Consumer revolution stopped the real one

The idealists who once thought to change the world through television were outflanked by consumerism, writes Tom McGurk.

Tom McGurk

Last Saturday, in the Aviva Stadium studio for the Ireland-South Africa match, I began my 40th year presenting live television. It all began for me with the autumn schedule back in 1974, when RTE was coincidentally introducing Ireland’s first colour television transmissions.

It was a very different media landscape to the one we have today. For a start we lived in an Ireland that was mostly single channel land – except for some ...