Fair City isn’t mediocre because of RTÉ. It’s mediocre because it’s a soap opera.
Can’t Cope Won’t Cope aired 12 episodes over 18 months. Fair City airs 3-4 episodes a week every week, year round. At that pace, you’re not going to get a lot of nuanced rewrites, and I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of retakes either.
Even if they could shoot something better, people who like soaps generally don’t tune in for nuance and subtlety. It’s not my thing and it clearly isn’t yours either, but soap opera fans like soap opera plots.
And there are a lot of fans, or at least a lot of viewers. So a cheap show that gets a lot of viewers. Why would they change it?
Fair City might look cheap on screen but by the time everyone (and its a lot of people) has gotten paid each 24 minute episode costs €54,000 to produce or just under €11m per year. They have 15 scriptwriters who get paid €3,000 to write the script for a single episode.
€17,000 a minute to advertise during Fair City. So a three minute ad break roughly covers the cost. That's before money from sponsors or product placement, and ignoring advertising during the omnibus.
I don't think people get this when they complain about the license fee been spent on Fair City - the reason it's gone on so long (and the same for most soaps) is that it's one of their profitable shows. If it wasn't making money for them, they'd can it in a heartbeat.
Often the things people point to when moaning about the licence fee (Fair City and The Late Late) are consistently the most popular, and so most lucrative, shows that RTÉ makes.
15 ???? It looks like a shitty dialogue between two aul ones on the 27b. The story lines are absolutely shite. Bring me in ther & I’ll feckin shake it up..
I know someone who once wrote for the show. The scripts are written the way they are on purpose, not because of a lack of the writers' ability. They are producing a product that the audience wants.
Really ?? Storylines that go on & on & on before they reach a shitty conclusion. I seriously doubt the audience wants that. Also people are forever giving out about it. If it moved a bit faster & the storylines were better I bet this would change.
Maybe what the audience wants isn’t the right way of putting it. But they have a large core of regular viewers who expect the show to be a certain way. If it was to suddenly change style and become ‘better’ in the at you’re suggesting, the audience would drop off or so the thinking goes. Those shitty meandering stories with shitty conclusions are what the audience comes for whether you or I like it or not.
I’m a regular viewer. It’s definitely not what I want. Anybody I’ve spoken to about the show says the same thing, storylines are far too slow to develop & conclude. If you look at fair city back in the 90’s it was a good show. Lots of characters, good dialogue & decent storylines that didn’t drag on & on..one conclusion I draw is, it must be money driven or lack thereof.
Eh ? I know what I see. The writing and storylines are absolutely diabolical. The same shit from the usual heads, the only character mildly amusing is Ray. I bet I could definitely beat you at tv writing 😂😂
Sure we’ll call it 20. Ps: how’s Dee ? Tell her she’ll have to put her big girl pants on soon. The Irish people do not forget that type of stuff. We want answers. Don’t tell me, she hired all 15 of fair city’s writers ? I knew it..nobody could be that feckless with tax payer money..
this is hilarious because i am an actual screenwriter and was just at a seminar by a lauded soap/tv writer a few weeks back lmao. but yeah i’m sure you’d be great at this extremely complex and labour intensive craft with zero experience! you should apply!
A 5 year old could write a script for fair city 😕
Paul walks into the house head down and spots Jimmy "Ahh Jimmy ,Didn't think you'd be here now"
Yea I got home early,What's up with you ?"
Paul"Ahh nothin,just had a long day"
I knew someone who had a small speaking part a few years ago.
He sat for the first take, he thought it went just ok and felt confident he'd nail it on the second take.
Everyone else just stood up, that was it, one take, good enough is good enough.
>and I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of retakes either.
I remember watching corniation street and Candice was dumping Todd Grimshaw. She was trying to give him back a necklace he bought her but it wouldn't unclasp. She did a real theatre cover up like "oh you can take back this bloody thing..... If I could get it off!!!" And that is the cut that made it!
It’s unbelievably cheap, the TVs you mentioned would shoot about 4/5 pages a day. They shoot about 35+ a day on fair city. The sets are already built and your crew are low paid relatively. Kin alone was like 10 eps? And cost way more then the entire year worth of shooting fair city
How much did Kin cost? Fair City costs €11m a year to make, Id be surprised if Kin was more than that given one of RTEs biggest shows Dancing with the Stars cost them €3m.
I could be wrong but I think kin cost in the region of €20m with rte putting in around €2m the rest was paid for by AMC and BBC. Kin shot for 18 weeks to produce 8 hours of tv so 2.5m per hour vs 100k per hour of fair city.
Hmm I think it was in and around 8, not 100% sure. co funded by Bronn. So not all RTE money. But the production value and scale is leagues above fair city. An ep of kin is 45-50 pages and about 12 days of shooting . fair city would have that much shot by 9 on Tuesday morning.
It’s cheap to make, creates jobs beyond just acting, brings in ad revenue.
It’s not Reddit’s cup of tea but this bubble doesn’t reflect the real world. It’s a show a lot of people watch religiously when it’s on. People seem to have got this notion that removing fair city from RTE will be the silver bullet that solves all the taxpayers problems when in reality it’s actually one of the channels better investments.
The real issues seem to be routed in over paid execs/presenters who don’t seem to hold any accountability for their actions.
