Allow me to set the scene.
It’s Christmas Day 2016 in a Brooklyn apartment. A dozen Irish 20-somethings are crammed into a kitchen-cum-hallway-cum-living room about three metres wide at most. We do not have the resources for Christmas dinner, so we’ve ordered Chinese. Whether it arrives is another issue, as the streets are covered in snow. All of us are homesick.
But someone, somehow, reveals that they have 20 episodes of Reeling in the Years saved to their laptop.
The HDMi cable is retrieved, Steely Dan starts to play that awful riff and our nerves are settled.
We select a year at random and before we know it, Mary Robinson, who finished her tenure as president before any of us had learned how to read, stands at a podium and tells us that women’s rights are human rights. We all cheer, drinks are either downed or spilled, Christmas is saved.
But how can a programme without any narration, with nothing but the barest of subtitles printed over grainy RTÉ archive footage, elicit whoops and cheers from a room of people too young to even remember the events being shown?
That’s the magic of Reeling in the Years, a most Irish phenomenon.
Reeling in the Years condenses whole years into 25 minutes, never spends any longer than 90 seconds on even the most consequential historical event, and the result is a hurtling rollercoaster that unfolds inside the hearts of every Irish person.
Everybody in Ireland is familiar with the tropes of Reeling In The Years. There’s the happy music suddenly cutting off as the screen fades to black, so you know that something sad is coming next. There’s every episode of the 2000s season where politicians and financial regulators and bankers confidently talk about how Ireland’s economy is in good health and will remain in good health forever. There are sobering moments with almost no context whatsoever, like when the subtitles simply tell you that “SHERGAR WAS NEVER FOUND”.
Because the show has no narration, it can veer from Irish pop culture to international tragedy without warning. We see Niamh Kavanagh winning the 1993 Eurovision and before we can wonder where she is now, we’re already into the Waco siege where 81 cult members died. Such is the breakneck speed of events that you pretty much have to watch with a notebook so you can remember what you wanted to look up on Wikipedia once it ends.
Sometimes you’ll need to sit through four tragedies in a row before its finally interrupted by Ireland scoring a goal at the World Cup while Feeder play in the background. Ah Feeder, eases the pain.
Reeling in the Years provides a casual, communal way for anyone of any age to engage fully with Irish and world history. Well, sometimes it’s history. Sometimes it’s thousands of people at St. Stephen’s Green for the opening of Planet Hollywood. That’s the magic of the show. Events of the utmost existential importance are spliced together with minutiae that could not be more ludicrous.
The events of the year aren’t even shown in order. It’s not like January, February, March… They are shown completely at random. The only hint about what’s to come next is that when the music cuts off, you know that shit is about to go down.
The advent of social media has allowed Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds to become a sort-of permanent running commentary. Live updates for history. Reeling in the Years in real time.
While it might seem like such a development could undermine the uniqueness of Reeling in the Years, in probability, the opposite is true. Nothing fills me with more satisfaction or national pride than the idea of the country sitting down at 9pm of a Sunday night to watch Reeling in the Years in tandem — connected through Instagram stories, group-chats lighting up, tweets going viral. All of us cheering while watching footage of a JCB tear down a Lidl while ‘God’s Plan’ by Drake plays in the background.
Once again we will be joined by moments of quintessential Irishness. The death of Gay Byrne, the introduction of marriage equality and reproductive rights, that time the man slipped on the ice. All the important stuff.
More than simply nostalgia, Reeling In The Years taps into the Irish penchant for self-obsession without too much self-dissection. A mirror that reflects an entire country through time, allowing us to bask in the history that shapes the Ireland we know.
The show doesn’t analyse, it doesn’t preach, it doesn’t try to pick the Irish psyche apart. It simply shows us as we were, and therefore as we are. There are reasons to cheer and reasons to despair. Most of all, it allows us to think about who we are and where we’ve come from and what will happen next on this preposterous little island.
As of right now, it remains unconfirmed when we’ll be seeing a series of Reeling in the Years for the decade that’s coming to an end, but a spokesperson for RTÉ has confirmed to JOE that a new season of the show is in the works, much to our relief.
The state broadcaster would probably have better luck bringing in a licence fee for laptops if they would add it to the RTÉ player.
Because when it comes to entertaining, educating and enthralling a group of Irish people, nothing can compare to the old reliable: Reeling in the Years.
Now play that awful riff.
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