The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It’s a great magazine series covering Ireland’s underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.
Naturally, it’s also had a long and illustrious history of no support from RTE, who just seem to hate the whole idea and would prefer they just had a nice, non-controversial chat show instead.
Well, Sampler just won ‘Best Special Interest Programme’ at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Nice one! (Not that you’d know it from the IFTA website, which hasn’t updated the awards pages in 2 years. — update: Simon points out I’m looking at the wrong site: the real one is here.)
Disclaimer: Luke, the producer, is a good mate of mine. But it’s still
a great programme. ;)
Go take a look! Episodes 2 to 5 are online in full, in RealVideo format — and encoded at a pretty decent bitrate.