Saorview is here … at last

Saorview is here …. at last


Off the fence
Áine ryan

I have Saorview-itis. And I bet I am not the only Irish citizen who feels like throwing my remote-control at the box in the corner every time Gaybo reminds us about the end of television as we knew it.
(God be with the days when my granny examined the back of our first television in an attempt to see how a talking horse, called Mr Ed, could appear on a grainy screen in a 1960s Irish kitchen!)
All RTE has managed to achieve in this latest information overdrive is to scare lots of  people into thinking that the introduction of the digital broadcast system is more complicated than making a nuclear bomb or doing somersaults on the moon.
It is almost a year-and-a-half since Minister Pat Rabbitte launched this costly campaign, which is underpinned by the simple message that we need to buy a small electronic box – similar to a DVD player – and attach it to our aerials in order to continue getting reception.
Is it not ironic (even telling) that our cash-strapped Department of Communications has spent €1.2 million on this most irksome public relations drive and last week, just days before the switchover – tomorrow, Wednesday –  around 100,000 people still had not bought the box. Admittedly, there has been a reported last-minute surge in the purchase of the Saorview boxes. And hands up. Mea culpa! While I didn’t quite have a look of terror on my face when I called into Clarke’s TV shop in Westport last week, I was scratching my head as I asked (the reasonable question) whether I would need a new aerial, or even a new television.
Thankfully, I didn’t, as is the case for the majority of people. Thankfully too this transitional process from Neanderthal analogue to sophisticated digital turned out to be pain-free for my household. All I needed to do was engage a Digital Consultant, Saoirse, my 20-year-old daughter, to set it up. It was all done in five minutes.
So what was the need for this expensive campaign? Would a couple of timely letters in the post not have worked? That could have been supplemented by  a month-long advertising promotion during September. Surely the fact that so many people have left it to the last-minute to purchase the box affirms this argument.
But, no, our big-brother nanny State thinks differently. Despite the outrageous costs. The well-oiled PR machine, and its many elitist tentacles, has become a new arm of the State. It bombards the citizen daily, hourly, with its vested version of reality. It brainwashes us with its hysterical warnings of all sorts of apocalypses. The latest is simply Saorview.