I made my first broadcast around seventy years ago,when the wireless reached the bedrock classesthrough the hire-purchase system. In the early1930s light and classical music was broadcastweekly by the local BBC from the Ulster Museumand my mother and I would stop what we weredoing to listen to Mozart, Bizet, Verdi, or to switchoff Wagner.

‘Do you hear them all coughing when the musicstops?’, I said to Mother. ‘If I were to go there andcough, you could tell all the neighbours: “That’s myson coughing on the wireless”.’ She just rolled hereyes as usual but I went the following week to theMuseum anyway. When I got home I said toMother, ‘Did you hear me coughing?’

‘I certainly did,’ she said, ‘but you only coughed theonce, in the first break.’

‘I know, I said, ‘that’s because, after that, they threw me out.’

In October 1977, I took part in my first real livebroadcast. The occasion was the publication of my first book, The Sinking of the Kenbane Head(Blackstaff Press). I was very nervous. High on fear,instead of answering questions about the book Ibegan to talk about the antics of an uncle of minewho overstayed his leave during World War Oneand was locked up in Carrickfergus Castle. Excitedfaces appeared at the glass window. After the

show Gloria Hunniford asked for more stories likethat. My broadcasting brand was set in concrete. I suppose there wasn’t a lot of Protestant humouraround at that time.

Radio sets a stern test for writing. Every word mustwork for a living. An apprenticeship on thismedium helps enormously in the task of snippingthe long nails off the work. Conversely, reachingradio writing standards means that, when set out onthe page, the voice of the author is always there.

In the last twenty-eight years I have covered mostbroadcasting fields – drama, documentaries,presenting, script writing, and religiousbroadcasting. The patience of many a producer hasbeen tried, and I well know it. Like many a writer Iam in debt to the likes of Paul Muldoon, SamHanna Bell, Paul Evans, Jim Sheridan, BernaghBrims, John Boyd and many others. For regionalbroadcasting to exist, local talent is vital. It says agood deal for Radio Ulster that it hasn't just dippedinto a pool that was there: it has nurtured andcreated artistic talent that, under the miasma of theTroubles, might otherwise have never lightened our day.

Image courtesy of Sam McAughtry

I have been trying to work out when I heard myfirst radio broadcast and I think it must have beenabout the time of the Franco incident. My fathercame home from work one evening and said thatFranco had been on the tram. I was puzzled by this.I could not understand how the Spanish general,with four columns advancing on Madrid and a fifthcolumn in the city itself, had time to go gallivantingon one of our old Belfast red trams. Later it was explained to me. My father hadnicknamed a neighbour who looked like the man inthe news.

I certainly remember hearing the radio in mygrandparents’ home when one of my aunts, whohad a fine soprano voice, gave a song recital fromthe local station. Our own radio set arrived in 1939,and changed life for ever. My clearest memories areof the wartime broadcasts. Listening to the chimesof Big Ben and the nine o’clock news was a dailyritual, and newsreaders Bruce Belfrage and AlvarLiddell became almost like members of the family.At 10 pm you could, if you wanted, tune in toHamburg and hear the Nazi version of the news,read by the traitor William Joyce. He had anaffected upper-class accent and always began withthe words ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling’. Verycleverly, the government never jammed the station,and ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ became a figure of fun, a morale-booster instead of the opposite.

It was the age of ITMA and the variety shows anddance bands – Ambrose and his orchestra, BillyCotton – and crooners singing ‘Smoke gets in youreyes’ and ‘When they begin the beguine’. And ofcourse there was radio drama. My father said itwould never work, because the disembodied voicecould not capture the magic of the theatre. Withinweeks he was listening with the zeal of theconverted. Television still lay in the future. All theaccents were received English, and there was verylittle regional input.

