The Revolution Must Be Televised

These are treacherous times for Ireland’s independent broadcasters. Not only are they having to face a serious downturn in advertising revenue, (their only source of income), but there’s a new broadcasting act wending its way through the legislature, and ever-increasingly competition for viewers from countless stations available via satellite and the Internet.

As the boss of TV3, our main national independent broadcaster, David McRedmond is at the frontline of these new challenges. He has overseen their buy-over of 3e (Channel 6 as was), the introduction of TV3’s online presence and a significant increase in the station’s Irish-produced programme content, alongside voluntary reductions in salary, points of difference with the BCI (now reformulated as the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with former RTÉ man Bob Collins as chair), and some public criticism over the phone-in element of late night bought-in quiz show Play TV.
Meanwhile, the station has nurtured a roster of fine TV personalities who have struck a chord with the viewing public, including Colette Fitzpatrick, Martin King, the departed Lorraine Keane and Claire Byrne, Lisa Cannon and the indefatigable Mark Cagney, who in ten years with the station, working fives days a week as co-presenter of the station’s flagship Ireland AM, has clocked up the equivalent of 50 years of Late Late Shows.
In person, McRedmond is an affable, gregarious and energetic man. You get a strong sense that if anyone can steer the good ship TV3 through these stormy seas, it’s him.

Jackie Hayden: The government’s new broadcasting act is on its way through the Senate. Is it too late for changes?
David McRedmond: Yes.
What would you change If you could?
(Pauses) Well, I’d like to change a whole lot. Broadcasting in Ireland provides such a fantastic opportunity, even in the middle of a recession. I can see the opportunity to build a really major industry here. In other countries, broadcasting industries are built on the back of commercial broadcasters. The production sector have a guaranteed outlet for their product, which in turn produces the money to invest in more productions. The next step up is to export the programmes and build reputations. In Ireland we are defined by our culture. It’s our strongest asset, with enormous potential in broadcasting terms.

How do we develop that potential?
You have to have economic regulation. Otherwise all you have is the State deciding how much money everybody earns. It’s profoundly anti-democratic. You have to have somebody who will say, “We are going to allow commercial broadcasters to make money.” Broadcasting regulation in this country is all designed to control the independent and commercial sector. It doesn’t promote it, but controls the licenses, the output and the amount of advertising. It’s all about control. We have this hugely dominant State broadcaster, more dominant than in almost any other country. This is not me being anti-RTÉ. A lot of their people and their programmes are really good. But they are so massive that we are in danger of becoming a State with a single State broadcaster. It’s almost a Soviet-style system! That needs to be cut back.

Where do you stand regarding the license fee?
We believe the government needs to address the dual-funding model where RTÉ gets both the license fee and carries advertising. I don’t want the license fee for TV3, not even for our news. It should stay with RTÉ because we need a public broadcaster, but that’s all it should be! The Sound and Vision scheme (which allows commercial stations access to a small amount of license fee income to be used for non-commercial broadcasting – JH) is a valuable source of funding, but it’s a small amount, no more than €4 million, and once again it’s used by the BCI to control and limit broadcasters, rather than to promote them and their work. I’m arguing to get RTÉ out of the commercial market. As things stand, RTÉ doesn’t compete in any realistic way in the commercial market because it has the benefit of so much public funding. It’s simply not possible. You cannot be a commercial broadcaster and a public service broadcaster at the same time. The Broadcasting Act should have said that within one year there will be a full review of the dual-funding mechanism.

Are you suggesting politicians intimidated by the power of RTÉ?
A lot of politicians are in awe of RTÉ. But the real issue isn’t at government level, it’s at the permanent government level, the Department of Communications, the regulators, the BCI, the BAI, Comreg, RTÉ. This whole State system serves the State: it’s not about developing commercial broadcasting. They’ve had a huge influence on the Act, which is full of controls on commercial broadcasters. The whole thrust of the Act is wrong. Why does the State feel that it can control and influence the content we carry, how much advertising we can have, whether certain programmes fit or not, whether we can own other companies?

So you want to be free of all those restraints?
Absolutely. There are quotas for doing Irish programming and EU programming, and we exceed those quotas by a long way, because the main thrust in TV3 since we changed ownership three years ago is to make it more Irish. Over 30% of our output is Irish-produced. We don’t need the State telling us to do these things. Instead, we need viewers to tell us what to do. We’re not allowed carry political advertising. I don’t understand why. We have to be impartial. The State obliges us pretty much to have no views whatsoever.

