The Irish language broadcast channel, TG4, broadcasts a range of television programmes about traditional music and singing. Whilst it is obviously mostly in Irish, non Irish speakers can turn on subtitles, although song lyrics are not translated. On 11th June TG4 celebrated its 30th anniversary by launching a permanent online archive of programmes. The following is from their press release:
“Our aim is for TG4’s Digital Research Archive to be a living archive. This means that we will continue to add to this site on an ongoing basis. We are preparing newly digitised tape material from 1996 to 2011, as well as material from 2012 onwards, for upload to the site.
There is currently access on this site to more than 9,000 programmes. It is a site designed for researchers. The layout is clear and intuitive. There are options for simple and advanced searches by date, genre and field. There are eleven filter fields, such as title, description, catalogue item and place name. Functional workspaces allow users to save search lists, content lists and clips.
Registration is required to access this service at www.cartlann.tg4.ie. The site allows access for three levels of research users: 1) Public, 2) Educational and 3) Production researchers. The level of access is selected based on the intended use. The visibility of the material is based on the access level.”
Alternatively, if you just want a browse to get an idea of the range of material (be warned, there are Irish language soap operas too!), you can look at many previous programmes via the TG4player – https://www.tg4.ie/en/ – although programmes are sometimes only on there for a limited amount of time. Many of these programmes feature contemporary performers, but there are series such as Se Mo Laoch (“My Hero”) which feature older generation traditional performers, and other short series or one-off programmes on specific performers or aspects of musical history. Although TG4 was established only 30 years ago, their musical history programmes frequently draw on earlier material from the RTÉ Archives which contains much in the English language.
Katie Howson