29 March 2024 The Irish Film & Television Network
     
Five Minutes With... 'Love/Hate' Commissioning Editor Jane Gogan
15 Nov 2012 : By Eva Hall
'Love/Hate' series three returned to RTÉ last Sunday
It's the show that's got everyone talking, from TV critics to sports stars to national health organisations. RTÉ's 'Love/Hate' returned to screens last Sunday night with a bang of a keg and a gangland burial which involved a digger and three drunk criminals.

Not even the fact that the show's stars, writer and producer busily participated in some PR spin in the run up to the show could dispel the 17 complaints that the national broadcaster accrued just 24 hours after episode one aired.

Now in its third season, it's been two years since John Boy, Darren and Nidge first dis-graced our screens with their gangland antics; with John Boy now dead at the hand of his former associate Darren, who has suffered the loss of his brother and girlfriend from his life, and Nidge, who finds himself preparing to go to war with the Real IRA just as he was settling into life at the top of the gang chain.

The woman responsible for bringing all this grit, grime and gangsterism to our screens, RTÉ Drama commissioning editor Jane Gogan, talks to IFTN about why commissioning 'Love/Hate' was pure fate, and how the audience figures will always outgrow the complaints.

How did ‘Love/Hate’ get commissioned all those years ago? We had worked with Stuart Carolan on two previous dramas, ‘Little White Lie’ and ‘Raw’. I bumped into David Caffrey one day out and about and he said he was working away with Stuart, and I said ‘What are you doing?’ and he told me a bit about it. I said ‘You really ought to pitch that as a drama, as opposed to a film’.

So they came in to myself and David Crean who works with me, and it was just so so so strong we said ‘come back with a producer attached to the project’ and that’s what they did. They back came with Octagon Films which has just proved to be a great partnership of a collection of very very capable people.

Was the script originally a film idea? I think they’d been talking of a film, I don’t think it was ever a film script, but it quickly evolved [into a series].

Pull
The violence isn’t there for the sake of having violence there, it’s there because it’s something very real so no there were no concerns. "

What was it that you saw in the original idea that made you encourage them to pitch the idea to RTÉ? It came out of something that was very very honest, and very well thought through. The big thing that I found compelling was that it didn’t place gang world in the word that was different than the one we all occupy. It was very connected to the daily lives that we all have, and I thought that was really important.

And the way Stuart demonstrated that, the way that he talked about the little domestic stories, the relationships. One of the ones I really thought was very strong was the whole thing of Mary and the bins, from series one. Somebody keeps putting rubbish in Mary’s bins, it’s a really common experience and it drives people crazy. I thought made it very identifiable, all these small things that built texture.

What happened next? Was a pilot commissioned? We don’t really commission pilots for drama, what we did was we commissioned a four-part series. I think from the time it was originally pitched, to attaching a production company, and to submitting it for development was probably about a year before we would have green lit a series.

When the series was written and finished production we put series two in development. This is what we would normally do with a series that is potentially a returning series, as soon as you get an audience response, you’re ready to say ‘We’ll take a second series’, so a lot of the ground work will be done for a second series, third series and so on.

‘Love/Hate’ has a reputation of being the grittiest programme RTÉ has ever aired. Were there concerns over the initial subject matter and violence portrayed in the series? No. There’s nothing in the series that hasn’t come out of something very real, it’s very very well researched. The violence isn’t there for the sake of having violence there, it’s there because it’s something very real so no there were no concerns.

Some of the cast of ‘Love/Hate’ have said the initial script presented to them at the read through was altered dramatically when it came to shooting the first episode. What were the most significant changes and why was this? It wasn’t a different script, it would have been a very early draft of a script, and each episode would go through many drafts. They evolve to make the drama as good as it can be so there wouldn’t have been a ‘You can’t do this you can’t do that’. It was ‘How good can this be, what works what doesn’t work?’
Set
Many of the original cast members from series one return in series three

We have a very good relationship with the producers and the writer and there’d be a lot of discussion about just making sure that everything stands up to scrutiny and everything is as good as it can be. So it’s not a descriptive relationship.

Would you say the first series that aired was the same series that you initially commissioned? Well what you commission is a concept, was I disappointed? No I wasn’t. I think what you want to do is to make sure that the writer is as close to the audience as he possibly can be, so whether it’s David or myself or Steve Matthews who would work closely with Stuart as a script editor, I think everybody is working to make sure that Stuart’s idea is as close as it possibly can be to what he wants it to be.

