Paul KeenanInside RTÉ: A Memoir by Betty Purcell (New Island, €19.99 / £16.30)
Joe Carroll
This is a revealing book on the inner workings of RTÉ, which looms so large in Irish life today. Betty Purcell joined the station from UCD in 1979 as a trainee radio producer. She retired 33 years later after a full and stimulating career, mainly in current affairs in radio and television, but also with stints on The Late Late Show, Questions and Answers and Would You Believe.
She also combined work with active trade unionism and a term as the elected staff representative on the RTÉ Authority.
Thus she is in an unrivalled position to write about RTÉ from the inside and does not pull punches when describing the campaign by members of the Workers’ Party to influence current affairs programmes in the 1980s, the battle within the station for and against the censorship imposed by Section 31, and what she would see as covert Catholic Church influence on programmes on women’s affairs.
No secret
She makes no secret that she herself was coming from a left wing, liberal-secular viewpoint. As a new recruit she felt that “Broadcasting for me was a continuation of politics by other means, and was a route to effecting social change and exposing injustice. It was a career path about which I was and remain passionate.”
She writes lucidly about the debacle which was the Mission to Prey documentary by the Prime Time Investigates unit. For her there were already alarming signs in the unit of a dumbing down by newer executives who felt pressurised by the more sensationalised methods of the rival TV3.
Betty Purcell was unknown to the vast majority of RTÉ listeners and viewers for whom she was a name on the credits but she played an influential role on the station’s most important programmes and working with high profile presenters like John Bowman and Pat Kenny. Although she found working with Kenny on radio fulfilling she was not so happy when she moved to co-produce his Late Late Show. She was not comfortable with the “entertainment” aspect of the show but had been given a brief by the then Director-General to “get the programme back to being talked and argued about in the homes and workplaces of Ireland”.
She ended up having a blazing row with Kenny over his treatment of a woman interviewee and left the programme soon afterwards having partially restored friendly relations. She believes that RTÉ should have better used Kenny’s great talents in current affairs interviewing.
As the staff representative for five years on the RTÉ Authority she punched well above her weight and earned the respect of the older, more experienced members such as Dr Garret FitzGerald. She took a leading role in the appointment of Bob Collins as Director-General and the ousting of a senior TV executive.
Her fiestiness may have some origin in her early difficult years when she spent 30 months with her sister in an orphanage in Dun Laoghaire following the separation of her parents. Fortunately, her hard-working mother was later able to resume care of the whole family but the young Purcell girls were well treated by the French nuns in what has been called “among the best of Dublin’s orphanages at the time”.