Reeling and Rocking

It’s a little over two weeks until the new series of Reeling in the Years airs on October 17, but the episodes still exist only in rough draft. Producer John O’Regan is currently deliberating over whether the 2006 sporting victories of athlete Derval O’Rourke and boxers Katy Taylor and Bernard Dunne should be set to Bell X1’s ‘Flame’ or Sugababes’ ‘Red Dress’.

The ‘Flame’ sequence has been meticulously edited so that the bass kicks in at exactly the point where the video cuts from O’Rourke to Taylor and then – at the moment where the referee lifts Dunne’s arm in the air in victory – the chorus comes crashing in. The clip ends with a minute or so of Paul Noonan & co bopping around on Tubridy Tonight.
“The bass line comes in with the shot of her,” O’Regan enthuses, doing a little air-boxing to demonstrate. “Dumf, dumf, dumf. There’s a nice movement in that song. Bernard wins on the chorus and that music goes with the shot of celebrations. And there’s good movement in that shot, with that man, Noonan is it? It’s a good performance by the band. We’ll start another story here but you see it has all that energy.”
Nevertheless, O’Regan is still tempted by the idea of ‘Cooler Than The Red Dress’. Sugababes (being female) would tie in more closely with the two ladies’ sporting achievements, and 2006 also marked the first of Kilkenny’s four in a row in the hurling, with their narrow defeat of Cork (themselves chasing the three-in-a-row).
“So they’re cooler than the red dress, you see?” O’Regan grins at his own joke.
Kilkenny’s run of All-Irelands has recently come to a crashing end and Dunne has retired from professional boxing, but O’Rourke and Taylor are still among the country’s most successful athletes. Surely it’s hard to make a retrospective series on events that are still so recent as to be almost current?
“Well, in 2000 we made the ‘90s [series], and that seemed to go down really well” he replies reasonably.
“Someone who was eight in 2000 is 18 now. And in 2000 you could smoke in pubs, and 9/11 hadn’t happened, so a lot of things have changed since the year 2000,” the producer points out.
“The substance of what happened in a year doesn’t change over time; your view of it changes.”
It’s for that last reason that O’Regan is a big believer in the charts when it comes to scoring each episode of Reeling in the Years. The charts are democratic and the charts don’t lie. They can’t do anything other than accurately reflect the tastes of the time, much as we might like to forget what the tastes of the time actually were. Most people these days will own, say, a Joy Division album. But realistically, if you were of a record-purchasing age in 1979 you probably passed over Unknown Pleasures for Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’
“It’s about the stuff that was in the charts, not the credit music or the music that endures,” says O’Regan, waving a dog-eared, phonebook-size volume called British Hit Singles at me. “The charts are an indication of what people like and listen to. For example, in the ‘80s, Brendan Shine, Foster and Allen or The Fureys and Davey Arthur, were in the Irish charts, so all of those are in the programme.”

NOSTALGIA TV?
So where did the idea for Reeling in the Years come from? The “original of the species”, according to O’Regan, was a 1980s BBC series called The Rock and Roll Years that ran through the events of a year with a contemporaneous soundtrack and a few explanatory captions. That spawned a Granada copycat, The Rock and Goal Years, about soccer in the north-west of England, with a soundtrack from the bands of the time and place: The Smiths, Joy Division, The Stone Roses and James.
O’Regan, who was working in Granada at the time, admired the slick editing of The Rock and Goal Years and the way the post-punk and Madchester soundtrack complemented the footage – and that was the inspiration for Reeling in the Years.
Since Reeling in the ‘80s was made in 1998 – followed by the ‘90s in 2000 and the ‘70s and the ‘60s in 2002 and 2004 – the show has become phenomenally popular. It was voted the nation’s favourite home-grown TV show ever in an RTÉ Guide poll. It has more fans on Facebook than The Late Late Show and in the ratings for one week of August this year it took up four of the top 10 slots, including numbers one and two. Before EMI secured all the copyright necessary to distribute a DVD version last year, there was a black market in home-made boxsets of the four series.
Explaining the enduring appeal of the show is a tricky one. There’s the nostalgia element, for sure, which is great craic if nothing else. People in their 50s seem to get an endless kick out of seeing clips of their own generation leppin’ about in bellbottoms worn at armpit level. But the would-you-look-at-the-state-of-Big-Tom factor doesn’t explain the attraction of, say, Reeling in the ‘80s, to those who either weren’t there or can’t remember the time.
That probably has more to do with the way the music is used to conjure up the atmosphere of the era. Watching footage of the H-Block hunger strikes and a riot outside the British Embassy in Dublin, under the pared-back, menacing – almost macabre – sound of Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’ and The Police’s ‘Invisible Sun’, you get a far more powerful and immediate sense of the bleak mood of the era than you would from listening to a TV presenter tell you about it, or indeed from reading about it in a history book.
O’Regan himself says he is not remotely interested in nostalgia. But he does hope the show will be useful a few years down the line as a way of showing kids, and reminding the rest of us, what it was actually like to live through each of the last five decades, including the latest one from 2000 to 2009.
“The ‘80s is the favourite for me personally, because it was my teenage years so I know the music inside out. So it’s reclaiming chart hits like The Blades or early U2 or The Boomtown Rats, the stuff I grew up with.
“But I remember making the ‘80s [series] and I wasn’t nostalgic at all. I would have no desire to go back to economic depression, unemployment, the Troubles in the North, the sense of isolation and insularity Ireland had. There’s that line, ‘The past is a different country, they do things differently there’ – but I wouldn’t necessarily want to live there.
“In terms of TV, we’re the first to poke over the ashes of the last decade. In the future, people will make far more profound programmes and essays on the time but they might look at us as a starting point. If I want to give someone a feel for 2008, the economic crash is part of the story, but it is only part of the story. There’s sport, music and pop culture. They were all part of living in that year.”