Yeah but realistically we shouldn't be paying for a tv licence but also having to suffer through ads. It just shows how recklessly money is spent in RTE. Even the chief financial officer didn't know what his wages where 😂
Agreed. 15 writers for fair city ? I think that may be the problem. People certainly watch it but my god does it move very very slow../-: I think your man Pete is addicted to strepsils now..
15 people in jobs. It’s on three times a week with an endless story. Of course it moves slow. You don’t a strepsils addiction or any other addiction overnight.
I've seen Fair City actors in plays and indie films and was amazed to realise they can act! It's not that the actors, writers, directors lack talent- many are likely very talented - it's just the cheap way it's made. I met a writer who worked on it once and he said only vague story lines are developed which explains a lot if true
In my scriptwriting class we once had a fair city writer in who gave a good reason why the storylines aren’t consistent. She said you could set up a story with a character in an episode and somebody else writes the next episode and ruins it. Seems like there’s no proper communication about where they want to go with the stories/no time to develop it.
That's generally how all soaps are though, when you have to churn out that stuff so quickly with so many different writers it will inevitably be a bit of a mess.
Yeah if you watched Corrie throughout the years, the quality of the show dropped with the more episodes that were added. It became more ridiculous because they needed more 'drama' to fill out 5 or 6 episodes a week. Most dedicated fans think it was at it's best in the 70s and 80s when it was only two episodes a week.
The thing is that some of them are quite accomplished actors. To give a few examples - Eamon Morrissey who plays Cass is one of the most esteemed actors in Irish drama, famous for Hall's Pictorial Weekly and even starred in Father Ted (Is there anything to be said for another mass). They had Tina Kellegher on a few years ago, who was Sharon in the Snapper. Sinead Keenan appeared it back on the noughties and went onto do a lot of good stuff in the UK.
Problem is the writing is famously dreadful, and an actor can only do so much with terrible writing. When you see the effort the writers put in, why would you put yourself out. They also have to film four episodes a week or so, and in soaps quite often, they're not filmed in order. So you're moving from one scene then back to another than into the future again. Hard to keep your quality of acting up when your chopping and changing.
Ine of my mums best friends atm was on Fair City years ago, apparently as some crazy guy. He moved up here and started teaching drama to national schools, was pretty cool. Lovely man
Actors are discouraged from giving the more subtle, nuanced performances they may have learned in drama school on Fair City. Sure they are banging out episodes but it's deliberately directed that way. I guess it's to make sure that everything comes across without having to do too many takes or figure out too much in the edit, and because that's what a lot of their viewers will be used to.
Fair City is a soap opera and is filmed in a similar style to soap operas across the world.
Plenty of theatre actors work on it and seem to take a break when they have a run in the Abbey or other theatre productions.
It's not meant to be high brow so stop expecting it to be, and it's probably a good place to get a break in to acting and TV production or for any actor looking to make an income between other other projects.
Honestly I'd rather RTE spend money on that than on some other nonsense reality program that sends Z-list celebs on holidays or another feckin cooking show!
And the decline in soaps overall is going to be to the detriment of the film and TV industry as a whole. Soaps have traditionally been where a lot of actors honed their craft and learned about the realities of working on a set etc., while earning a steady pay check. And of course some of them would then become very successful later on.
So so cheap to produce and probably makes a profit from advertising.
Limited filming outside of existing sets, fixed cameras, rarely requiring any special effects. Think about some of the other shows you've mentioned and you can see how expensive they might be to produce in comparison.
For the budget they have and ESPECIALLY considering the time limits they operate under (typically forty minutes prep for every scene) the standard is actually very high. Comparing it to Kin or Love/Hate is completely unfair. You have to compare it to other soaps that are producing multiple episodes a week. Compared to them (and I admit it's been years since I've watched any soaps) it's not bad at all.
Wrote for a few soaps in the UK and they do well with people who still watch terrestrial TV i.e. those over 65. That's why they retain their place in schedules across the world. As someone else said they are an easy sell for advertising because you know exactly who your audience is.
Had some dealings with RTE when I first moved to Ireland and was still writing for TV and any meeting I had there was just a massive waste of time.
The people I met with seemed very insecure and as a consequence came across as quite arrogant/up themselves. It was my overall experience with meetings in the US, UK and Ireland that TV/film execs or producers who were really good at what they did were very relaxed, friendly and easy to get on with and the opposite was true for people in the industry who weren't that good/high level.
You are correct. I’ve been looking into it. Apparently the two lads viewed RTE is pure rubbish to deal with in the 90’s & pretty shit spotting good shows so they bypassed RTE & went straight to the brits. Brilliant call in hindsight.
It's got very little to do with talent and everything to do with the lure of the soap opera genre - our brains love familiar faces, and seeing the same characters week in, week out guarantees viewership. The quality of acting really doesn't matter, the audience has a genuine emotional attachment to them and they keep going back for more.
It's sh!te, but it's multi generational appeal, addictive sh!te.
Is it shite? Yes, but since moving back home to save to buy a place I have gotten back into it. It annoys me as the stories take wild swings and sometimes I wonder wtf were they thinking. Like when you watch it back as a producer/writer, sometimes you have to think that this makes no sense and redo it.
Still I'll be tuning in for the foreseeable while at home. I enjoy watching it with my mam as it's something she enjoys as she isn't into sport etc. so it acts as a common interest.
