The Ones That Got Away

IT’S A freezing cold afternoon in January and a camera crew down on Fifth Street are filming outside Manhattan’s Ninth Precinct police station. The story they’re covering is a profile on an Irish cop from Donegal who has been working on the force in New York for the last few years. Sgt. Paul McCormack is about to reveal a little of his extraordinary life to a news team working for a brand-new programme which will begin its run on RTE on St Valentine’s Day next.

Stateside, a fast-paced magazine show based in and about New York and America’s East Coast, is made almost entirely by people who have left Ireland during the last decade, and who are now set to give a little of the lowdown – which has been so clearly absent thus far – on the ones that got away.

But before you throw up your eyes in horror, envisioning a Paddy-clone of MTV’s consummately revolting Realworld, take it easy. There will be no therapy-twisted Generation-Xers whining to the camera – or at least if so, it will probably be tongue in cheek. The show mixes a degree of contemporary flash TV with an easy magazine style to cover a number of subjects. Commissioned by the Independent Production Unit in RTE, it’s produced by the New York-based Irish Broadcasting Corporation for RTE in association with WNYC-TV, one of New York’s most respected public broadcasting stations. The series will run for a half an hour at 8 o’clock on Tuesdays for the next two months.

Meanwhile, back in the East Village, presenter Brian Rohan is just about managing to disguise the fact that it’s one of the coldest days yet in this nascent year (“it’s hard to look natural when you’re freezing your arse off”). Around the group, New Yorkers are dashing past showing a complete lack of interest as only New Yorkers can.

Behind the camera, the Stateside crew are fighting the encroaching darkness and the vicious little breeze coming up from the East River, but the light holds until Rohan’s intro is completed and the cluster of people and equipment piles into a station-wagon onto the next designated shoot. It’s part of a relentless, breakneck schedule that almost everybody involved in the project has been following, against the better advice of their common sense and medical counsel, but all in the interests of getting the show in the can.

Although Irish audiences have had brief tastes before of what life is like on America’s East Coast, the difference here is that instead of being made by a crew, flown over for a day or two’s shooting here and there, the IBC et al are based entirely in New York itself.

“This is a first from RTE to commission a company that is actually overseas to put together a production over here,” explains Ray McCarthy, who is the series’ producer along with Patricia Zur. “Since we’ve been on the ground here for the last couple of years we know how to get around obstacles that might be overwhelming if you came here completely cold.”

The inestimable value of having a team of resident New York Irish report on the Irish resident in New York is obvious. The hitherto film-and-run policy hasn’t helped the forming of stereotypes such as young Pat the construction worker weeping over his pint or that paradigm of the American Dream, Ms Mary O’Yuppie.

The sad truth is that the attention paid to us over the last decade or so has been very minimal. Life stories have been cursorily glimpsed, not appreciated or understood. Print journalism has perhaps examined the phenomenon in a little more detail, but any journo will tell you of innumerable refusals from editors of pieces covering real, everyday issues and events here.

Several radio programmes proposed to the powers-that-be down the years met with no joy, at least two non-fiction book projects were turned down by Irish publishing houses, and project originators had to eventually ask themselves if “home” really gave a bollix?

Naturally enough, one of the most obvious and potentially effective ways of all to challenge the discrepancies would be television – being the most direct and visual medium. But that had its own hurdles. This writer first met one Ray McCarthy of Co. Cork when he was winding up his MFA at Brooklyn College in 1991. I was persuaded on board as presenter for Ray’s tube debut and thesis, which was a half hour show for and about New Irish life in New York. The idea was irresistible. Since there was no such show extant on community programming in the city (unlike most other ethnic minorities), we were convinced that a decent magazine show, that could be broadcast here and at home, was feasible.

However, the demon dream-smasher would rear up out of the steaming Manhattan pavements every time we thought the idea might just take off, screaming the unbearable words: “Cost-Prohibitive!” Virtually everything, from labour to equipment hire to post-production facilities in New York, cost vastly more than a similar venture would if it were made in the RTE studios. Without a complete, supportive studio base in Manhattan, the expense factor was beyond human resolution. After completing a segment for Cursai, the innovative Irish-language magazine show, the team’s core members returned variously to their well-paid nixers on Japanese documentaries, steadier print journalism, playwriting and various other pursuits.

However, taking up a full-time position with the public broadcasting outfit WNYC-TV, Ray McCarthy decided to develop the idea while building up a career with the New York station. In the meantime he glimpsed another opportunity. “On the WNYC-TV schedule, I saw there was a dearth of Irish programming, and thought there was a space to run imported programmes from Ireland for the American market.”

