Dear Sir/Madam,
I have a number of issues with Friday night’s broadcast of the Late Late Show. I can’t believe RTÉ in all it’s wisdom decided to give a confidence trickster, cold reader and con artist a forum on it’s flagship show to peddle their wares. Helen Parry Jones’s appearance as a guest of Ryan Tubridy is a new low point for our national broadcaster. What you effectively did last night is give a charlatan a platform on which she can legitimize her morally bankrupt ‘profession’. Even more dangerous than that, you subjected the volunteers to bogus advice with no grounding in medicine without anyone from the medical profession present to refute it. The tenets of the philosophy of public service broadcasting espoused by the otherwise questionable Lord Reith were utterly shattered by that broadcast. His template of “educate, inform and entertain” were chewed up and spat out in favour of the circus of bemusement you visited upon your audience.
One can only imagine that, in an ever increasingly competitive marketplace, that it is difficult on a tightened budget to come up with a consistent product of substance. However to this discerning viewer, it seems as though you may as well have become a game show. You’re show gave away €40,000 worth of prizes last night, lest you need reminding. It is depressing to me that in 2011, the flagship show, on our flagship station has stooped so low. If you continue to tailor your broadcast to your imaginary audience of idiots then our national broadcaster itself has become morally bankrupt. We might put up with the same old formats, peddling the same old tripe for a certain length of time, but when our broadcasting system, in it’s fiftieth televisual year deems it acceptable to limbo dance beneath the perceived wants of the lowest common denominator, we have to speak out. One can question the comedic tastes of the commissioning editors. One can even question bias in the political coverage. However, when the longest running chat show in the world is debased to the level of last night’s broadcast, none of that matters, because then you’ve lost the only capital that counts in broadcast media, and that’s integrity.
Kind regards
Christopher Duffy