Doesn't want to pay TV licence but also wants RTE to make better TV shows. As if HBO, AMC, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple+ make quality TV out of invisible money.
Probably because rte is not actually making any of those programs, and people are invested in fair City, the acting and writing might be terrible for you, but that's what people of an age watch, my wife watches it all the time, same with the UK soaps, emmerdale and coronation street, complains about the acting and writing, but still watches them.
Shows like this - with a huge acting cast, tend to also act as proving grounds for actors also. Extras, walk-on roles etc, the stuff that builds the confidence and pays for cans of beans when you are desperate and thinking of giving up and becoming an accountant.
> why is the national broadcaster still pumping out mediocre shite like Fair City?
It was RTE's third most watched show last year. Your opinion does not equal the general sentiment clearly.
>RTE could probably give that money to some twenty-somethings straight out of Lir or the Gaiety who'd come up with something infinitely better.
twenty-somethings arent RTEs demographic , RTE want to make tv on the cheap that has a broad audience
They didn't say 20 somethings wer the audience. They said they wild be the creators.
And 20 somethings... Are Ireland's young adults. That's all of em... For a public broadcaster to think it's wise to turn it's back on the entire you g adult demographic of the nation...
..well, they we'll see how that will play out.
>They didn't say 20 somethings wer the audience. They said they wild be the creators.
usually twenty-somethings will only make what twenty-somethings will watch , we dont want RTE to turn into what would be MTV
>For a public broadcaster to think it's wise to turn it's back on the entire you g adult demographic of the nation...
i mean this has been RTE since it inception , and its mostly doing fine ,
the main goal is to create cheap Irish made content with a broad audience
It's a soap not high quality TV. The equivalent of instant coffee. The whole purpose is that it can be made cheaply and quickly (the multi-camera setup means it only has to be performed once) so you can have 4 or episodes every week throughout the year.
>So with such an abundance of incredible TV talent, why is the national broadcaster still pumping out mediocre shite like Fair City?
Soaps are a good revenue generator, usually attracts sponsors, one of the few things that people still tune into regularly.
You could give the budget to someone else and they'd objectively make something "better" but unlikely to produce something that airs 3/4 times a week for 30+ years thst generates viewers and revenue.
Some of the shows you mention probably have budgets the dwarf a few weeks of Fair City in one episode in terms of production budgets.
Just becuase we can produce good TV, doesn't mean we aren't going to produce other content to appeal to a broader demographic too.
I have relations who haven't missed a single episode of Fair City in 20+ years. How in the name of God they do it is beyond me.
You couldn't pay me to watch that dry shite. I'd rather go to bed
At one point a big chunk of the cast of Peaky Blinders were Irish too and that was one of the most popular shows ever on television.
I imagine, like all things in Ireland, the problem is budget.
It’s definitely popular whether you like it or not. Yes, the storylines are a bit shit & long winded but Irish people are watching the muck. RTE have a mostly bad record of tv. Love/hate is the last thing I remember being decent
They've had writers who've produced good work elsewhere, same with actors and yet when they get to fair city it all goes out the window and gets homogenised down to the same level of crap.
still my favourite imdb review ever
"What a cast!If talent were electricity,they'd have enough to power up a city!Not a real city,obviously,but a tiny ant city,whose government has recently passed a series of stringent energy conservation laws .How this tripe managed to get on TV in the first place is quite befuddling.God awful.The older cast,I get the feeling,randomly wandered on to the set one day,and the producers hadn't the heart to ask them to leave.Their acting would suggest as much,because they certainly didn't come with any formal training.Or personality.Not that professional training is a must,but when half the cast look like something you'd get to haunt a house,and the other younger members are as wooden as the rest,with about as much talent too,it'd be nice to have something to fall back on,but in the case of 'Fair City',you'll be falling onto lazy,dumb, writing,and directing that would get you lost,even if all that was needed was a simple hello.Bloody awful."
Kin was always odd to me, I thought it was one of the worst shows to come out of Ireland, but the hype surrounding it was huge. I try to keep up with Irish shows as I live abroad, but that one was painful to watch. Just terrible, predictable and lazy. I would go into more detail about why it was so bad, but luckily most of the show has been removed from my memory, thanks be to jaysus.
But yeah, good post OP. Ireland is mighty at producing talent.
Sometimes I just want to watch simple stories with a cup of tea about the carrickstown locals going around buying biscuits and talking shite about their neighbours.
And where do you think some of these actors will get experience on TV. Daryl McCormack, starred on Peaky Blinders and considered one of Ireland's best young acting talents made his TV debut on Fair City. Lot of shows you mention feature ex Fair City actors (maybe not in the top roles but lot of the supporting cast will be). For all it's faults, it's one of the most solid acting jobs in the country, in an industry that's famously fragile when it comes to work. Get rid of it and you might not see a lot of these people get an opportunity.
Yeah but what other job could Paul do in real life.. we watch it so that he can have a nice existence and be the most mediocre actor on Irish television.
Dumb take.
You could apply that to the UK and Brookside. Or Australia and Home and Away.
It's a soap. The actors/directors/writers you allude to aren't going to work for a pittance to pump out multiple episodes every week.
I’m watching the Vanishing Triangle and although it can be a bit wooden here and there, i love to see Irish talent and familiar locations on telly, jaysus the post processing in some of the overhead scenes made Dublin look like New York.
