RTE International

Well not too long til it will launch, Who's gonna watch it

You think 7 months is not long?!
There's other things closer, Sky1 relaunch, UKTV relaunch, Christmas.

All RTE seem to show anyway is UK and US programming.

Surely if there was any good programming coming out of Ireland it would be making it's way over to fill the schedules of the existing digital channels anyway.

Don't give him ideas.

I think it would be more of a channel for Irish ex-pats to be honest, if anything similar to what Tara TV was, best of Irish TV mainly from RTÉ and regular RTÉ News thrown in too, it was just that Tara TV never made a profit. Whether RTÉ International will, we don't know, whether it could be going Worldwide could be another thing too.

They'd be best teaming up with Setanta, both comapnies are Irish, well known and Setanta seem to pretty well in this country and in the US aswell.

Tara TV used to fill it's schedules with Irish programming quite well. RTE does produce a lot of its own programmes.

I thought Tara was great, remember enjoying 'Never Mind The Gondolas' in particular (although that has now finished)

Yep - I remember watching a few shows on Tara before it folded (presumably when RTE got round to actually wanting to be paid for the shows Tara was showing?)

Some of them had a "homespun" charm a bit like some of the ITV regions in the 80s (in craft terms) - but some of the ideas, the writing and the wit was definitely worth a watch.

The comedy especially was quite good, even though some of the references went right over my head. It was a good chance to see early performances by the likes of Daira o'Brien and Ed Byrne.

The Late Late show was often worth a watch, especially if they'd flown over a British guest. Not seen since Gay Byrne left however. Also I remember seeing an excellent RTE documentary about 'Fairy Tale of New York' which Tara showed one Christmas, this was later repeated on ch4

Don't feed the Gondolas. It has kind-of been succeeded by The Panel in that it has some of the same sort of people (Dara O'Briain is recurrent much of the time) and discusses topical-lite type news, but most of the time just degenerating into comic rants about random things.



It's not that great at all now, certainly nothing like the Gay Burne haydays, seems overtly zelebrity driven, with Pat the Plank Kenny being unable to carry out any of the more probing/intimate interviews Gay used to do (whilst still being able to mix in light stuff very much at ease). It has hads its moments though, like a while back when a man walked down onto set swearing viciously at the host. The next weekend he proceeded to drive his car through the main entrance doors of RTE's studios.

I heard Dara o Brien talking about that the other week on 5 Live. Apparently there has been the idea to do an British version of The Panel but everyon reckons it'll be too much like a male Loose Women!

Well, The Panel is a sort of hybrid between Mock the Week , Loose Women and The Eleven O'Clock Show . Considering Dara O'Briain's popularity in the UK (mainly thanks to MTW ) an equivalent of The Panel might go down quite well. It'd certainly do better than Tonightly .

Hmm I wont be watching, because im in Ireland! And even then with my license fee (oh and don't forget we have to watch ad's too) there still isn't anything on, The Panel, Podge and Rodge, and Failte Towers at a stretch. Apparently Fáilte Towers (Fáilte means welcome in Irish and is included in many Irish proverbs) is heading to the UK too now. Personally I watch more of UK television, but a lot of Irish people simply can't get UK teleision because of their location and patriotism, i know my old neighbours would not watch Top Gear unless it was shown on RTE2. A lot of locations in Ireland can't even get Sky! The only channel we cannot get here is Five, so we aren't too bad off now.