A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland

Edward Brennan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783319968599
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319968605
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores the question of how society has changed with the introduction of private screens. Taking the history of television in Ireland as a case study due to its position at the intersection of British and American media influences, this work argues that, internationally, the transnational nature of television has been obscured by a reliance on institutional historical sources. This has, in turn, muted the diversity of audience experiences in terms of class, gender and geography. By shifting the focus away from the default national lens and instead turning to audience memories as a key source, A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland defies the notion of a homogenous national television experience and embraces the diverse and transnational nature of watching television. Turning to people's memories of past media, this study ultimately suggests that the arrival of the television in Ireland, and elsewhere, was part of a long-term, incremental change where thedomestic and the intimate became increasingly fused with the global. 

© The Author(s) 2019

E. BrennanA Post-Nationalist History of Television in Irelandhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96860-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. How Should We Write a History of Television?

Edward Brennan¹

(1)

Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Edward Brennan

End Abstract

The newsreader wept as he made the announcement. Those who could made telephone calls to friends and family and told them to turn on their televisions. For others, word of mouth spread the news from house to house and street to street. Over those few days, the screens in people’s sitting rooms and kitchens, for the first time, brought the truly unwelcome into Irish homes. This was not bad news. It was horror. The replays of his recent visit to Ireland added to the tragedy. On 22 November 1963, John F. Kennedy lay dead in Dallas. For many in Ireland a sense of possibility and optimism died with him that day. If we listen to Irish people who are old enough to remember the early days of television, this is a moment they all remember. It was an event that they shared with each other, and with the world, through television among other media. Yet, when we read about the history of television in Ireland this moment is seldom mentioned.

This book is about a discrepancy between the reality of electronic media and how their histories are written. It considers the history of television in Ireland as one instance of a general problem. The problem is that histories of broadcasting tend to be written at the level of the national. They are preoccupied with the role of national broadcasters within nation states. They tend to play down the role of international influences and mute the voices of viewers. All the changes, the ‘new normal’, that came with television go unquestioned. They are left hidden in plain sight. This work is intended as a complement to existing histories. It sheds light on how television, as part of a raft of cultural changes, transformed the way that Irish people related to time and space, and the new ways that they were connected to, and disconnected from, each other. It uses personal memories of television as a key source. This change in sourcing transforms our vantage point on media in the past. It disrupts the orthodox national perspective, which frustrates our ability to understand television as a phenomenon that was, like the shock of the Kennedy assassination, simultaneously global and viscerally personal. Turning to people’s memories of television changes our view of the private screen from being an element of a national culture to that of a crucible where global processes became fused with personal, private life. Before embarking on a broader discussion of history, memory, television and social change it is useful to take some time to think about what television is. The difficulty here is that the word ‘television’, like the word ‘media’, describes many very different things at once. To begin to understand what television is, it is useful to consider what it might have been.

From an Open to a Closed Technology

In September 1946, the Irish Independent appears, momentarily, to have developed the ability to see the future. In a Curly Wee and Gussie Goose cartoon, Mrs Hen prematurely faces the twenty-first-century disappointment of realising that social media often do not feel very social at all. This was not about an internet platform, but was a vision of how television might shape social life (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Curlie Wee and Gussie Goose Cartoon, Irish Independent, 18 September 1946

(Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

Television only became a domestic possibility for people in the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s. And then it was only available to a small minority. Nevertheless, the medium had been established as an idea since the early twentieth century. The Killarney Echo, from 1 January 1910, offers the earliest mention of television found in an Irish newspaper. The period before the Second World war illustrates how, unlike the set of technologies and conventions that we would later know as television, in its earliest days the medium was an exciting but vague space of open-ended possibility. From the 1920s, Irish newspapers offered occasional reports and comments that suggested that this media innovation would soon be available in shops and homes. There was a succession of false starts with articles, from the early 1920s, suggesting that television was just a matter of months away. The Irish Independent, for example, informed its readers of the invention in 1923.