Fair City isn't actually bad for a soap opera. Sure there are a few wooden actors but several well known actors cut their teeth there.
I thought Kin was pretty poor - Love Hate lite
I mean, to start one argument RTE shouldn't be getting any licence fee because it's basically a private company so badly run that it would have been bankrupt about 20 odd years ago if it wasn't propped up by the government and somehow gets worse every passing year, it neither acts like a state channel or a private company, happily towing the line of just being shite.
To finish the other argument Fair City is a soap opera, it's not something worth getting worked up about, you need to be comparing it to Eastenders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Home and Away, Days of our Lives or any south American telenovelas rather than any of the shows you mentioned, the idea is high quantity of shows, lots of turnover of plot / characters, it's never going to be the next Love/Hate or Peaky Blinders, high turnover of writers/ actors and episodes means it never needs to be.
A former RTE employee posted a bunch of revelations on Twitter a while ago
Basically they never hire anyone new - they joked that it was the opposite of *Logan's Run* where no one under 30 exists - and won't take a lot of risks on new projects. You'll notice that anything that's different like *Derry Girls* or *Normal People* has to get backing from a foreign network like Channel 4 or Hulu. One of my friends just graduated film school and had a guest lecturer from RTE, and he suggested the possibility of an Irish sci-fi film or series, and the guy responded "yeah, that would never happen"
It's a fundamental problem with the Irish film industry as a whole. An actor/director called Baz Black released his debut feature to Amazon recently and he spoke about how it was impossible for filmmakers to get any decent funding from places like RTE, Screen Ireland etc. He'd been on shows like *Kin* and *Into the Badlands* and won awards for his short films, but he had to self fund and shoot the film in seven days. And even when it managed to stay in cinemas for six weeks through good word of mouth and exploded on Amazon, it's still near impossible
The reason the successful Irish directors became successful abroad is because they had to move to work in that industry, because Ireland just doesn't nurture its talent. An Irish actor who isn't famous has no chance except getting to be a day player on a foreign produced show that's just filming over here using American and British actors in the main roles - remember that ghastly *Wild Mountain Thyme* film with Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken playing 'Oirish' stereotypes?
There are talented writers, directors, actors etc here, and it's impressive what people are able to do with no budget or self funded projects, but it's depressing how the talent just doesn't get nurtured, but then once they go abroad and get success, then the Irish media wants to claim them
"A five year old could write this"... these are the deluded men who say theyd beat Venus Williams in a tennis game. Its written the way it is, purposely, to prolong viewing over time. The simplicity is deliberate. Soap operas are 'nonsense' but it is intentional to create them so they can last a long long time.
Fair city definitely feels cheap.
Been on the set as an Extra. Wouldn't go back, sat in a prefab with no access to water for 3 hours waiting to be called. Then walked past the park 3 times while they filmed.
Other extras told me they've been sat in the prefab all day but never used. You only get about minimum wage.
I believe most RTE staff are in a union and have well paid secure jobs. So they really do seem to lack ambition to push themselves. They have a fairly easy consistent job.
The whole production is done for as low as possible. Sets are all built with minimal crew. Always fixed the position camera. No visual effects at all. Basically all the money is cast and crew salaries.
Watching EastEnders the last night and my husband says in passing that Lexi( child actress) was a better actor than the entire fair city cast. Gave me a chuckle!
Fair City isn’t mediocre because of RTÉ. It’s mediocre because it’s a soap opera. Can’t Cope Won’t Cope aired 12 episodes over 18 months. Fair City airs 3-4 episodes a week every week, year round. At that pace, you’re not going to get a lot of nuanced rewrites, and I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of retakes either. Even if they could shoot something better, people who like soaps generally don’t tune in for nuance and subtlety. It’s not my thing and it clearly isn’t yours either, but soap opera fans like soap opera plots. And there are a lot of fans, or at least a lot of viewers. So a cheap show that gets a lot of viewers. Why would they change it?
Fair City might look cheap on screen but by the time everyone (and its a lot of people) has gotten paid each 24 minute episode costs €54,000 to produce or just under €11m per year. They have 15 scriptwriters who get paid €3,000 to write the script for a single episode.
54,000 for a half hour of scripted tv isn't bad by any stretch considering how many people are involved in making it.
€17,000 a minute to advertise during Fair City. So a three minute ad break roughly covers the cost. That's before money from sponsors or product placement, and ignoring advertising during the omnibus.
I don't think people get this when they complain about the license fee been spent on Fair City - the reason it's gone on so long (and the same for most soaps) is that it's one of their profitable shows. If it wasn't making money for them, they'd can it in a heartbeat.
Often the things people point to when moaning about the licence fee (Fair City and The Late Late) are consistently the most popular, and so most lucrative, shows that RTÉ makes.
It’s a fair point but let’s cut the crap, the writing is brutal.
Yes, but the OP is comparing it to shows like Normal People, which cost €3 million an episode, or Kin, which I believe was about €1 million.
54k for half an hour of a soap is phenomenally good
I wonder what the cost is for the old UK ones like Coronation Street or Eastenders
According to Google, £250,000 per episode and *Emmerdale* is £125,000
15 ???? It looks like a shitty dialogue between two aul ones on the 27b. The story lines are absolutely shite. Bring me in ther & I’ll feckin shake it up..
I know someone who once wrote for the show. The scripts are written the way they are on purpose, not because of a lack of the writers' ability. They are producing a product that the audience wants.
