Factual

RTÉ Factual is the home of uniquely Irish stories, a place where RTÉ’s audiences come to be entertained, informed, and to see themselves.

In 2021, the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the appetite of our audiences noticeably shifted from programmes that informed and reflected the world around them to programmes that offered an escape and a diversion. Around the country, people remained at home, and wanted something to watch. Thanks to sustained efforts of production teams both within RTÉ and outside, in the independent production sector, RTÉ Factual was again able to offer a wide range of content across the year.

Telling Our Stories

As with previous years, our focus was to tell a range of distinctly Irish stories to an international standard and compete for audiences who have an increasing number of options.

The year started with a series of one-off documentaries that captured our viewers’ imaginations. In Marian, John Clarke spoke honestly and openly about his life with the late Marian Finucane and of his pain at her untimely passing. Let the Rest of the World Go By charmed the nation with the story of two best friends, both men, who married for tax purposes. Both, unusually for one-off documentaries, featured in the list of most-watched programmes of 2021.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia was a major theme in our output while the pandemic continued as audiences wanted to be brought back to simpler times. The Way We Were played strongly on Sunday nights in January and looked back on how the nation used to holiday and work, among other themes. It proved extremely popular with audiences, as did Reeling in The Years, which returned with a new series that covered the 2010s. It attracted huge audiences, most encouragingly among viewers aged 15-34 where the 2011 episode attracted a 53% share and 140,000 viewers within this younger demographic.

Our History

Other aspects of our recent history featured strongly in some of the main documentary offerings of the year. Gunplot saw the One RTÉ strategy bear fruit where the Documentary on One team collaborated with the in-house TV Documentary Unit to produce an impactful nine-part podcast series alongside a one-off, hour-long companion television documentary. The collaboration was a huge success with over 1.5 million downloads for the podcast and over 300,000 viewers for the television documentary. Elsewhere, the Documentary on One team continued to deliver a slate of high-impact, award-winning one-off documentaries. The strand remains the touchstone for audio documentary storytelling, both in Ireland and further afield.

In Specialist Factual, the Decade of Centenaries continued, and 2021 saw the centenary of partition of the country and the foundation of Northern Ireland. The event was marked sensitively and appropriately with two companion documentaries, one a social history fronted by Miriam O’Callaghan and the other a look at the politics presented by Michael Portillo. Our environment, its history and the question marks over its future also featured prominently in the Specialist Factual slate with The Burren: Heart of Stone and a second series of Future Island.

Religious Programming

For the second year running, RTÉ Religion supplemented its regular religious output with extra Weekday and Sunday Masses & Services, streamed in association with ChurchServices.tv on the RTÉ News Channel. On average, these attracted over 30,000 viewers a day. RTÉ Religion also produced several programmes to mark minority faith festivals, such as Passover and Yom Kippur (Jewish), Vaisakhi (Hindu and Sikh), Nawruz (Baha’i) and Ramadan and Eid (Muslim), including live OB coverage of Eid Prayers from Croke Park.

Switching Channels

The year in Popular Factual was defined by a switch of channels for two of its most important brands. In September, Ultimate Hell Week moved from RTÉ2 to RTÉ One and attracted an entirely different and younger profile audience to the channel, while in October, Home Rescue went the other way from RTÉ One to RTÉ2. The supersized hour-long version of the popular format attracted an average audience of over 200,000, almost doubling previous audiences in the slot. Both series will give us a firm base from which we can develop new programmes and launch new talent in 2022, and beyond.