While filming the St Patrick’s Day Ball some months previously, Ray had hooked up with its chief organiser, the Dublin-born lawyer Daniel O’Leary. With Ray on the technical end of things and O’Leary in a primarily organisational capacity, they formed the Irish Broadcasting Corporation, and began operations by importing programmes like Glenroe and Fair City from Ireland for broadcasting on WNYC. The station was delighted with the broad new audience it attracted. Thus the connection was made with WNYC, and the IBC was heading in the right direction.

In the meantime, a couple of local TV programme projects did manage to get off the ground, none particularly top-of-the-line, until the successful weekly magazine show Out of Ireland, which debuted on Channel 25 a year and a half ago. As if to prove everybody’s expectations right, it is now broadcast on 22 channels in over 13 different states, serving both the young Irish and Irish American communities within the US, featuring Irish news and events on an ongoing basis.

But the IBC’s vision extended to the possibility of working in America on an up-to-the-minute show that could be shown in Ireland itself, which would bring home an entertaining and realistic depiction of life on the East Coast for the New Irish. Ideally, it would be a programme that could withstand the transatlantic cross-over, and in turn be broadcast over here.

Another freelancer at WNYC-TV, Patricia Zur, was approached by Ray as he began to put together a proposal on the idea. A New York native who has been freelancing on everything from network to public broadcasting over the last ten years, Patricia joined in actively on Stateside in early 1994.

“Yeah, it’s taken a long time to bring this project to fruition . . .” grinned McCarthy over a pint in Ryan’s pub last week. It was unclear whether his amusement was prompted by the nature of the understatement he had uttered, or by the fact that himself and Zur were finally sitting down to a well-earned jar after a gruelling 16-hour day. “A friend of mine faxed me the ad that RTE were running in the Irish papers. I thought it would be an ideal time to submit a proposal for the commission rounds.”

So did Clare Duignan, then Commissioning Editor of RTE’s Independent Production Unit. Under the Changes To The Broadcasting Act of 1993 (masterminded by that stupendous human being and champion of the arts, Michael D. Higgins), RTE must spend a fixed amount of money outside the station on programmes from independent producers every year. While the first round declined the IBC’s initial proposal on those familiar demon grounds, “cost prohibitive”, Duignan was more than impressed with the idea.

“The time that it came in was at the height of the Morrison visa controversy and of course, emigration is just a very big, ongoing issue,” she explained. “More and more Irish people are taking the option to go and work in the States either indefinitely or for a few years, and at the same time it coincided with Mary Robinson coming to the Presidency, and her commitment to remember and include our emigrants as part of the Irish community. I suggested to IBC that they look for a co-production partner, in order to make the price of the project acceptable to us, and so they did.”

“Part of WNYC’s brief is to serve the various ethnic communities here, so there was a natural situation to approach them with the possibility of a co-production,” continued O’Leary. “Since we had already developed a strong and positive relationship with them, and since the programme could potentially be of as much interest to them, we approached them directly about getting involved.”

“They also realised that there was an audience for this programming, not only for first generation Irish people living in New York, but for Irish Americans as well,” says Zur, “of whom there are nearly fifty million.

“We wanted to use our position to achieve a more understanding perspective on the Irish American identity, and to explore their part in, for example, the peace process. WNYC’s managing director David Sit liked that and the way that we didn’t want to simply show people in their environment, but to examine the issues that directly affected them.” Eventually after negotiations, WNYC-TV came up with the offer whereby they would provide the post-production facilities and equipment for Stateside, precisely the kind of local backing they needed.”

The IBC were thus able to return to RTE in time for the 1995 round of commissions with a co-production proposal, and although still on a very tight budget, the project was born.

Just before Christmas, Clare Duignan came over to meet with the show’s makers, to discuss final feature ideas, and chose presenters. In the aforementioned spirit of striking a balance, one Irish and one Irish-American were chosen, the first well-known, and the second, as it turns out, a newcomer to the screen.

Jenny Conroy is a familiar face with Irish audiences. Her screen debut as the tinker girl in The Field brought her to the international big screen, and her role in TV dramas like Glenroe endeared her to audiences at home. Jenny has spent a number of years working and living both in New York and Los Angeles, continuing her career in acting, and developing her own writing. When she heard about Stateside, one particular aspect of it struck her. “I think it will be great for people who have family – brothers and sisters or kids – who have moved out here: it will give them a real perspective, because most people have no idea what the day-to-day lives of their loved ones are really like once they move away.”

Brian Rohan comes to the fore of the camera directly from the world of print journalism, which was an interesting move for him. “It’s a very different experience, interviewing for camera and interviewing for print. Apart from the fact that I never wore make-up as a print journalist!” But Rohan’s background also provided the myriad of contacts necessary to compile a good range of stories. “The good thing was that they gave me the room to develop a story myself, which I liked, as opposed to a producer just handing you a script and saying, ‘okay, read’.”