You had a run-in with the BCI over the sponsorship issue in relation to your Vincent Brown programme.
I happen to be a non-executive director of the sponsor, Royal Bank of Scotland, although I wasn’t involved in the detail of the arrangement. But think of the theory of it: the commentariat is saying that you shouldn’t sponsor news and current affairs, and they say it’s an EU rule, which is another form of State control! So we get no license fee and we’re not allowed a sponsor for the programme. So how are we supposed to pay for news and current affairs? The situation is so bad that INN (Independent News Network) closed yesterday. Their model was based on income from spot advertising. But there’s not enough advertising to fund the best programming. So why are they trying to restrict me from doing news and current affairs? It’s a fundamental democratic issue. No single brand accounts for more than 3% of our advertising revenue. We get no money from the State, so we’re beholden to nobody. We’re entirely independent. In ten years since the station started there’s never been a single complaint of commercial bias or political bias.

So you’d prefer to fund those programmes from sponsorship than from a share of the license fee?
Yes, absolutely. Call me a liberal if you like, but we are a commercial station and we believe in the plurality of broadcasting. If the State is paying for all the news in the State, there has to be a question mark. If TV3 did not exist you’d only have State television in Ireland. It’s shocking, but that’s all we’d have. The RTÉ newsroom has very good journalists who do very good work, but they are entirely dependent on the State funding them. So all the news would be dependent on State funding which is profoundly anti-democratic and tends to produce a single view. It’s why we at TV3 want to do a better job and to put more money into news and current affairs. And if you want to talk about independence, nobody is going to tell Vincent Browne what to do. He attracts a substantial audience right across the demographics, including younger viewers because he doesn’t care what anybody thinks.

He’s a bit rock’n’roll with that attitude?
Yes, there is a bit of that. But we can’t provide the service we want to provide with RTÉ selling advertising at an uncommercial price, and we’re having to live with the crumbs off the table.

There’s been an issue over the number of minutes you’re allowed to devote to advertising space.
The legislation was changed to allow us to increase our minutage, but the second we told the regulator that we were going to do this, the regulator, improperly in our view, told us we can’t! So even when the legislative intent was there, we had six brief weeks where we were allowed to do what we wanted to do and then, slam, the door was shut.

Do you ever feel you’d like the BCI to get off your case?
Yes, I do. We work well with them at a detailed level, but the overall thrust of what you’re saying is correct. We don’t need to be regulated. There’s absolutely no reason why we should be told what advertising minutage we should have. If we show too many ads, those ads have a diminishing return, particularly if viewers don’t like it, and it’s self-defeating. So why do we need somebody tell us what we can or can’t do? It’s really just an excuse for the State to say, to misquote Parnell, you can go this far but no further. So I fundamentally question the degree to which the BCI, or the BAI as it is now, has ever understood TV3. No board members of the BCI ever came out to TV3, unless they were doing interviews on Ireland AM, or something. I tried to go in and see them and I wasn’t ever allowed to meet them.

Why not?
I’ve no idea! I met the Chairman once or twice, and he’s very engaging, but if we have a new board for the BAI, I want to get in and show what we’re doing in TV3. Equally, I want them to come here and see what’s going on.

Do you expect any serious changes with the BAI replacing the BCI?
I’ve no idea. I can’t see them making a fundamental change. They should be able to say to RTÉ, “Sorry. You’re selling your advertising that may put somebody else out of business.”

You think they should have that power?
They absolutely should have that power, just like Offcom in the UK. It would be ideal for them to have those powers. And this is not about RTÉ. We have to get over this. This country is not about serving RTÉ. This is about developing a broadcasting industry that gives viewers a genuine choice. There are about 7,000 employed in AVS in this country. Why isn’t it 14,000 or 21,000 or 50,000? We could be brilliant at it.

What needs to happen to create that?
We need to earn more money to re-invest in Irish productions like we are already doing, but want to do more of. We need to have an advertising commercial market that free and that works. At the moment we have market failure because the dominant player’s advertising income is subsided by the State. That doesn’t work.

There are stations broadcasting into Ireland from outside who carry Irish advertising but they are not regulated in any way. Isn’t that unfair?
Yeah, well… it’s extremely unfair that we should be restricted. There’s a limit as to what can be done about what comes into the country, although there are things that could have been done and the Government has not listened to us.

Is there no way the regulatory body could have some control over those stations?
There probably is, but they haven’t bothered. They’re now even suggesting there might be a levy on us to fund our own regulation. That’s a mind-blowingly curious concept. We have to pay for it and then say we’re very pleased to get it! We’re not looking for money from the State, so would the State please stop looking for money from us?