I can’t say that radio much influenced my earlydesire to write, but it did occur to my adolescentmind that the BBC might be a market for buddingauthors. I prepared a script about the ancient Celticmonastery at Nendrum and sent it to OrmeauAvenue. It was politely returned. I made a vownever to have anything more to do with either theBBC or Irish history. I would become a creativeartist, a poet or a novelist. How the gods must havelaughed! I was destined to find my career in Irishhistory, and to make many broadcasts fromOrmeau Avenue. But it has left me with a curioussensation that somehow I have not yet finished myschool homework. I still want to be a writer when Igrow up.

Image courtesy of A.T.Q. Stewart

My uncle James guided my infant right hand to thecat’s whisker, the half of a headphone clutched tomy left ear . . . And suddenly, shockingly, a fat ladysang (screeched, rather: Dame Nellie Melba, thetoast of Wogga Wogga, I learnt later).

And thus began for me a lifelong, haphazardtutorial provided by radio, Hollywood and, later,television – plus books, of course. ‘Elementary’schooling in those days meant just that: a litany ofEnglish monarchs, geography the red patches on anatlas (but we were early readers, thanks largely to comics).

Uncle James gave us an accumulator (wet battery)set and on it we followed the progress of the SecondWorld War, laughed at ITMA and listened to TheBrains Trust. I recall vividly hearing Professor Joadmention General Wolfe at Quebec and the ‘Frenchand Indian’ wars in America. Indians! . . .Cowboys?. . . thinks I, and with the help of mylibrary ticket was soon up to my neck in the mire ofpersonalities, politics and mayhem that was theeighteenth century – a mire in which, sixty-oddyears on, I still wallow happily.

It was from a footnote in a condensed history ofrevolutionary France that I first heard about the1798 rebellion in Ireland. Then, in a radioprogramme written by Sam Hanna Bell, Idiscovered that the rebels were Presbyterians and

that our own church in May Street had been ahotbed of sedition, with muskets secreted in theroof space! All this my father, an Orangeman,reluctantly verified.

As one who, against the odds, aspired to be a writer, I owe a debt to BBC radio, and not only because itprovided an outlet for my early work at a fraughttime when outlets were few. It also brought me thevoice of the great Frank O’Connor, reading anddiscussing his work. It was a revelation. For all hisfame, O’Connor considered himself to be in theline of the hearthside seanchai, telling his tale to the‘rapt faces in the firelight’. The ‘literary’ writer wholost sight of those faces, he said, did so at his peril.

The faces in the glow of today’s electronic hearthare generally rapt – and if not, the remote is tohand. Critics may carp, but that other presence inthe living-room has become a great comfort andcompanion, not least for the often solitary folk ofmy vintage.

George Bernard Shaw once railed against ‘flannelledfools to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom’. Age and the box have brought this fool a weeklymicrocosm of all the intrigue, greed and vanity ofthe eighteenth century: Premiership football. For that I am eternally grateful.

Image courtesy of John Morrow

I’d like to thank the BBC for helping me to survivethe longest day of the week in my childhood. OnSundays, I swear to God, I might have died youngof boredom in Belfast, if it hadn't been for thewireless. Everything else about Sunday was dire.Sunday School in Sunday-Best-Clothes; BestBehaviour; No Rowdy Playing in the street. And no point in going to the localplayground, even if you were allowed out, becausethe swings and roundabouts were padlocked on theLord’s Day by order of Belfast Corporation.

Sunday afternoon was given over to the tedious taskof helping my mother to clean her collection ofbrass ornaments. She handed me the blue-and-white tin of cotton wadding impregnated withBrasso, ‘You rub it in, and I'll polish it off ’ and thenshe turned the radio on. I still associate the headysmell of Duraglit with the glorious years of radiocomedy shows starring Al Read, Jimmy Clitheroe,Ted Ray, Jimmy Edwards, Dick Bentley, JuneWhitfield, and Elsie and Doris Waters. And theventriloquist Peter Brough with his woodendummy Archie Andrews. My mother swore thatPeter Brough never ever moved his lips when he wasprojecting the voice of Archie. ‘Catch yourself on,’laughed my father, ‘why would the man bebothered to do that on the wireless where nobodycan see him?’ My mother advised me to pay noheed. ‘It’s whatever you think yourself,’ she said.

