From Reeling In The Years to recapping the controversy, RTE producer John O’Regan has said he won’t be shying away from controversial topics that happened over the last decade.
Mr O’Regan has opened up about what viewers can expect on this series which will cover events that happened from 2010 to 2019.
He said that while no moment in history was ever off topic, like sex offender Jimmy Saville and child molester Brendan Smyth, he is mindful of how the stories get shown to a younger audience tuning in.
He said: “I’ve never encountered that. We tend to look at the year as the year. Michael Cleary is in, Brendan Smyth is in. It’s a UTV documentary that exposes the activities of Brendan Smyth and the fact that there were extradition warrants in Dublin for several months so that came from Ulster television.
“We haven’t really experienced that. I think we still look at the year as a year. I would be mindful. Reeling in the Years deals with serious topics and it is not targeting a young audience but you have to be aware that sometimes there will be younger viewers watching. Maybe the better point is it is sometimes how you treat a story.
“So the Syrian Civil War is a massive story of this decade and it has to be in the programme but we would judge the shots and footage we would use to tell that story – no more than the Bosnian Civil War.
“It’s important. It’s retrospective. You know who has won the election – but you don’t have to favour it. What you’re trying to do is give a sense of the debate that was around at the time. That is the most important thing. You want to have different voices because they were voices that were knocking around at the time.”
The new series of Reeling In The Years opens with the stories and the soundtrack of the year 2010, when Ireland was hit by freezing weather in January: temperatures dropped to -16.3 degrees in the coldest spell for almost fifty years.
An ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano brought travel chaos across northern Europe, Google’s ‘Street View’ came to Ireland and Limerick’s ‘Rubberbandits’ boasted about having a ‘Horse Outside’. 2010 also saw the opening of the Aviva Stadium, the launch of the ‘iPad’ and the start of ‘Love/Hate’ on RTE.
Broadcaster Gerry Ryan died in April. After Britain’s general election, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government: David Cameron replaced Labour’s Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. In Haiti, an earthquake killed an estimated 222,000 people and left more than 2 million others homeless.
2010 was the year of the Chilean Miners’ Rescue, when 33 miners were trapped underground at the San Jose mine. After 69 days, the miners were safely brought to the surface, one by one.
In the All-Ireland football final, Cork beat Down by a single point, winning 0-17 to 0-16. Kilkenny’s hurlers aimed for a record five All-Ireland titles in a row but Tipperary stopped the ‘drive for five’, winning 4-17 to 1-18.
2010 was the year of the EU-IMF bailout. As massive spending cuts and big tax rises failed to solve rapidly spiralling national debt, Ireland’s economic crash reached crisis point in November, and the government sought an economic rescue package of €67.5 billion from international financial authorities.
Mr O’Regan said there will also be two important topics covered every year on the show – the All Ireland final and music of the year.
“We decided way back that we would put in the All-Ireland finals for each year because I always felt there are many people in this country who date a time or period by who won the All-Ireland and the second one is showcasing Irish music.
“That is what a station like Rte should be doing. It isn’t a revolutionary decision. That is what the late Larry Gogan did when I was kid. He would play the bug tracks internationally and then he would give you a single from an Irish band. And that is what the programme does in that tradition.
“They are the only two criteria. The overall aim is to balance information, entertainment, Irish, foreign for an audience and hopefully engage them across the half-hour.”
He opened up about the previous challenges that were faced by the Reeling In The Years team when footage back in the 60s was never archived or destroyed because of lack of videotaping.
“I worked in Granada for ten years and Grandad in the 60s were the powerhouse of entertainment and they recorded some concerts with the Rolling Stones, The Animas and The Beatles… these acts who subsequently became very famous. Very little of it exists.
“The culture at the time in the 60s, the video tape machine didn’t exist. Rte is no different. There is very little that survives in the 60s and on into the early 70s. There is very little video tape.
“There is a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist or maybe it was wiped because video tapes were very scarce but that tends to change once you get to the mid to late 70s.
“I also think that there was a culture in broadcasting the 50s in the UK and 60s and the 70s in Ireland, a lot of people regarded live broadcasting as there for the moment. The thought process was really that you gave your performance for the day or for the night and why would people keep it if it wasn’t really part of the mindset.
“It wasn’t the culture at the time. You can imagine that there must be gems in people’s personal recordings,” he said.
Compiling what to air seems no easy feat and the cost of copyright can make things challenging.
“We sit down and we look at the work of you and we make a list on paper and we list the news and current affairs, the other elements, music, pop culture, sport and we make a list just on paper and then we start to see what might be there from television that reflects it to stand out moments you might remember yourself.
“Each year is slightly different. 2016 for example is a year that has several main events. It seems to fit together. We haven’t finished it yet, we’re still editing. But it’s large chapters of stories. You’ve got the General Election, the 1916 commemoration, Brexit, Trump, Election, the Rio Olympics.
“We make a list of those and see what footage we can afford because Reeling in the Years is not just Rte footage, there is a lot of copyright negotiation and we have to go through and see what we can afford.
“I have found in the end I come up with 30 to 35 stories and you always end up leaving up some major news stories and you leave out major sports stories and you leave out big songs and big tunes and that is just the process. You hope that people accept it as viewers that it isn’t compiled in the sense of a formal news review of the year where you are listing a series of events.”
He said he hopes the new series will be a hit with viewers.
“I would never presume that a sequence works, we will only find out when it goes out. And the viewers are the judge, not us,” he added.
Reeling In The Years starts Sunday on Rte One at 8:30pm.
