The Riordans

The Riordans was the second Irish soap opera made by Radio Telifís Éireann (then called Telifís Éireann). It ran from 1965 to 1979 and was set in the fictional townland of Leestown in County Kilkenny. Its use of Outside Broadcast Units and its filming of its episodes on location rather than in studio, broke the mould of broadcasting in the soap opera genre, and inspired the creation of its British equivalent, Emmerdale Farm (now called Emmerdale) by Yorkshire Television in 1972.

Tensions and rivalries

As with all soap operas, The Riordans was centred on various tensions, rivalries and relationships. Among the central ones were

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• generational - conservative parents (Tom and Mary) and radical young son and heir (Benjy); Batty Brennan and his wife Minnie Brennan , as the old people in the community, against everyone else.
• mother versus son - Mary against Benjy, which some critics likened to John Millington Synge's Playboy of the Western World;
• liberal versus conservative - radical priest Father Sheehy versus his older parishioners; conservative parents Tom and Mary against liberal children Michael and Jude; conservative Catholic Tom and Mary versus their contraception-using daughter-in-law, Maggie Riordan;
• outsider versus insider - the Riordan family, with their middle class farming background, against orphan Maggie, wife of Benjy; members of the nomadic Irish traveller community versus the settled, non-nomadic farming community;
• Class - well-to-do characters like the Church of Ireland upper middle class wife of the doctor, Mrs. Howard, and the middle class farming Riordans, against farm labourers Batty Brennan and Eamonn Maher.
• community gossip - as with most soaps, The Riordans contained a 'local gossip' character, Minnie Brennan, who, typically for the such characters, proclaimed no interest in gossip at all, but nevertheless became the source of local information on the lives and loves of the community.

One additional twist to the series was that the elderly gossip, Mrs Brennan, though considerably older than all the other characters (and actors) in the series except her onscreen 'husband' Batty Brennan (he had to be written out of the series suddenly when the actor playing him died), was played by the elderly Anne Dalton, the real-life wife of John Cowley, Tom Riordan, the lead middle aged character. The striking difference in ages of the couple (she was his senior by twenty years, and as Minnie Brennan was made to look even older through make-up) became a source of comment among viewers, as some noted in letters to the show that she was old enough on screen to convincingly play his mother.

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