'At Your Service' recalls 'budget-shattering' year

It was a bit of fun watching the 'At Your Service' episode relating to the refurbishment of The Hideout, last night, writes Brian Byrne.

It also brought back to owner Jonathan Keogh sometimes scary memories of the year of work it took to get the pub to its current exceptionally high level of quality, in the process 'shattering' the original budget as he freely admitted in the programme.

"I was looking at various things and coming away not liking them," he recalled last night. "I wanted the best possible, because there's nothing worse than being down the road a couple of years later and wishing we had done it differently. It's also more expensive to fix something later than do it right the first time."

In the nature of such programmes, the distillation of a hundred hours of filming into 24 minutes of 'video bites' TV left an awful lot more out than it showed, and the boilerplate bits of the script ('back in Kerry, the Brennans are worried ...') have become more rote than revealing.

While mention was made of the historical background to the pub, and Jonathan's wish and strenuous efforts  to reference that in his design, there was little from the editing to show any of it. So for anyone who wasn't there through the decades when Jim Byrne, and his late son Des (this writer's father and brother), made it a global name, there was nothing in the programme of heritage interest.

But then, this is tomorrow's world, not yesterday's.

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