RTE has announced details of its autumn/winter schedules, which include a series of programmes celebrating the millennium. The station will celebrate New Year's Eve with 15 hours of programming, including live coverage of the millennium from around the world and from many locations around the country.
As already announced, Pat Kenny will host the Late Late Show from September. In a video presentation at the schedule launch, Mr Kenny described taking on the Late Late as "probably the biggest challenge of my career". The Saturday night slot previously filled by Kenny Live will be devoted to Saturday Live, a new live entertainment show fronted each week by a different personality. "Each Saturday Live will be slightly different and designed to play to the strength of each presenter," according to RTE.
Gay Byrne will make an early return with Make 'Em Laugh, a series on the development of Irish comedy, using clips from the RTE archives of his personal heroes, including Maureen Potter, Frank Hall and Billy Connolly.
Another archive-based series, Reeling in the Years, will tell the story of Ireland in the 1980s in 10 parts, combining footage of memorable events with the biggest pop hits from each year. RTE Unwrapped is a six-part series which goes behind the scenes of some of RTE's most successful television and radio programmes, focusing each week on the making of one particular show.
New drama includes DDU, a spin-off from RTE's previous crime series Making the Cut, with Sean McGinley and Andrea Irvine reunited as detectives in a provincial Irish town. Also scheduled is Eureka Street, a BBC-produced adaptation of Robert McLiam Wilson's comic novel set in contemporary Belfast, which stars Vincent Regan, Dervla Kirwan and Sorcha Cusack.
Brenda Fricker takes the lead role in Growing Pains, a four-part family drama set in Ireland and Germany about two women thrown together by fate.
The major documentary series scheduled are The Irish Empire, a five-part series looking at the Irish diaspora, From a Whisper to a Scream, following the global success of Irish music stars, Seven Ages, a series by Sean O Mordha on how the country has developed since independence, and Christianity in Ireland, a series on Ireland's Christian heritage. Other documentary series include From the Cradle to the Grave, which looks behind the scenes at the operation of the Department of Social Welfare, Harbour Lights, a fly-on-the-wall series following the lives of visitors and residents in the Co Wexford resort of Courtown at the height of the holiday season, and The Craic Down Under, a video documentary series about young Irish people in Australia.
Single documentaries on a range of subjects, from Micheal Mac Liammoir to Joe Dolan, are included in a schedule which sees the return of such titles as the marine programme Out of the Blue, the agricultural series Ear to the Ground and the books programme Imprint. Clare McKeon's chat show is moved to an earlier slot on Tuesday evenings, and the arts review programme, Later with John Kelly, moves to Wednesday evenings.
Movie premieres for the autumn include Hollywood blockbusters such as Tomorrow Never Dies, Twister, Scream and The English Patient. Irish films receiving their first television broadcast include Last of the High Kings, Some Mother's Son and I Went Down.
"At a time of increasingly multiple choice in television, people will ask, `why have a public service broadcaster?"' said Mr Joe Mulholland, RTE's managing director - television, at yesterday's launch at Montrose. "But now, more than ever, there is a need for a free-to-air public broadcaster which is strong and dynamic."