Also on board is journalist Patrick Farrelly, former editor of The Irish Voice. He started off as a current affairs producer on RTE radio, moved into newspapers when he came to New York, where he also frequently contributes to The Village Voice and other papers. He took up producing when he worked on the film of Broken Harvest two years ago and then on TV Nation with Michael Moore, and his contribution to Stateside will comprise of several current affairs segments. He feels strongly that Stateside has potentially a break-through contribution to make to Irish television.

“No country in the world has had such a large percentage of its population leave it. Ireland holds the record for that. And yet there is this absolute, complete reluctance to deal with that experience. It’s as if it’s such a structural part of what being Irish is, that we just can’t face up to it. It’s interesting in a way that RTE have decided to do it, and what you have to say too is that it’s about time.”

Back in the Stateside offices on Lafayette Street, production co-ordinator Orla Byrne is printing out resumés for faxing to a newspaper, Ray is on the phone organising a shoot, and Patricia Zur is checking tapes for chyros. The phone rings constantly and the paste-up board bears sheets of scrawled-upon schedules that lend an abstract art effect to the production office wall. As the segments roll across the screen, an innovative, slick style that is well up to current American broadcasting standards emerges as the feel throughout Stateside.

One piece on the notorious Hell’s Kitchen gang, “The Westies” features author of a book on the subject, T. J. English, elaborating on the kind of men who terrorised a neighbourhood in the 1970s. Another profiles young public defender Jane Anne Murray, who had a high-powered job in one of the city’s most powerful law firms, but left it to act as defence for those who wind up in the lower-city lock-ups each night, a fascinating process.

“This piece is one we affectionately refer to as the dogumentary,” goes Zur, who slots yet another tape into the player. “It’s one of the ‘Around The Town’ segments that we have lined up, which show the eccentricities of life to be found in New York.” On the tape, a flamboyant gentleman is presenting “the look this spring”, showing the camera “Chanel-style” wool jacket, a “Versace style” coat and the full regalia biker jacket in black or pink “for Biker-Bitches”. The kick is that Mr Roth’s wares are intended not for the fashion-conscious New York woman, but rather her sartorially correct pet. Larry Roth’s boutique “Doggie Do and Pussycats Too” caters exclusively for four-legged fashion hounds. Several heads have popped around doors to catch this surreal comic gem.

“Each programme has a set format, with four segments,” explains Ray. “We start off with a personal profile, which could be anything from Jane-Anne Murray, to actor Paul Ronen, or in Boston, where we’ll be profiling a nurse. That’s followed by ‘Around The Town’, where we might cover what happens when a person actually arrives in America, and gives best advice on what to do. Then we have an ‘Inside File’ piece that deals with more serious issues, like the question of votes for emigrants, or the stress of emigration and the support systems available. Then we wind up with ‘Time Out’, which covers arts and entertainment.”

As the production board gains more scrawls and the phone rings yet again, one Stateside crew are in the heart of Harlem to cover a gig by jazz musician David O’Rourke, while down at the Astor Place Theatre, Jenny Conroy is prepping another ‘Around The Town’ segment. Photographer John Francis Bourke is executing the difficult task of persuading the outrageous ‘Blue Man’ theatre troupe to pose for a promo shot with her. These lads spend their time onstage slinging paint, dough, mashed bananas and gob-stoppers around the gaff and after a sort of anarchic sci-fi laughfest, the finale involves the entire audience in what can only be described as a crepe-paper orgy. Into this melee steps Jenny and crew, the results being, one suspects, something to look forward to.

The potential popularity of Stateside may be augured by the recent success of another project commissioned by the IPU, The Morrison Tapes. Following the progress of four Irish Greencard recipients from a time shortly before they left for America until they were four months established there, the series has been one of the most popular and talked-about shows in a long time, which bodes well indeed. This long-awaited exposure and interest back home in the emigration process are welcome not only for the makers of Stateside, but significantly for the community they represent. Because while snappy segments like the Blue Man Group or the “dogumentary” make for a programme with a lot of fun, a more serious overview is worth considering.

The bid for communication and understanding between “home” and what Dermot Bolger so poignantly termed “Ireland in Exile” cannot be underestimated. The reference to Mary Robinson’s expression of commitment to the emigrant community is very much on the ball in connection with feelings on this side of the water: we do actually care about whether “home” gives a bollix. And the fact that the “Greencard Generation” (how many catchphrases and platitudes are there?) get on a plane and leave does not mean that they suddenly stop being Irish people.

If we are to look positively at recent interest in the subject, however, things may be about to a change. It’s particularly now, when emigration has changed in its nature to allow for temporary absences, frequent homecomings, or emigration with eventual returns in sight, that it is important for the so-called “New Irish” to maintain a real connection with Ireland and vice-versa. Projects such as Stateside may be a beginning to help develop it.

Stateside begins airing on February 14th next, for eight weeks.