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Our look at left wing publications, produced by the Alternative Media History group, has been one of the successes of the Community in a Studio project. Now they are thinking about making series 2 in the Autumn. One of the things they think is they’ll need more people involved – as researchers, as studio crew, as panelists, as editors etc. If you liked the show or just want a go at making some television contact lookingleft@dctv.ie.

There’ll be representatives of Looking Left down at the Greaves School http://www.greavesschool.com/ with copies of the DVD and you can watch the first series online.

Ellen Reddin welcomes you to the fourth and final episode of Never Too Left in its current run. Never Too Late looks at some of the bigger issues affecting older people today. In this episode the question on the agenda is the activities that older people get involved in. Mary Harkin from Age and Opportunity explains why it is important for older people to remain active, for many reasons, in order to improve their well being and maintain their mental health. Other guests include Alicia McGovern from the IFI talking about the Wild Strawberries Club, and a Damien McCroary from the Ballymun Whitehall Area Parntership.

Daniel Finn returns to present the fourth episode of Looking Left. Produced as part of Community in a Studio, this DCTV series uses historical journals of the left as a hinge to explore the issues that animated the movements and politics of the past. In this edition, we take a look at The Irish Socialist. The panel includes two people involved in the production of the paper, Noel Redmond and Mick O’Reilly. Dr Anne Matthews, a historian familiar with the communist movement here and our regular man on the labour beat, Connor McCabe also sits in on the panel.

In what is sadly the last of our programmes exploring masculinities organised with MAIN this season, Finian Murray, of the men’s health project takes the audience through the annual Men’s Health Week. Picking up on themes from the UK, it looks at men accessing services. All the research shows that the male half of the population are quite weak at getting tested or treatment when it comes to medical treatment. This year the health week has developed a poster encouraging people to not “wait until it’s too late.” The poster has been distributed to health centres GAA clubs and areas where men gather across the country. David Culver, the shows resident psychologist joins the diverse panel again to put the issues discussed into the wider context of mental health.

In this episode Anne Leahy from Age and Opportunity joined Ellen Reddin to talk about age and social exclusion. A dictionary definition tells us that social exclusion means not having enough social contacts in the course of your day or life, it also means not being able to participate fully in the things that make life worth living. In episode two of Never Too Late we look at this, and other big issues facing older people in Ireland Today.

Looking Left 003 from DCTV on Vimeo.

There’s a new episode of Looking Left available on Vimeo today.  Looking Left is proving to be one of our more popular shows, with a decent online following on the left wing blogosphere.  Check out Irish Left Review, where one of the group involved in producing the show has uploaded copies of Graton and Z Mag, both magazines that arose from the struggles of the early eighties.

As usual we stick all new content on our front page, it also gets sucked into our video section via a Vimeo plug in.  We will eventually get around to bringing you a better way of viewing our online content.  The sudden upsurge in content surprises us as much as you.

Street Smart Sustainability – Climate Change and Energy Security from DCTV on Vimeo.

Cultivate Episode 1 from DCTV on Vimeo.

The mainstream media often does not focus on the economic and social impacts of Peak Oil and Climate Change. For this reason many people still feel that these issues are not directly relevant to their everyday lives. Street Smart Sustainability is a 4 part series, which seeks to increase the understanding of the issues around sustainability so that people can make informed decisions on what they do in their daily lives.

In each episode we go out on the streets of Dublin to get Vox-Pops on what people think about the issue of the week. These Vox-Pops then form the basis of a lively in-studio discussion led by presenter, Dylan Townsend.

We’ve two shoots a day through out this week.    It’s part of our Community in a Studio project, where we attempt to embed the skills to organise a studio discussion show with different set of community groups.  Tonight MAIN are back in, a men’s group that look at issues of depression and isolation among blokes.  RAG are back again earlier in the day.

The Looking Left Shoot went well last night, it focused on Gralton and Z Mag.  Two magazines that came out of the struggles and new community movements of the 1980′s.    You can read about Z Mag over on Cedar Lounge.