The wonders of wireless transmission are manifold. The latest discovery for the use of radio-active waves is a device by which one can see as well as hear. The householder who “listens in” to a lecture or concert will, it is claimed, be able to see as well as to hear. More than that, he will be able to watch every movement of the lecturer or instrumentalist or singer just as he now watches motion pictures in the kinematograph theatre. The discovery is not yet made public either in practical demonstration or in technical explanation. But there seems little reason to doubt that the problem has been solved and in a few months the apparatus, so the discoverers say, will be placed on the market. ¹

Four years later, The Irish Times noted that ‘we may not hope yet to see the Derby from fireside or champion pugilists pommelling each other at £10 a blow. It is not quite come to that, but the results already achieved are sufficiently wonderful’. ² Five years later, again, but undeterred, the Irish Independent told its readers that there was ‘a prospect… that in the not far distant future television, as an adjunct to the broadcasting service may be introduced into the Saorstat [Saorstát Éireann, the Irish Free State]’. ³ It reported that ‘preliminary discussions’ had taken place ‘within the firm of Messrs. Baird, patentees of one of the television inventions, and if the result should be satisfactory, experiments may begin very soon’. ⁴ These ‘any day now’ predictions would remain false for another quarter of a century. Nevertheless, television had already entered people’s imaginations, if not their living rooms.

Journalists discussed television as a marvel of scientific progress. The Independent reported that the chief wireless operator on board the Cunard liner Berengaria had seen his fiancée talking with other people in a room in London while he was 1500 miles out at sea. This happened in 1928:

He had not known he was going to see her then, but he recognized her beyond a doubt as soon as her face appeared. This was no dream, although it may be said to be the fulfilment of a dream. The vision was real enough. It was just an incident in a demonstration of what a Baird Televisor could accomplish in carrying sight across thousands of miles of space and through any intervening obstacle, enabling distant events to be witnessed, at the moment of their occurrence, as easily as distant sound is heard by means of wireless telephony. ⁵

Like teleporters in science fiction today, people understood what television was and what it could do, although it existed as an idea rather than as a practical reality. There were occasional news articles and lectures. A popular racehorse was called Television. ⁶ Television featured in newspaper advertising as a wonder of technology. ⁷ However, while people awaited this scientific marvel’s imminent arrival, there was no consensus on what it was for. There was no clear, shared idea of how it would be used. Before the medium settled into a single mould, there were diverse visions of what ‘seeing by wireless’ might mean. Like Gussie Goose, but 20 years earlier, newspapers envisaged that television would be used as a form of visual, person-to-person communication. This echoes the use of screens in the science fiction popular at the time from writers like E.M. Forster and Jules Verne. A review of the novel The Television Girl (1928) by G. de S. Wentworth James remarked that ‘to fall in love with a face seen on the televisor—when the television comes—will be no more extraordinary than to fall in love with a voice heard over the telephone’. The Irish Times opined that when the ‘radio-television apparatus’ became commonplace it would allow us to not only speak to, but also see, other people at a distance. Thus ‘communication would become wider and wider, and the earth smaller and smaller, till a man could communicate instantaneously’. ⁸ In 1928, 70 years before its realisation, John Logie Baird , the Scot commonly credited in Britain with inventing television, stated that ‘telephoning to friends by “television” will be the next big thing to be commercially developed’. This would come ‘as surely as the telephone itself came’. ⁹ There were other uses, practical and imagined, for the wireless transmission of pictures. The Irish Times again announced the inauguration of a public service between Berlin and Vienna for the ‘telegraphic transmission of photographs, printed pictures and hand-writing’. ¹⁰ It was envisaged that radio sets would be able to print out photographs of distant events by combining early ‘television’ technology. ¹¹ Irish physicist E.E. Fournier D’Albe predicted that television would display sports, conflicts and explorations. He imagined television being installed in public theatres rather than private homes. ¹² As Raymond Williams observed, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. How Should We Write a History of Television?
• 2. A Dominant Narrative in Irish Television History
• 3. Personal Memory and Social Power
• 4. Making Sense of Television
• 5. Memories of Imported Programmes and International Broadcasts
• 6. Time, Space and Television
• 7. Recollection and Social Status
• 8. Putting the Bishop and the Nightie to Bed
• 9. Personally Remembering the Global
• Correction to: A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland
• Back Matter