Media

Should RTÉ stop showing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang so much?

Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan says reruns of old films won’t cut it for Montrose. Who’s going to break the news to Dick Van Dyke?

Lionel Jeffries in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), a staple of Christmas television schedules. Photograph: United Artists
Lionel Jeffries in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), a staple of Christmas television schedules. Photograph: United Artists
Laura Slattery's picture
Laura Slattery
Tue Feb 04 2025 - 06:05

It’s always good to see someone in politics stay faithful to strongly held beliefs, and to this list we can add Patrick O’Donovan and his firm opinion that rerunning Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory just won’t cut it for RTÉ.

The new Minister for Media said as much to the Irish Examiner shortly after his appointment, confirming that his view on this precise subject has not wavered since 2014, when it received its premiere at a hearing of the Oireachtas communications committee.

Kevin Bakhurst, now RTÉ director general, was in attendance then, and he will doubtless remember O’Donovan’s Chitty-averse, anti-Wonka remarks, coming so soon as they did after a repeat of his complaint that Oireachtas Report was being scheduled so late at night, it was only “for the benefit of insomniacs”.

O’Donovan was saddened by the chastening experience that was watching RTÉ over the Christmas 2013 break. The broadcaster’s annual festive line-up was “a recurring problem”, he warned, adding that Willy Wonka star Gene Wilder was “big in 1974, but he is not big now”.

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This feels somewhat harsh in retrospect to Wilder, whose impish, vacant-eyed delivery of Pure Imagination in the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory led most TV obituary reports when he died in 2016. Still, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang star Dick Van Dyke is now 99 and goes to the gym three times a week, so he’s presumably seasoned enough to realise you can’t win them all.

Despite RTÉ‘s best efforts on the Chitty Chitty front, I’ve never seen the 1968 Ken Hughes film, which is based on a children’s novel by James Bond creator Ian Fleming and has something in common with Willy Wonka in that the screenplay was co-authored by Dahl.

But I’m aware that the Minister is far from alone in his antipathy, not least because having mentioned to two colleagues that I was doing this deep dive, they both revealed that they had been terrified by the film as kids. This raises the possibility that there are policymakers out there who were also traumatised by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at an early age.

“A strange, rather queasy film” was the verdict of British writer Simon Winder in his Bond/Fleming takedown The Man Who Saved Britain. “Decidedly up and down,” wrote Fergus Linehan, reviewing the film for The Irish Times upon its release, “with only the title tune being anyway catchy”.

Alas, no one heeded the wisdom of critics even in 1968, and the musical duly graduated to the status of children’s classic, spawning a West End stage production in 2002. The future Minister for Media’s 2014 intervention was ignored. That same year, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the theme of the Late Late Toy Show, with host Ryan Tubridy – child of RTÉ that he was/is – telling reporters he had come up with the idea “in the green room after last year’s show”.

The title tune, an ode to a car, duly opened proceedings on the most-watched programme on Irish television, though there was no sign of the sinister Child Catcher, a villain created for the film and depicted in a manner now widely regarded as anti-Semitic.

RTÉ‘s attachment to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang endures. A cursory search suggests the film has aired on RTÉ One or RTÉ2 at least five times in the last five years, with showings in June 2020 (bank holiday Monday), December 2020 (Christmas Day), December 2021 (St Stephen’s Day), January 2023 (New Year’s Day) and December 2023 (St Stephen’s Day).

O’Donovan’s uncontroversial stance is that old film reruns aren’t going to lure RTÉ-eschewing younger viewers to the joys of linear television. It’s uncontroversial because no one is under the impression that they will. That’s not what these films are intended to do.

No one in RTÉ thinks “just one more push with the Oompa-Loompas, and we’ve got Generation Alpha for life”. No one brings “let’s try not showing any Dick Van Dyke vehicles” as their big pitch to strategy meetings.

For that matter, when ITV aired Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the morning of New Year’s Day this year, its executives weren’t rubbing their hands with glee at finally chancing upon the antidote to the steady drift of audiences to streamers and social media.

These films aren’t going out in peak slots. They don’t command pride of place on the home page of the RTÉ Player. They surface at points in the schedule when it would be uneconomical to put out new programming.

Repeats, generally, are a symptom of a wider television marketplace problem, not the cause. In any case, not even the most fervent, ambitious supporters of public service broadcasting would dare ask the Government for the level of funding required to show something cool and exciting at 10am on December 26th, when half the country is still in bed.

As almost everybody knows, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory are examples of cheap vintage padding, and they have their disciples. Indeed, in 2003, a dark year when RTÉ found itself without the rights to broadcast these two “old reliables” at Christmas, it was schedule-shamed by the Sunday Independent, which concluded that “TV fans are sure to be disappointed”.

True, viewers have moved on a bit since then. The hope in the film industry is that they’ll have moved on so much, they’ll have come full circle – that’s why a reimagining of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is in an early stage of development at Amazon MGM Studios and Bond producers EON Productions, with Ireland’s own Enda Walsh doing the honours on the screenplay. I guess this one will be on Prime Video first.

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