From knitting to television with Alan Esslemont, TG4’s rise to Ireland’s 7th most popular channel

From knitting to television, TG4’s rise to Ireland’s 7th most popular channel

Very interesting interview with Alan Esslemont, Director General TG4

What is your background briefly?

I’m originally Scottish, although very proud that I am now an Irish citizen, naturalised at a ceremony in Killarney in 2018 led by Judge Bryan MacMahon and Minister Paschal Donohoe.  I came to Galway in 1984 on a nine-month teaching contract with UCG (NUIG) and 35 years later I am still here! My wife, Máire, is from Mayo and we raised five adult children in the Connemara Gaeltacht.  Before coming to Ireland I graduated with an MA in French from Edinburgh University, spending about two years working in France and Switzerland and then two years working as a machine knitter in a knitting factory in the Isle of Skye.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

From knitting to television via academia? Probably not!  But for everyone there are always forks in the road and, for some of us, sometimes a moment of epiphany.  From the first day I sat down at a video editing machine in a Fás course in Tralee, beginning to make decisions on how moving pictures should fit together and how a visual story should be told, I knew that I really, really wanted to find a way of working in television.

In 1989 I was lucky enough to become a member of the start-up team for Telegael, the first successful audio-visual company in the west of Ireland.  Then, in 1995 I was appointed to the senior management group of Teilifís na Gaeilge which launched TnaG in October 1996 and then I played a key role in the successful re-launch of TnaG as TG4 in 1999.    I became Director of Television for TG4 in 2000 and then in December 2007 I returned to Scotland to help set up and launch BBC ALBA, the Scots Gaelic television channel.

With five kids in school and college, we didn’t want to move to Scotland, so I spent almost nine years commuting weekly from Connemara to Glasgow and Stornoway.  In the lead up to its launch in 2008, BBC ALBA was seen as being ‘set up to fail’ but the channel was a pioneering success and ended up being watched weekly by an audience ten times the total amount of Gaelic speakers in Scotland.

BBC ALBA was a great place to be and people say ‘never go back’ but in October 2016 I came back to work in Ireland as Director General at TG4 and have really enjoyed the challenge.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

TG4’s reputation and popularity with audiences is now well established and we are the 7th most watched channel in Ireland, ranked above rich and accessible broadcasters like Channel 4, Sky and BBC Two.  Habitual Irish speakers watch us in great amounts, with our news, ‘Nuacht TG4’, and our soap, ‘Ros na Rún’, especially popular with our core audience.  But almost everyone in Ireland, with little Irish or none, will find something in our schedules which is compelling and unique, especially in our sport, our music and our documentaries.

We are also aware of how audiences, especially young audiences, are changing the way they view content and we have doubled our investment in young people’s programming and established a new digital non-linear channel called ‘BLOC’ which serves young people aged 18-35.

But beyond the public value that TG4 creates culturally, socially and for the Irish language, our new five year strategy highlights the role that TG4 plays in the creative economy and the development of the audio-visual industry in Ireland, especially in the regions.  In this respect, TG4’s strength is its model as a publisher broadcaster, a model first developed by Channel 4. That means that we don’t actually make our own programmes. We strategise our schedules and our brand in-house, but we commission our programmes from external independent producers.

Because of the high level of global competition in the television market in Ireland, producers who work for us have to reach world-class standards for their programmes to be watched by Irish audiences. This means that producers working for TG4 are honing world-class skills which can then serve other broadcasters, nationally and internationally.  Thus any investment in TG4 becomes an investment in Ireland’s creative economy.

Tell us about the potential of the creative economy, particularly in the regions, what might ‘good look like?

The potential for Ireland is huge.  The Creative Ireland strategy launched by the Government in 2017  has a national goal for Ireland to become a global Centre of Excellence for Media Production and the government’s own advisors pointed out the critical role played by TG4 in developing the audio-visual sector outside of Dublin/Wicklow.  In the last 5 years alone TG4 has invested over €130M in Ireland’s creative services, helping build strong, internationalising Irish companies.

What ‘good’ looks like is perhaps exemplified by Telegael, the company from An Spidéal I started out with over thirty years ago.  In the early years, Telegael’s turnover was very dependent on TG4 but their entrepreneurial CEO managed to find an international market for the company’s skills and now Telegael has a huge annual turnover focusing on animation and live-action drama. These days TG4 hardly provides 5% of Telegael’s income but we are proud that it was the quality of TG4’s programming that provided such a compelling calling card for home-grown talent to grow and flourish in the international audio-visual market.

Why do you think it is such a powerful idea?

It’s powerful because of the status of audio-visual content worldwide, a status that has indeed grown over the last few years.  Perhaps people are viewing less traditional television than before but they are actually viewing more content than ever. For that reason we have diversified into short-form digital content and also into Irish language cinema.  The first films from our ‘Cine4’ brand will come into cinemas this year and we have the stated and achievable aim of winning a foreign-language Oscar for Ireland.

Media remains a powerful force in the modern world and we are proud that surveys show that over 90% of the public strongly identify TG4 as a promoter of Irish.   But being a creator of wealth, especially in Ireland’s regions, means that everyone one shares in TG4’s success, not solely those interested in Irish.

TG4 is both a great idea and yet also a challenge as more and more Gaeltacht areas experience challenges in maintaining an active usage of the language. Question how does Irish remain a vibrant and functional language, rather than an exercise in preserving heritage?

Your question gets to the core of the problem the Irish language in Ireland has had for over 300 years.  How do we achieve a vibrant and functional bilingualism in a world dominated by the English language? What added value does the Irish language bring to individuals in Ireland?  There was a famous Canadian academic, William Mackey, who pointed out ominously that “a self-sufficient bilingual community has no reason to remain bilingual”.

I believe that TG4 is part of a vision for healthy bilingualism in Ireland, especially in those regions where Irish is strong.  We help create status for the language and help bring Irish into the national mainstream. And very importantly we are part of an international industry which doesn’t need to be in Dublin to create wealth and to create world-class audio-visual content.

What similarities and differences do you see between the Irish and Scottish languages and their usages?

I speak Irish at home and at work in Connemara and I learned Scots Gaelic in the knitting factory in Skye and used it daily in my role of Head of Content with BBC ALBA.  The two languages and their respective ‘Gaeltacht’ communities are similar but their histories have diverged. The efforts to revive Irish in Ireland have been criticised but have been much more effective than in Scotland.  But by working together, we can both make progress.

This applies to Wales as well, where the native language is still very strong and where the Welsh TV channel, S4C, has about three times the budget of TG4. At present TG4, S4C and BBC ALBA co-produce a great deal together and this internationalised base has allowed us recently to open up new markets for co-production including Korea and China.

How can people find out more about you & your work?

Lots of TG4 content is available worldwide without restrictions on tg4.tv and I can be contacted through tg4.ie or via TG4TV on LinkedIn.  And if you’re at home in Ireland, just turn on the telly and enjoy!

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