seems he wants the whole of Ukraine, and is prepared to see widespread…
It’s a bit early to be brewin’ up a storm about St Patrick’s Day (St Eunice, maybe), but there seems to be some level of friction about it every year. A conflict over St Patrick’s Day stamps blew up on Liveline (RTE Radio 1 Thursday), grist to the mill for that Confessio-type show. The first…
Few people like to hate, those who hate probably feel justified, and few would defend it in public discourse. And yet, though I’d have no truck with hate, I’m uneasy about the idea of ‘hate crime’. Some crimes are motivated by hate, but the crime is still the crime and can be prosecuted as such.…
I’ve often thought that if I was forced to have just one television channel to watch TG4 would be among the top contenders. This was confirmed for me by Ar an Aer (TG4, Tuesday). Subtitled ‘Pobal Dé’, it was a short and unfussy programme compiled from the archives 1960s-1990s and focusing on the work of…
Brendan O’Regan