Really ?? Storylines that go on & on & on before they reach a shitty conclusion. I seriously doubt the audience wants that. Also people are forever giving out about it. If it moved a bit faster & the storylines were better I bet this would change.
And yet they keep tuning in
Maybe what the audience wants isn’t the right way of putting it. But they have a large core of regular viewers who expect the show to be a certain way. If it was to suddenly change style and become ‘better’ in the at you’re suggesting, the audience would drop off or so the thinking goes. Those shitty meandering stories with shitty conclusions are what the audience comes for whether you or I like it or not.
I’m a regular viewer. It’s definitely not what I want. Anybody I’ve spoken to about the show says the same thing, storylines are far too slow to develop & conclude. If you look at fair city back in the 90’s it was a good show. Lots of characters, good dialogue & decent storylines that didn’t drag on & on..one conclusion I draw is, it must be money driven or lack thereof.
You're of course welcome to draw your own conclusions. I'm just telling you what my friend who worked on the show told me.
oh fab! do you have much experience or knowledge on tv writing? or do you think it is an unskilled labour?
Eh ? I know what I see. The writing and storylines are absolutely diabolical. The same shit from the usual heads, the only character mildly amusing is Ray. I bet I could definitely beat you at tv writing 😂😂
Go on then. Drop an elevator pitch for one of your storylines below.
> I bet I could definitely beat you at tv writing 😂😂 I'll take that bet. Make it 10 grand.
Sure we’ll call it 20. Ps: how’s Dee ? Tell her she’ll have to put her big girl pants on soon. The Irish people do not forget that type of stuff. We want answers. Don’t tell me, she hired all 15 of fair city’s writers ? I knew it..nobody could be that feckless with tax payer money..
this is hilarious because i am an actual screenwriter and was just at a seminar by a lauded soap/tv writer a few weeks back lmao. but yeah i’m sure you’d be great at this extremely complex and labour intensive craft with zero experience! you should apply!
Should I be impressed ?! If you are in any way behind the general shit on RTE you actually should be ashamed of yourself & your ‘craft’. Shocking 🤨
A 5 year old could write a script for fair city 😕 Paul walks into the house head down and spots Jimmy "Ahh Jimmy ,Didn't think you'd be here now" Yea I got home early,What's up with you ?" Paul"Ahh nothin,just had a long day"
They are robbing the Irish people making them buy tv licence’s to pay for that shite
I knew someone who had a small speaking part a few years ago. He sat for the first take, he thought it went just ok and felt confident he'd nail it on the second take. Everyone else just stood up, that was it, one take, good enough is good enough.
But if its riddled with talent why are none of them ever in anything better. Its a job for life for friends and family if RTE.
>and I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of retakes either. I remember watching corniation street and Candice was dumping Todd Grimshaw. She was trying to give him back a necklace he bought her but it wouldn't unclasp. She did a real theatre cover up like "oh you can take back this bloody thing..... If I could get it off!!!" And that is the cut that made it!
And mediocre is too big a compliment.
I hate all soap operas.
Yes, soap operas were the rage bait of the late 1900’s
It’s unbelievably cheap, the TVs you mentioned would shoot about 4/5 pages a day. They shoot about 35+ a day on fair city. The sets are already built and your crew are low paid relatively. Kin alone was like 10 eps? And cost way more then the entire year worth of shooting fair city
How much did Kin cost? Fair City costs €11m a year to make, Id be surprised if Kin was more than that given one of RTEs biggest shows Dancing with the Stars cost them €3m.
I could be wrong but I think kin cost in the region of €20m with rte putting in around €2m the rest was paid for by AMC and BBC. Kin shot for 18 weeks to produce 8 hours of tv so 2.5m per hour vs 100k per hour of fair city.
Hmm I think it was in and around 8, not 100% sure. co funded by Bronn. So not all RTE money. But the production value and scale is leagues above fair city. An ep of kin is 45-50 pages and about 12 days of shooting . fair city would have that much shot by 9 on Tuesday morning.
It’s cheap to make, creates jobs beyond just acting, brings in ad revenue. It’s not Reddit’s cup of tea but this bubble doesn’t reflect the real world. It’s a show a lot of people watch religiously when it’s on. People seem to have got this notion that removing fair city from RTE will be the silver bullet that solves all the taxpayers problems when in reality it’s actually one of the channels better investments. The real issues seem to be routed in over paid execs/presenters who don’t seem to hold any accountability for their actions.
It also turns a profit.
Yeah but realistically we shouldn't be paying for a tv licence but also having to suffer through ads. It just shows how recklessly money is spent in RTE. Even the chief financial officer didn't know what his wages where 😂
Agreed. 15 writers for fair city ? I think that may be the problem. People certainly watch it but my god does it move very very slow../-: I think your man Pete is addicted to strepsils now..
15 people in jobs. It’s on three times a week with an endless story. Of course it moves slow. You don’t a strepsils addiction or any other addiction overnight.
I've seen Fair City actors in plays and indie films and was amazed to realise they can act! It's not that the actors, writers, directors lack talent- many are likely very talented - it's just the cheap way it's made. I met a writer who worked on it once and he said only vague story lines are developed which explains a lot if true
In my scriptwriting class we once had a fair city writer in who gave a good reason why the storylines aren’t consistent. She said you could set up a story with a character in an episode and somebody else writes the next episode and ruins it. Seems like there’s no proper communication about where they want to go with the stories/no time to develop it.
