Munster Express Online

It promises to be a full summer season on RTÉ with three new entertainment series, four new factual series, new music series, four new lifestyle series as well as up to 40 top upcoming GAA fixtures, Noel Curran, MD of RTÉ Television, says: “Our focus in recent years has been on bringing quality home-produced programming to Irish audiences all year round. Special attention has been given to the summer period over the last few years and this trend will continue for summer 2008.”

 

New Entertainment programmes include a new reality show as well as new Saturday night gameshow. In Fáilte Towers 12 well-known Irish personalities take over the running of a hotel for over two weeks while brand new National Lottery gameshow, The Big Money Game, will be presented by Laura Woods.

As well as these new entertainment series, there will also be a wealth of new Lifestyle and Factual series. Dermot O’Neill presents the brand-new Super Garden, where five amateur garden designers compete for the opportunity to exhibit their own garden at Bord Bia’s Bloom in the Park 2009.

Celebrity chefs Kevin Thornton and Kevin Dundon go head-to-head in Heat, in which their protégés are pitted against each other every week, battling it out in Ely HQ’s restaurant to become the Heat Champion.

Use It Or Lose It is a series of programmes for RTÉ that reunites former sports stars with the teams of their youth for one last game. With diet and fitness issues to the fore, old friendships and old rivalries are bound to reinstate themselves as everyone gets to know each other all over again.

Following the recent successful run of Arts Lives documentaries, RTÉ Factual will continue to provide a wealth of documentary and factual programmes over the summer, including two new series from RTÉ’s Archive Unit – Disasters and Hostage – and three returning series – Consuming Passions, Corrigan Knows Food and O’Gorman’s Summer. Heist, meanwhile, is a brand-new three part crime series for RTÉ One, while Customs is a new 4 part series going behind the scenes with customs officers nationwide. Following the success of Eden and Bittersweet, RTÉ Drama will present Little White Lies, a new feature-length drama starring Andrew Scott as a down-on-his-luck actor whose life and career has fallen to bits since he was dumped by his highflying girlfriend, played by Elaine Cassidy. Fair City will continue throughout the summer on One, while series four of Grey’s Anatomy takes up residence on Sunday nights alongside new spin-off drama Private Practice.

The Olympic Games 2008 presents Bill O’Herlihy, Darragh Maloney, Peter Collins, Michael Lyster, Tracey Piggott and Joanne Cantwell as our main anchors for the Beijing Olympics which will showcase some of the greatest athletes the world has ever known. RTÉ Sport will have up to 16 hours of coverage on every day of the Games. More than 10,500 athletes from over 200 countries will compete – among them Team Ireland, with some three dozen world-class contenders, the very best that modern Ireland can produce. Some of our runners, walkers, throwers, boxers, shooters, rowers, sailors and show jumpers will be potential medallists – either now, or in 2012. Others will make Olympic finals, break records or produce personal bests.

 

Ireland’s Olympians is a brand new five-part TV series, and accompanying hardback book, from RTÉ Sport. Produced with the co-operation of the Olympic Council of Ireland and the Irish Sports Council, the series will feature in-depth interviews with leading Irish athletes and international experts across a wide range of sports – including Derval O’Rourke, David Gillick, Eileen O’Keeffe, Kenny Egan, Paul Hession, Joanne Cuddihy and Alistair Cragg.

Sky One recently announced that it has greenlit development on two scripts of the iconic British science fiction series Blake’s 7. Elaine Pyke, Commissioning Editor, Drama, commented: “At a time when science fiction shows often discard good story-telling for overblown visual effects – and following the lead of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica – the time is ripe for a revival of a show that represents the best traditions of the genre, not to mention one of the best-loved and most successful dramas of all time.”

 

Blake’s 7 presented to the world a vision of the future, a future where the galaxy is ruled by the iron fist of a galactic federation, in which freedom and justice are things of the past. Into this vision creator Terry Nation cast a small band of outlaws who find themselves in control of the most powerful space vessel in the galaxy, the Liberator. Led by the enigmatic Roj Blake, the group of rebels would strike at the very heart of the Federation, and change the face of science fiction television.

The series originally ran for four seasons between 1978 and 1981 and recently topped a British Film Institute poll to find the UK public’s favourite television show. The development comes in addition to the already announced slate of adaptations of works by best-selling authors including Chris Ryan (Strike Back), David Almond (Skellig), Terry Pratchett (Going Postal) and Martina Cole (The Take and The Graft).