And that’s what I still love about the radio, whetherI’m listening to it or writing for it. The visualimages that words and sound conjure in the mind’seye know no bounds. In the imagination of everylistener, it can be ‘whatever you think yourself ’.

The first drama I ever heard and saw in my mind’seye was BBC Northern Ireland’s The McCooeys. Itwas a family favourite. Every character in it was justlike somebody we knew. Bella McCoubrey from theStoney Mountain was as real to me as the bigwoman from the country who lived up our street.In those pre-TV days, the wireless was the magicbox. And still is.

Don’t get me wrong. These days I enjoy televisionand I love the theatre. But radio will always bespecial to me. The childhood friend who inspiredmy imagination and rescued me from the banality of the three Bs – Boredom, Brasso andBelfast Corporation.

© Darragh Casey

My twin Peter and I are huddled inside a fadedsecond-hand wigwam which we have pitched in themiddle of the green carpet in our seldom-usedliving room. I can still hear my father’s ratherformal baritone laugh, my mother’s jolly descant.They are listening to ITMA, Tommy Handley’sweekly progression of brief encounters withcolourful regulars whose voices and catch phraseshave entered the national consciousness to such anextent that after only a word or two they areapplauded by the studio audience: ColonelChinstrap, Mrs Mop (‘Can I do you now, sir?’),Mona Lot (‘It’s being so cheerful that keeps megoing’). Peter and I are far too young to follow thecomedy, but we feel happy eavesdropping on ourparents’ laughter. Perhaps not understanding thejokes mysteriously increases our contentment.

We have two radios in our house: in the large chillyliving room the good one that receives all thestations; in the cosy kitchen-cum-breakfast-room awee Bakelite box that delivers only the HomeService, its dial a parchment glow. Children’s Houris part of the familial fug: Toy Town with Larry theLamb, Mr Mayor, Mr Plod; the stories and songs ofAuntie Vi; Uncle Mac; Commander Stephen King-Hall who ends his broadcasts, ‘Be very good andvery quiet, but not so good and so quiet thatsomebody says “What are you doing?” ’; and fromBBC Northern Ireland the fanfare of kazoos that

introduces Cicely Matthews’ I want to be an actor.(My friend Jim Fitzpatrick’s appearance on thisshow brings him brief celebrity in Bristow Park.)Some of the signature tunes (Toy Town’s ‘TheDance of the Little Tin Soldiers’, for instance, or‘The Jewels of the Madonna’ which introduces – Ithink – the magical Box of Delights) will alwaystransport me back to the coke fire and the creamwalls turned browny-yellow by my parents’chain-smoking.

Dick Barton, Special Agent stars on the LightProgramme and therefore can be contacted only inthe living room. Do I really want to exile myselffrom the warmth and companionship of thekitchen? This tension anticipates a much laterperception: that the experience of art is bothindividual and communal. In 1948 my fatherextends the world of our imaginations by hiringanother radio that is receptive to more than theHome Service – for one shilling and six pence perweek. In less than a decade, as well as beingaddicted to Journey into Space and The Goons, I shallbe trying out some new things on the Third Programme.

© BBC

‘We ought to listen to that,’ my father said,pointing to the Radio Times. It was Blues and Greys,a ballad documentary on the American Civil War. I was about fourteen: not only did the programmereinforce my fascination with history but this wasthe first occasion when I became dimly aware of theskills and craft required to make a compellingbroadcast. Recollection of my childhood in Dublinis crowded with memories of BBC Home Serviceand Light Programme radio.

‘I would try to start off by getting them to sitdown,’ the Principal, John Malone, advised shortlyafter I had begun my teaching career in east Belfastin 1964. I turned for help to the Today andYesterday in Northern Ireland programmes beingmade in the new Schools Department. Would theboys sit quietly? My anxiety was unnecessary:hubbub lapsed into quiet absorption as theybecame familiar with the writings of Sam HannaBell, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and others.