There’s been a lot of negative reaction to your late-night Play TV.
Look, we’ve been through the toughest recession, with revenues plummeting to minus 20% or 25%. We’ve had two rounds of redundancies and all taken pay cuts, and we’re doing our best to survive. And then we do something like Play TV and there’s been all sorts of complaints.

Some of the complaints have been about callers not being able to get through.
Yeah. I’m not saying there aren’t reasons for complaints, I thoroughly accept that. It’s our job to work with the service provider of that programme to make sure they get the service right.

But when you’ve got really good programmes like Vincent Browne, isn’t Play TV a bit low-rent?
Great! It gets 12,000 viewers some nights. If somebody thinks, as you say, that it’s low-rent, they don’t have to watch it. It’s post-midnight and it’s making money. Joe Duffy on RTÉ had two days about it. But we’ve just broadcast the excellent two-part series The Forgotten Irish, a major, major series, one of the most moving documentaries I’ve ever seen. Where was that discussed on RTÉ? This comes back to the fundamental thing whereby if they’re going to be the national broadcaster, then please act as a national broadcaster and reflect what’s really going on. I’m really at the point of saying, can we please get the State off our back?

Some independent producers might argue that your budgets are too limited.
I’m absolutely sure they do!

Are they right?
The best way to build a broadcasting industry in Ireland is to do it at low-cost. We have to be low-cost. That’s as important as the quality. In a country of this size, you’re not going to generate the same revenues as in the UK, say. We’re not going to do costume dramas. I brought in Ben Frow from Five, and before that Channel Four, in the UK and he has revolutionized TV3. We’ve always wanted to do Irish programmes, and Ben’s found a way. It doesn’t need to be that expensive. You don’t need the big sets, or the catering truck and all the paraphernalia around it. I’d make no apology to independents. Budgets have to be tight. The only other way is for the independents to join us in saying to the Government, “Can you please stop screwing up the advertising market, so that commercial broadcasters can make more money.”

Would you welcome that support?
I would, and we do sometimes get it. Frankly, we haven’t always worked well with independents and should be open to criticism in that regard.

In what way?
For a while we weren’t doing enough Irish programming. We weren’t talking to them. We weren’t getting their ideas. The Sound and Vision scheme through which we can access a small amount from Government to help co-fund some independent productions, has helped. But in the last round, and this is almost enough to make us ask why do we bother, we got 10%. RTÉ got 35% and TG4 got 40% from a budget that’s less that 4 million. Oireachtas committee members pushed very hard for this to help the commercial sector and the plurality of broadcasting, and most of it still goes back to the State.

With the drop in advertising spend, the national newspapers have slashed their advertising rates. Does this impact on what you can charge for advertising space?
Absolutely. Prices have plummeted and they’re now going to have to go back up. It’s un-sustainable. We are as low-cost as you can be. But the advertising community understands this and they do support us and are glad that we provide an alternative to RTÉ. But if RTÉ is uncommercial about how it sells its advertising, that’s a fundamental problem.

And are they?
By their own admission they’re going to lose over €60 million this year. If I lose €60 million in one year through our operating costs being that much higher than revenue, that’s not sustainable. The policy is wrong. In most other countries the State broadcasters are either out of the ad market altogether or are being taken out or having their ad minutage reduced because there’s an understanding now that commercial broadcasters need to make their revenue in a free market.

You’re saying that RTÉ have a single-funding role?
Yes.

With license fee income or selling ads? Which?
Selling ads just makes them another commercial broadcaster. The costs of operating RTÉ seem to be vast and they have extraordinary reserves. It comes back to the question, what is Ireland going to become? We talk about becoming a modern open economy, and yet we have the most closed and the most dominated broadcast sector! So the only way we can change is if the market can operate freely.

So RTÉ should have license fee income and no other source of revenue?
Look, what I would argue for first is to have the serious debate about it and with RTÉ fully involved in it. That’s what the new Broadcast Act should have been about. Generations have moved on. People do not watch TV like they used to. The audience gets its media from various sources, including online. But what it’s not getting is a significant choice in Irish broadcast media.

What is your prognosis on advertising at the moment?
In Ireland, advertising is something companies cut first in a recession, but now that we’re just past the bottom of the cycle, companies are having to decide they have to start advertising again.

If it does get any worse, what happens?
INN closed. A lot of regional papers have closed. Others are in trouble. We’ve had a couple of good months of advertising income and we’re confident of seeing it through. But the real question is how long will it take to get back up.