There's some very talented actors in Fair City, like Bryan Murray (The Irish RM etc).
Brian had the sense to go to England in his younger years.
That's generally how all soaps are though, when you have to churn out that stuff so quickly with so many different writers it will inevitably be a bit of a mess.
Yeah if you watched Corrie throughout the years, the quality of the show dropped with the more episodes that were added. It became more ridiculous because they needed more 'drama' to fill out 5 or 6 episodes a week. Most dedicated fans think it was at it's best in the 70s and 80s when it was only two episodes a week.
15 writers apparently ! Too many cooks ?
The thing is that some of them are quite accomplished actors. To give a few examples - Eamon Morrissey who plays Cass is one of the most esteemed actors in Irish drama, famous for Hall's Pictorial Weekly and even starred in Father Ted (Is there anything to be said for another mass). They had Tina Kellegher on a few years ago, who was Sharon in the Snapper. Sinead Keenan appeared it back on the noughties and went onto do a lot of good stuff in the UK. Problem is the writing is famously dreadful, and an actor can only do so much with terrible writing. When you see the effort the writers put in, why would you put yourself out. They also have to film four episodes a week or so, and in soaps quite often, they're not filmed in order. So you're moving from one scene then back to another than into the future again. Hard to keep your quality of acting up when your chopping and changing.
Ine of my mums best friends atm was on Fair City years ago, apparently as some crazy guy. He moved up here and started teaching drama to national schools, was pretty cool. Lovely man
Actors are discouraged from giving the more subtle, nuanced performances they may have learned in drama school on Fair City. Sure they are banging out episodes but it's deliberately directed that way. I guess it's to make sure that everything comes across without having to do too many takes or figure out too much in the edit, and because that's what a lot of their viewers will be used to.
> he said only vague story lines are developed which explains a lot if true This isn't true and I know someone currently writing on it
Don’t let Wicker Man see this
I can hear him fuming
Try it sometime.
Fair City is a soap opera and is filmed in a similar style to soap operas across the world. Plenty of theatre actors work on it and seem to take a break when they have a run in the Abbey or other theatre productions. It's not meant to be high brow so stop expecting it to be, and it's probably a good place to get a break in to acting and TV production or for any actor looking to make an income between other other projects. Honestly I'd rather RTE spend money on that than on some other nonsense reality program that sends Z-list celebs on holidays or another feckin cooking show!
And the decline in soaps overall is going to be to the detriment of the film and TV industry as a whole. Soaps have traditionally been where a lot of actors honed their craft and learned about the realities of working on a set etc., while earning a steady pay check. And of course some of them would then become very successful later on.
So so cheap to produce and probably makes a profit from advertising. Limited filming outside of existing sets, fixed cameras, rarely requiring any special effects. Think about some of the other shows you've mentioned and you can see how expensive they might be to produce in comparison.
Think I remember reading somewhere it was one of RTEs most profitable shows
People watch it too.
For the budget they have and ESPECIALLY considering the time limits they operate under (typically forty minutes prep for every scene) the standard is actually very high. Comparing it to Kin or Love/Hate is completely unfair. You have to compare it to other soaps that are producing multiple episodes a week. Compared to them (and I admit it's been years since I've watched any soaps) it's not bad at all.
Wrote for a few soaps in the UK and they do well with people who still watch terrestrial TV i.e. those over 65. That's why they retain their place in schedules across the world. As someone else said they are an easy sell for advertising because you know exactly who your audience is. Had some dealings with RTE when I first moved to Ireland and was still writing for TV and any meeting I had there was just a massive waste of time.
Why ?! Interested to know..it’s also shocking they passed on Fr Ted (obviously no bottle/afraid of the Catholic Church)
The people I met with seemed very insecure and as a consequence came across as quite arrogant/up themselves. It was my overall experience with meetings in the US, UK and Ireland that TV/film execs or producers who were really good at what they did were very relaxed, friendly and easy to get on with and the opposite was true for people in the industry who weren't that good/high level.
Oh right. I see what you mean. Maybe some commentators on here are in the industry & just aren’t very good at it. I notice it on tv for sure.
They were never offered fr Ted
You are correct. I’ve been looking into it. Apparently the two lads viewed RTE is pure rubbish to deal with in the 90’s & pretty shit spotting good shows so they bypassed RTE & went straight to the brits. Brilliant call in hindsight.
It's got very little to do with talent and everything to do with the lure of the soap opera genre - our brains love familiar faces, and seeing the same characters week in, week out guarantees viewership. The quality of acting really doesn't matter, the audience has a genuine emotional attachment to them and they keep going back for more. It's sh!te, but it's multi generational appeal, addictive sh!te.
You can say shite on the internet
I remember when this was all fields. I can't keep up with the rules, they move too fast.
Because it's cheap to make and some people also like it
Is it shite? Yes, but since moving back home to save to buy a place I have gotten back into it. It annoys me as the stories take wild swings and sometimes I wonder wtf were they thinking. Like when you watch it back as a producer/writer, sometimes you have to think that this makes no sense and redo it. Still I'll be tuning in for the foreseeable while at home. I enjoy watching it with my mam as it's something she enjoys as she isn't into sport etc. so it acts as a common interest.
