It ran 30 minutes originally and in black and white, but by the end of it's run, was 60 minutes and in colour. I doubt that any episodes exist. Supposedly, RTE destroyed all the tapes of this show, at least the earliest ones anyway. This was an excellent weekly soap, that combined comedy, drama, tragedy in the ordinary day to day lives of the Riordan family and the other inhabitants of Leastown, a fictional village set in county Kilkenny, but filmed in Dundalk (I think). It made a household name of Gabriel Byrne in it's final couple of seasons. It ran 1965 to 1979. The main cast John Cowley, Moira Deady Anne D'Alton etc were there from beginning to end. The show stopped the entire country every Sunday night for one hour. And the cast became so synonymous with their characters, that John Cowley (playing farmer Tom Riordan) a Dublin City man, often got letters from real farming communities asking his advice on farming problems. I would love if RTE would bring the existing episodes out on DVD, in their original length and running order (as the show usually had a running story line) and not botch it up like they have with other classic shows.
Review of The Riordans
