Launched by the Mayor of Galway and local Cablelink manager John Moore O’Connor, West Coast Television is apparently the third local television service (after Dublin and Cork I presume) being provided by cable supplier Cablelink. The sole program being broadcast on WCTV to date is a local entertainment and sports show, The Kitchen Sink, which is produced by Galway’s own Mugshot Television company.
The Kitchen Sink is broken up into three main sections. The first (and longest), an overview of the week’s events in Galway, is presented by Síle Seoige (sister of TV3 news presenter Gráinne Seoige according to the current edition of Who’s Who in Irish TV ;-)). This includes reviews of plays currently running in Galway, or bands with upcoming gigs etc. Interspersed with these event previews are snippets of Síle and her cameraman asking people on Shop Street silly questions like why do pets look like their owners and so on. The second part of the show is a film review spot with Julian Gough (a member of local band Toasted Heretic). Finally, a sports round up is presented by Kevin Dwyer. Overall, it’s a good guide to things happening in Galway for those too lazy to pick up a newspaper, and of course you get a better visual and aural idea of what you could go and see.
If you are a cable subscriber in Galway, tune your television to 72 MHz (where you’ll see a Cablelink test card). The 45-minute show airs on Thursday evenings at 7:30 (with repeats on Sundays at 6:30 PM).
For the 1999 solar eclipse, you had three choices if you wanted to see it. The first was to look directly at the sun and take a chance at burning your retina (some people glimpsed for less than a second anyway and luckily that doesn’t seem to have done any long term damage). The second was to take a piece of cardboard, punch a hole in it and project an image of the eclipsed sun onto the ground. The third choice was the one I opted for, watch it on TV!
I decided to check out the coverage on all the cable channels and see what each one had to offer. I started off with the BBC and live shots from a Harrier Jump Jet above cloud cover gave us the first views of the eclipse. The Pet Shop Boys made a brief appearance with some special music they had composed for watching the eclipse.
We also had the familiar face of Sky at Night’s Patrick Moore, who was live from Cornwall, one of the first places in the UK to see the eclipse. Unfortunately, the scientific coverage was interrupted by Phillipa Forrester, standing around looking a bit cold and miserable, who was bringing us some of the “human interest” eclipse stories. Yawn. Still, at least it wasn’t as weird as the Channel Four coverage! The people on the Big Breakfast were talking to a new age traveller woman who was worshipping an eight-foot-high wire and papier maché effigy of the divine feminine for the occasion. Riiiight! Time to switch over to Euro News on TG4, who had a fairly dull commentary but some interesting eclipse shots from England.
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