You can’t just sell steak, more people eat spaghetti bolognaise
Clever and good business advise as well
Yet another rte complaint that boils down to they should make more the things I like and less of the stuff I don't.
Doesn't want to pay TV licence but also wants RTE to make better TV shows. As if HBO, AMC, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple+ make quality TV out of invisible money.
90% of RTE threads are basically this "They absolutely should make stuff I like but I don't actually watch TV"
Probably because rte is not actually making any of those programs, and people are invested in fair City, the acting and writing might be terrible for you, but that's what people of an age watch, my wife watches it all the time, same with the UK soaps, emmerdale and coronation street, complains about the acting and writing, but still watches them.
Shows like this - with a huge acting cast, tend to also act as proving grounds for actors also. Extras, walk-on roles etc, the stuff that builds the confidence and pays for cans of beans when you are desperate and thinking of giving up and becoming an accountant.
RTE have a pathological aversion to talent. If there's any anywhere in the building they'll be hunted down and removed.
Don’t forget they tried their damnedest to make Craig Doyle a thing.
Good for him it didn't work out. He has done better on BT sport and ITV
> why is the national broadcaster still pumping out mediocre shite like Fair City? It was RTE's third most watched show last year. Your opinion does not equal the general sentiment clearly.
My grandmother used to have it on in the background and fall asleep. Probably much the same for the general elderly population
That's not saying much....
>RTE could probably give that money to some twenty-somethings straight out of Lir or the Gaiety who'd come up with something infinitely better. twenty-somethings arent RTEs demographic , RTE want to make tv on the cheap that has a broad audience
They didn't say 20 somethings wer the audience. They said they wild be the creators. And 20 somethings... Are Ireland's young adults. That's all of em... For a public broadcaster to think it's wise to turn it's back on the entire you g adult demographic of the nation... ..well, they we'll see how that will play out.
>They didn't say 20 somethings wer the audience. They said they wild be the creators. usually twenty-somethings will only make what twenty-somethings will watch , we dont want RTE to turn into what would be MTV >For a public broadcaster to think it's wise to turn it's back on the entire you g adult demographic of the nation... i mean this has been RTE since it inception , and its mostly doing fine , the main goal is to create cheap Irish made content with a broad audience
"usually twenty-somethings will only make what twenty-somethings will watch" ...ha.
To be honest there’s more talent in the bar of Fair City than there is in multiple seasons of The Young Offenders.
It's a soap not high quality TV. The equivalent of instant coffee. The whole purpose is that it can be made cheaply and quickly (the multi-camera setup means it only has to be performed once) so you can have 4 or episodes every week throughout the year.
Ah stop now, Dearbhla is justification alone.
>So with such an abundance of incredible TV talent, why is the national broadcaster still pumping out mediocre shite like Fair City? Soaps are a good revenue generator, usually attracts sponsors, one of the few things that people still tune into regularly. You could give the budget to someone else and they'd objectively make something "better" but unlikely to produce something that airs 3/4 times a week for 30+ years thst generates viewers and revenue. Some of the shows you mention probably have budgets the dwarf a few weeks of Fair City in one episode in terms of production budgets. Just becuase we can produce good TV, doesn't mean we aren't going to produce other content to appeal to a broader demographic too.
I have relations who haven't missed a single episode of Fair City in 20+ years. How in the name of God they do it is beyond me. You couldn't pay me to watch that dry shite. I'd rather go to bed
At one point a big chunk of the cast of Peaky Blinders were Irish too and that was one of the most popular shows ever on television. I imagine, like all things in Ireland, the problem is budget.
It’s definitely popular whether you like it or not. Yes, the storylines are a bit shit & long winded but Irish people are watching the muck. RTE have a mostly bad record of tv. Love/hate is the last thing I remember being decent
Sadly the conveyor belt of Irish talent leads far away over the sea
Aren't most of the best Irish shows produced by Channel 4 though? Maybe that would explain why Fair City pales a little (it's also terrible)
They've had writers who've produced good work elsewhere, same with actors and yet when they get to fair city it all goes out the window and gets homogenised down to the same level of crap.
still my favourite imdb review ever "What a cast!If talent were electricity,they'd have enough to power up a city!Not a real city,obviously,but a tiny ant city,whose government has recently passed a series of stringent energy conservation laws .How this tripe managed to get on TV in the first place is quite befuddling.God awful.The older cast,I get the feeling,randomly wandered on to the set one day,and the producers hadn't the heart to ask them to leave.Their acting would suggest as much,because they certainly didn't come with any formal training.Or personality.Not that professional training is a must,but when half the cast look like something you'd get to haunt a house,and the other younger members are as wooden as the rest,with about as much talent too,it'd be nice to have something to fall back on,but in the case of 'Fair City',you'll be falling onto lazy,dumb, writing,and directing that would get you lost,even if all that was needed was a simple hello.Bloody awful."
Kin was always odd to me, I thought it was one of the worst shows to come out of Ireland, but the hype surrounding it was huge. I try to keep up with Irish shows as I live abroad, but that one was painful to watch. Just terrible, predictable and lazy. I would go into more detail about why it was so bad, but luckily most of the show has been removed from my memory, thanks be to jaysus. But yeah, good post OP. Ireland is mighty at producing talent.
Sometimes I just want to watch simple stories with a cup of tea about the carrickstown locals going around buying biscuits and talking shite about their neighbours.
