RTÉ has unveiled The Traitors Ireland: Uncloaked, its upcoming companion show for The Traitors Ireland, with the comedian, actor and podcaster Kevin McGahern recruited to be its “mischievous host”. Not too mischievous, though, right? No one wants another Oireachtas committee hearing.
Uncloaked is designed to superserve Traitors addicts who, it is expected, will indulge in extra content after the main show’s end credits flicker by. This “access all areas” sister programme promises to bring them “deeper into Slane Castle”, in Co Meath, which is where The Traitors Ireland was filmed in the spring, while also taking fans behind the scenes of a separate and, some might say, even more intriguing location: RTÉ Limerick.
That Uncloaked will be made there seems worth highlighting, if only because six years ago RTÉ’s studio in the city, on Cornmarket Square, was put on the chopping block by the public-service broadcaster’s former leadership.
The political response to this was so hostile and deafening that no director general of RTÉ is going to try that tactic again any time soon. It would be like going on The Traitors – a brilliantly absurd and absurdly brilliant reality competition show – and telling everyone how clever and discerning you are. The target would shift instantly to your back.
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So instead we have the fleeting beginnings of a regionalisation strategy, as previously flagged by Kevin Bakhurst, the current head of the broadcaster. Coincidentally, this particular instance of it should delight any local TDs who happen to be, say, a Government Minister with responsibility for RTÉ.
Any regionalisation will, inevitably, be followed by a spike in Freedom of Information requests by journalists keen to do stories on how much RTÉ is spending on transport for guests, so you could say it’s a win-win situation all around.
It often seems to surprise and annoy people, but television costs money to make. Still, there are ways and means to mitigate the expense. If, for instance, Patrick O’Donovan, Minister for Culture and also a TD for Limerick County, happened to be free one evening, he could save RTÉ a train fare and pop in for a chat with McGahern about all the latest betrayals and banishments.
But enough about Fine Gael. What about Uncloaked? I’ve already misclassified it as television, like some stubborn 20th-century traditionalist. Uncloaked isn’t technically a television show. Well, it is in the sense that it will air on television and people will watch it. But it also isn’t in the sense that it’s not defined by anything as old-school as a single medium.
The show will air directly after each episode of The Traitors, a moreish game of deception, paranoia and wild logic that originated in the Netherlands and went on to be a hit in several countries around the world. The Irish version, produced by Kite Entertainment and presented by Siobhán McSweeney, is RTÉ’s big autumn-schedule hope.
The Traitors itself is definitely a TV show, but Uncloaked, like the BBC companion show of the same name, is a multiplatform affair. This in-house RTÉ production will be broadcast on linear television and on RTÉ Player, while also existing as a podcast. It’s a visualised podcast, which is the industry term for a podcast you can also clamp your eyes on.
They sound as if they should be the same, but visualised podcasts are different from visualised radio. With visualised radio, the concession to cameras is incidental. The presenters are not looking down the lens. They’re largely just cracking on the way they were before.
The choreography of RTÉ’s Uncloaked remains a mystery for now, but the usual deal with visualised podcasts is that presenters stare straight at the camera, mimicking the grammar of television either occasionally or throughout, YouTube style.
On the BBC’s version of Uncloaked, the host, Ed Gamble, explains at the start of each edition that this is a visualised podcast, lest viewers get confused about the production values and the un-TV-like presence of giant microphones on screen.
Whenever you see an array of enormous microphones on television, this is what they’re there to say: “Look, we’re podcasters and this is actually a podcast, a modern podcast with modern, professional equipment that distinguishes us from amateur podcast hobbyists or those loser television guys with their invisible clip-on mics.”
I’m not predicting RTÉ’s Uncloaked will have that vibe. But I do generally find this genre of not-TV-but-on-TV a bit jarring. I long for the big-mic trend to disappear, like a hooded Traitor, into the night.
These aftershows are a strange beast anyway. They force random guests to speculate about events that were filmed months earlier while sitting beside booted-out contestants who know precisely how everything panned out but are contractually obliged not to let anything slip.
It’s too uncomfortable for mere audio, in other words. For the full squirm, it really must be watched, mics and all.
