issues in rural family life – the links between property, farm ownership and marriage at the very time of the debate on the Succession Bill". The show also focused on a range of farming issues, from the promotion of new farm technology to safety on farms. (In the 1970s Tom and Benjy featured in a television advertisement urging farmers to have metal-framed cabs put onto their tractors to protect themselves from serious injury should the vehicle overturn.) Other issues were also raised, such as illegitimacy, poverty, the problems of old age, marriage break-up, sexual activity, the dramatic changes in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, and most famously contraception, when it was revealed that Benjy's wife, Maggie, for medical reasons could not risk having a second pregnancy. The decision of the couple to use contraception (the Pill) caused considerable controversy and criticism from "family values" organisations and some in the Catholic Church. The show was on many issues both praised and criticised in the national media and even in Dáil Éireann. Moreover, civil servants in the mid-1960s criticised the image portrayed of a 'farm advisor' sent out to advise farmers on new advances in farming but who in the series was seen drinking in the pub and gossiping. Axing controversy The show underwent a number of changes in the mid-1970s, most notably moving from a half-hour to one-hour format, as well as a change in theme tune. The music originally used to introduce each episode was Seóirse Bodley's orchestral arrangement of the Irish traditional tune, "The Palatine's Daughter". The decision of the actor Tom Hickey to leave the series caused some problems. His character, Benjy was not killed off but went abroad "on the missions" (i.e., to work with the Catholic Church in Africa). A new farm labourer, played by new actor Gabriel Byrne, was introduced in 1978 and he played the love-interest for Maggie, Benjy's wife, who had remained after refusing to go to Africa with him. While the show had declined somewhat from its heyday, it still regularly battled with The Late Late Show to top the TAM ratings and was itself surprised when one episode, which unusually departed from the 1970s and focused on Tom Riordan as a young man in the 1930s at a family céilí, was critically acclaimed by the media and many older viewers, who viewed it as an accurate representation of life on an