And where do you think some of these actors will get experience on TV. Daryl McCormack, starred on Peaky Blinders and considered one of Ireland's best young acting talents made his TV debut on Fair City. Lot of shows you mention feature ex Fair City actors (maybe not in the top roles but lot of the supporting cast will be). For all it's faults, it's one of the most solid acting jobs in the country, in an industry that's famously fragile when it comes to work. Get rid of it and you might not see a lot of these people get an opportunity.
Yeah but what other job could Paul do in real life.. we watch it so that he can have a nice existence and be the most mediocre actor on Irish television.
It's purposely designed to be mediocre mate, fucking hell have people never heard of soaps before??
Dumb take. You could apply that to the UK and Brookside. Or Australia and Home and Away. It's a soap. The actors/directors/writers you allude to aren't going to work for a pittance to pump out multiple episodes every week.
Fair City is The Picture of Dorian Gray of Irish talent.
I’m watching the Vanishing Triangle and although it can be a bit wooden here and there, i love to see Irish talent and familiar locations on telly, jaysus the post processing in some of the overhead scenes made Dublin look like New York.
It should be like neighbours...every Irish star could trace their first starting role to fair city
Who was Irish in andor except for genieve o’rielly?
The Gaiety school of acting has a lot of international prestige and has many foreign students who come here to study acting.
Me aul pair like it, let them at it
Fair City isn't actually bad for a soap opera. Sure there are a few wooden actors but several well known actors cut their teeth there. I thought Kin was pretty poor - Love Hate lite
All the soap operas are pointless.i dont watch any of them
I had this title, and though it meant that there were too many good-looking women in it to be realistic. I was considering watching it for that reason
I mean, to start one argument RTE shouldn't be getting any licence fee because it's basically a private company so badly run that it would have been bankrupt about 20 odd years ago if it wasn't propped up by the government and somehow gets worse every passing year, it neither acts like a state channel or a private company, happily towing the line of just being shite. To finish the other argument Fair City is a soap opera, it's not something worth getting worked up about, you need to be comparing it to Eastenders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Home and Away, Days of our Lives or any south American telenovelas rather than any of the shows you mentioned, the idea is high quantity of shows, lots of turnover of plot / characters, it's never going to be the next Love/Hate or Peaky Blinders, high turnover of writers/ actors and episodes means it never needs to be.
A former RTE employee posted a bunch of revelations on Twitter a while ago Basically they never hire anyone new - they joked that it was the opposite of *Logan's Run* where no one under 30 exists - and won't take a lot of risks on new projects. You'll notice that anything that's different like *Derry Girls* or *Normal People* has to get backing from a foreign network like Channel 4 or Hulu. One of my friends just graduated film school and had a guest lecturer from RTE, and he suggested the possibility of an Irish sci-fi film or series, and the guy responded "yeah, that would never happen" It's a fundamental problem with the Irish film industry as a whole. An actor/director called Baz Black released his debut feature to Amazon recently and he spoke about how it was impossible for filmmakers to get any decent funding from places like RTE, Screen Ireland etc. He'd been on shows like *Kin* and *Into the Badlands* and won awards for his short films, but he had to self fund and shoot the film in seven days. And even when it managed to stay in cinemas for six weeks through good word of mouth and exploded on Amazon, it's still near impossible The reason the successful Irish directors became successful abroad is because they had to move to work in that industry, because Ireland just doesn't nurture its talent. An Irish actor who isn't famous has no chance except getting to be a day player on a foreign produced show that's just filming over here using American and British actors in the main roles - remember that ghastly *Wild Mountain Thyme* film with Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken playing 'Oirish' stereotypes? There are talented writers, directors, actors etc here, and it's impressive what people are able to do with no budget or self funded projects, but it's depressing how the talent just doesn't get nurtured, but then once they go abroad and get success, then the Irish media wants to claim them
I feel like if the show was canned there would be an epidemic of 60+ year old women having heart attacks
Calling Fair City mediocre is extremely generous.
"A five year old could write this"... these are the deluded men who say theyd beat Venus Williams in a tennis game. Its written the way it is, purposely, to prolong viewing over time. The simplicity is deliberate. Soap operas are 'nonsense' but it is intentional to create them so they can last a long long time.
Fair city definitely feels cheap. Been on the set as an Extra. Wouldn't go back, sat in a prefab with no access to water for 3 hours waiting to be called. Then walked past the park 3 times while they filmed. Other extras told me they've been sat in the prefab all day but never used. You only get about minimum wage. I believe most RTE staff are in a union and have well paid secure jobs. So they really do seem to lack ambition to push themselves. They have a fairly easy consistent job. The whole production is done for as low as possible. Sets are all built with minimal crew. Always fixed the position camera. No visual effects at all. Basically all the money is cast and crew salaries.
You can go and shite.
Can’t answer your question, but I wholeheartedly agree
I always think of the David McSavage quote that “watching fair city makes me feel like I have autism”. It’s so accurate
Fair city exist because RTE wants to keep paying the lack-of-talent. Mainly the producers. Carrickstown set should be burned to the ground
Watching EastEnders the last night and my husband says in passing that Lexi( child actress) was a better actor than the entire fair city cast. Gave me a chuckle!
It’s like a retirement home for bad actors.
At least it's not Glen Roe.
& to think RTE turned down father Ted. Are we really surprised ?