It was in the Schools Department that I cut myteeth as a writer. James Hawthorne – creator of theground-breaking Two Centuries of Irish History –produced my very first programme, on the Battle ofClontarf, and he insisted on driving me down toDollymount strand so that I could set the scene asvividly as possible. My mentor thereafter wasDouglas Carson. His series, Modern Irish History:People and Events, had exacting objectives: each

programme was to draw on contemporary sourcesto dramatise just one pivotal event over no morethan a twenty-four hour period. The challenge wasto lift young listeners into another time and place tocreate a coherent, accurate and compelling storyusing the voices of the past. Each programmeforced the writer to search out old documents, some being brought to light for the first time. David Hammond was usually on hand to resurrectlong-forgotten ballads. We were buoyed up by theenthusiasm of the actors who were grateful thatthey, too, had learned a little more about their past.We seemed to be involved in a collective campaignto show that the real history of an increasinglyfractured country was not dull but could begripping and enlightening.

Finally, I am firmly of the view that the mostperfectly crafted local radio programme ever wasWings of a Seraphim, Douglas Carson’s account ofgrowing up in Belfast during the most terrible yearsin modern history while some of his cousins werestorming the Normandy beaches and most of hisGerman cousins were dying for the Reich as theRed Army advanced. I play it to my Queen’sstudents once a year: without fail, the classes aretransfixed and some are moved to tears.

Image courtesy of Jonathan Bardon

My earliest and most unforgettable radioexperience: a play on the Northern Ireland HomeService being listened to by grown-ups in thekitchen, but overheard by me in the dark of thebedroom, when I was supposed to be asleep.

It told the story of the Cooneen ghost, of aFermanagh family haunted out of house and home,and pursued across the ocean to their new home inAmerica. What terrified me most was the recurrentknocking of the poltergeist, at first behind the wallsof the family home and then, unremittingly andever more menacingly, from behind the walls oftheir cabin on the transatlantic liner. If I heard itnow, it might just strike me as a primitive soundeffect, but at the time it had uncanny, unsettlingpower. It made a space for nightmare, a space that opened fitfully and a little frightfully for years afterwards.

Radio has the power to flow into your dream life,which is one reason why schools broadcasts provedso effective, particularly in the realm of languageand literature. Some teachers probably regarded aclass period spent listening to the wireless as a wasteof time, but no class period in all my years at schoolleft as deep a mark as the one when I first heardThomas Hardy’s poem ‘Weathers’ read by an actorfrom the BBC’s repertory company. A big,commanding, standard English voice, that shook

the speakers in the classroom and seemed to possessa force that equalled the natural forces at work inHardy’s landscape, ‘When showers betumble thechestnut spikes, /And nestlings fly’.

But in the end, it wasn’t so much the weathers as theweather forecasts that flowed longest and deepest inthe channels of the ear, and the shipping forecastmost of all. Night after night, year after year, at themoment of close-down, that solemn invocation ofthe names of the regions of the sea told you that theworld would be watched over until you woke again.It operated as a kind of mantra, and in fact it wasonly in the 1970s, when I started to live near thecoast in Co. Wicklow, that I fully realized theseriousness and consequence of the phrase‘attention all shipping’: after a stormy night I’dsometimes see French trawlers at anchor in thesheltered but still rolling waters of the bay:

L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle HélèneNursed their bright names this morning in the bayThat toiled like mortar. It was marvellousAnd actual, I said out loud ‘a haven’, The word deepening, clearing, like the sky Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

© BBC

Our house was quiet voices. Grandma and Grandaand Great Aunt Mary, my mother and father. Butthere was another voice mixed in with it. The onlyvoice which didn’t have a Belfast accent. Thewireless. It was always there in the background asmy mother baked. Family Favourites. And if therewas a song she knew she would join in, beating themixture in time to the tune. Maybe even dancing.

