Fair City first aired in September 1989 and since then it has become the number one home produced soap opera on Irish television.
David Flynn takes a walk down Carrickstown’s Memory Lane and remembers some of its most memorable characters and their storylines

 

It’s hard to believe but it’s been 35 years on September 18th, since the first episode of Fair City was broadcast on RTE 1. In that time, Ireland has changed in parallel with the different fictitious stories broadcast from an Irish urban suburb since 1989. Through all the different changes in media and technology, the half-hour three-time weekly drama series has continued its popularity through all the changes in Ireland that it has mirrored.

RTE was around twenty-eight years in existence when Fair City premiered in September, 1989.

At the time, the main TV drama series in Ireland was Glenroe starring Joe Lynch, Mick Lally and Mary McEvoy. It was a rural half-hour weekly show, which had been running since 1983 and was hugely popular with the tv audience. Alongside Glenroe there were also three British urban tv series, Coronation Street, Eastenders and Brookside that could be seen in Ireland. Emmerdale was a rural British series, which was also popular.

There were also a few Australian soap operas on the air, including Neighbours and Home and Away. The American soap operas of the time, Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest were also showing on Irish television.
The last time Ireland had its own continuing urban drama series was Tolka Row, which ran from 1964 to 1968, and starred a young actor, Jim Bartley.

The plans were put in place in the late 1980s for a new Irish urban tv series, and British scriptwriter, Tony Holland, who had co-created Eastenders for BBC acted as a script advisor for the new Irish series, which was entitled, Fair City.

Fair City is set in a fictitious Northside suburb of Dublin called Carrickstown. The series has been and still is very community orientated. Everything in the lives of the characters takes place in and around Carrickstown, and rarely is any storyline set outside that area. Every aspect of the human condition is featured on the series, including family life, romance and love, anger, jealousy and hate. Also murder, rape, kidnapping and almost everything illegal has featured on the hit series over the past thirty-five years.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own