It’s very much an authored series in that respect, and certainly we all would have encouraged Stuart to be an executive producer on it. He’s very close to the production, he would take responsibility, he’d work very closely with David Caffrey and they’d work out a lot of the detail of how it’s produced.

Was there a risk RTÉ might have lost its regular audience by airing such a dramatically different show than any other fictional series it had previously aired? Certainly we were very conscious in RTÉ that this was a series that would bring new audience into RTÉ, I was certainly very conscious of that 25-44 year-old audience; they know what they want to watch, they go looking for programmes they don’t go looking for channels.

We wanted to have a show for that audience. Is it alienating to other viewers? I don’t think so, I think viewers expect RTÉ to have a lot of variety in the schedule, and I think people understand that you need to cater for all kinds of different tastes and audiences. People may choose not to watch it, as long as it’s honest, and I think it is an honest series, I think it’s based on a very real truth, an identifiable truth, so if people choose not to watch it I don’t think they’re necessarily critical of RTÉ.

What, in your opinion, is the reason behind ‘Love/Hate’s’ success? I think it is a truth. I think there are very dark forces, and when you say its success, we’ve yet to see, an audience has got to decide about this new series, so up until series one and two, I think it is truthful and there is a fantastic range of characters.

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[RTÉ is] always on the lookout for producers who are working with writers who have something very distinctive to say "

What commercial prospects does a series like ‘Love/Hate’ bring to RTÉ? It is not a sponsored show. RTÉ has had its dramas sponsored in the past, it’s not at the moment. Fair City is sponsored but the other drama isn’t.

Do you think ‘Love/Hate’ was a rare gem for Ireland? I hope not too rare! It’s certainly a gem. You hope all your dramas are special in some way or another. It definitely has a very big connection with a large part of the audience, there’s no doubt about that.

And people talk about it for a long time, and you see people who aren’t here who are following it on Facebook and they want it. It has that depth and awareness, the place and the time that we’re in that I think resonates very strongly with audiences at the moment. And you’re always looking out for those ideas.

Do you constantly have people trying to pitch you the next ‘Love/Hate’? The thing with ‘Love/Hate’ is its originality, and that’s what we’d always encourage people to do, to pitch original ideas. If we have ‘Love/Hate’ now we’re not going to go for another one. What we’re always on the lookout for are producers who are working with writers who have something very distinctive to say. That’s the most important part of what RTÉ does in its drama output.

If you didn’t run into David Caffrey that day, where do you think ‘Love/Hate’ would have ended up? I think I would have run into them at some point. I think it was fate.

What do Irish producers need to do to impress you? Well researched, strongly authored dramas that have a good potential connection to the audience. No matter how entertainment-driven the idea is, it should always be connected to a truth. We know that’s what the audience looks for.

‘Raw’ for example, which is a series which will be out in the New Year, is a much lighter and more light hearted series than ‘Love/Hate’ but it’s still always set in the time that we’re in, all the characters, their stories, are set against very identifiable factors of the time that we’re in. So we would always look for that in any drama pitch.
Set
Stuart Carolan (writer) & David Caffrey (director) work closely together on 'Love/Hate'

What is the best way for producers to pitch to the Drama department in RTÉ? The best way to pitch to us is on a short one page pitch that outlines what the point of the drama series is and who the key people involved in it are: the writer, the producers. They can pitch that by email at drama@rte.ie. Then we can very quickly respond and say ‘We’d love to see more about this or come in and have a meeting with us’ and we’ll get a chance to tease things out before the producer and the writer put too much work into nothing.

We may have something just like it so we don’t want people going off and doing a whole lot of work to find out that actually we’ve got something in development already. So we aim to keep it as simple as we can and really make sure that people come to us at an early stage, but not so early that they haven’t put a lot of thought and preparation in on the series they imagine it will be.

‘Love/Hate’ airs on RTÉ One on Sundays at 9.30pm. Octagon Films produces, from a script by Stuart Carolan. David Caffrey directs. Robert Sheehan, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Aoibhinn McGinnity, Charlie Murphy, Jason Barry, Susan Loughnane and Killian Scott all star.



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