Hands (TV series)


Hands was an Irish television documentary series broadcast by RTÉ between 1978 and 1989, covering traditional Irish crafts.

Production

Creator David Shaw-Smith began with Telefís Éireann in the 1960s, working as a cameraman with Gerrit van Gelderen and became an independent filmmaker in the early 1970s. he and his wife Sally, an illustrator, travelled Ireland in a VW van recording traditional craftsmen.

Episode list

Legacy

Hands is still widely referred to as one of the greatest Irish TV series of all time.
Harvey O'Brien, in his The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film, said "The series was marked by its close-up observation of the techniques involved, and though lacking an explicit social commentary always gave the sense that these skills were gradually disappearing.".
For over 20 years, the original film sat in tea chests in a barn in Creagh, County Mayo. In March 2013 archivists packed all 1,800 film cans into storage containers and brought them to the RTÉ Archives.
In 2015, it was revisited in the series In Good Hands.