After Lorraine Keane departed from Xpose, TV3 ran a series called Total Xposure to find a replacement. There were some suggestions that the selection had been fixed beforehand?
Absolutely not. I can’t imagine how you would go about fixing something like that without the risk of somebody spilling the beans later. But it’s a good story!

If you could afford to employ one broadcaster not currently on your roster, who would you choose?
What a question! Jonathan Ross, if we could afford the £28 million! But we already have loads of on-air talent on TV3, like Colette Fitzpatrick presenting Midweek. I don’t know of a better presenter for that kind of show in Ireland or the UK. She is so in-your-face! We have Lisa Cannon, Karen Koster, Mark Cagney, all great TV broadcasters and seriously smart people.

Anybody from RTÉ you’d like to get hold of?
RTÉ is full of good broadcasters, but the style at TV3 is different. It’s more direct, more low-cost. They might have a difficulty adjusting to that, so there’s nobody at present that I’d be chasing. They have their house style, and we have ours. It’s important that we don’t start looking like RTÉ. We want to compete with them.

How do you feel about Brian Cowen?
He wasn’t blessed with timing when he came into office! He came out to TV3 for the first time only a week ago. For whatever reason, I think he kept himself under wraps for too long. Everybody who meets him says he’s a fundamentally decent person. There’s an obligation for Government to be in media. We at TV3 had the floating vote for Lisbon. After the first Lisbon vote, the Euromonitor report said that the floating audience that voted no were female, under 44, non-professional, non ABC1. That’s the core TV3 audience. We have the biggest share of that audience. Politicians haven’t always recognised or understood that. They do a great job on some shows on RTÉ and you’re speaking to people who 40 years ago decided how they were going to vote for the rest of their lives.

Is Brian Cowen the man to secure the economic future of the Irish broadcasting industry?
I don’t know. I’d love if he was. Eamon Ryan is somebody I have great respect for. To me the issue is: can they change what their department is doing? I seriously question that. I’m not sure that anybody has shown the capability of taking on the State machine, the Department, Regulator A, Regulator B, Regulator C, TG4. They have to be able to take on RTÉ as well. Who can take that on and fundamentally change things? To decide we are going to be a modern democracy, and that a modern democracy is not one where the State has 70% of the broadcasting cake?

So there’s nobody in government willing to take on RTÉ?
Nobody has yet shown an ability to do it, but I wouldn’t give up on Eamon Ryan.

Would you be any more optimistic about a Government lead by Enda Kenny?
I don’t know. He can be impressive. Simon Coveney, their Communications spokesman, was very good on the Oireachtas committee and he’s taken on board the fact that the new Chairman of the BAI is the ex-Director General of RTÉ, Bob Collins. But are they tough enough? TV3 is keeping its side of the bargain, giving viewers what they want. The Minister should now be saying the same to his department, his officials and the regulator.

How accurate are the TV ratings?
Nielsen have quite a proven system, I think. It’s constantly looked at. Of course, when your ratings are bad, you think, this is a really inaccurate system, but when they’re good you never challenge their accuracy!

Bill Cullen’s approach on The Apprentice seems to have less of the gratuitous abuse of his UK counterpart Alan Sugar.
They are different business cultures, and I’ve worked in both. Neither is better than the other, but perhaps in Ireland we can be more concerned about whether people like us. But Bill does an amazing job. Let’s not forget that Bill came into this with no TV experience. He’s masterful.

With that kind of programme, including X-Factor, there seems to an almost voyeuristic pleasure in seeing people being humiliated and abused.
I don’t know if that’s true. You hear that. I watch The X-Factor with my children, who love it. It has humour and works best when you don’t take it too seriously. The last thing I want to see is somebody seriously humiliated. But it can be emotional, maybe when you see somebody who hasn’t sung before, and it can tug at the heartstrings. And people do take sides and want their favourite to win, but I don’t think there’s anything abusive about it. Maybe sometimes when we do advance promos for those shows sometimes they might focus on those pieces, and maybe we don’t always get that right.

Which one of your shows would you pick to demonstrate what a good station TV3 is?
If I were a TV reviewer I’d go for something like The Forgotten Irish, two extraordinarily superb shows, very touching and brilliantly done. A daily programme like Xpose in many ways typifies what we do. It’s for a mainly female audience at home, often cooking the tea, with their children, having the TV on in the corner. At that time the news is on RTÉ, and very good news too that I often watch myself. And that’s a brilliant choice for viewers, to pick either of two excellent programmes. Now if only we didn’t have so many restrictions imposed on us, we could make more programmes like Xpose and create a greater choice for the Irish viewer.