But some programmes weren’t background – theywere to be sat down and listened to. Like TheMcCooeys. Everybody laughing at the goings on ofJames Young as Derek the window cleaner.And J.G. Devlin as Granda McCooey. And onetime there was a neighbour – a woman two doorsaway who was an English teacher and she wasactually in a play. So we all gathered round andlistened. A woman spoke.

Is that her? No. Maybe she’s acting. And she doesn’tsound like herself.

Everybody was anxious for her – but she was fineand we all laughed when we recognised her voiceand Granda raised an eyebrow to indicate he was inthe presence of poshness.

There were programmes which were linked to othersensations. For tea on Saturday we always had a fry and we’d eat listening to the football results.

Brighton and Hove Albion – one, SheffieldWednesday – nil. Little bits of bacon – two, a sliceof potato bread – one. Many years later I stoppedon a train at a platform called Preston North End.And I could nearly taste the fry. Preston North Endwas my Adlestrop.

Then there were the days you were off sick fromschool and you got the wireless brought up to yourbedroom.I learned more than I ever did in any class.There was a dramatisation of Lenz by GeorgeBüchner, about poor Lenz’s descent into madness.It was scored by the Radiophonic Workshop –electronic swoops of Dr-Who-like music before itstime. Scared the wits out of me. That radio playmade its way into a novel of mine, Grace Notes,many years later.

The first money I earned as a writer was from theBBC. I sent a story which they liked. It was JohnBoyd who did the liking and he invited me in – toldme Morning Story was 2800 words and my storywas far too long. At first I was indignant. Then Idiscovered that the more words you took out thebetter the story got. Up to a point. If you went toofar down that road you’d end up writing nothing.

© Jude MacLaverty

We didn’t have a television in our house until thelate fifties, so my early memories of the BBC are oflistening to the wireless.

Listening to the wireless introduced me to manythings, including science fiction. In the wee backroom of our house in Lisburn, beneath the five delftducks flying up the wall, there sits my mother, halfasleep in front of the coal fire while her shins meltin the heat. Behind us, from a corner of the room,a dramatic voice announces the next episode ofJourney Into Space. Mars, I think it was. A charactercalled . . . was it Whittaker? . . . got into a spot ofbother with the local aliens. What a boost it was forthe imagination – what a step up from the Beano,the Eagle and the Topper. I’ve enjoyed space storiesever since, and had a go at the genre when Ideveloped the ambition to write myself.

And now, looking back over forty years of having ago at writing myself, I see how much I value theBBC as a writer as well as a listener and viewer.

You see, being a writer is one tough business. Therereally is not much money in it unless you get lucky.If I'm truthful, the definition of writer that has

guided me through the years is crude and simple: ifyou can’t support your family through what youwrite and sell, you’re someone with a day-job, by nomeans yet a writer.

And for me, the long haul to being a professionalwriter began about 1967, when I was in mytwenties. A man called John Boyd at the BBCaccepted a script called The Tenant Shall Not . . . Itwas a fifteen-minute talk about moving in to 43Maralin Avenue – a house on the new estate beingbuilt at Knockmore, Lisburn. No words of minehad been published before, so how amazing it wasto write something, send it away, and hear it on theradio. And get paid for it! I didn’t know it then, butthe apprentice years had begun. In the threedecades to come there would follow contributionsto Morning Story, network radio plays, scripts forSchools TV and radio, and special commissions.

No doubt about it, the British BroadcastingCorporation quickened the hope that I might be awriter some day, and has been an open market forcreative thinking and writing for as long as I canremember; may it remain so.

© Walker Books

We acquired our first television set in 1956 towatch the wedding of Prince Rainier and GraceKelly. But the first broadcast to make a hugenegative impact was the funeral of Pope Pius XII in1958. In contrast, I over-indulged in television’ssheer escapism: endless American imports –Sergeant Bilko, The Lone Ranger, I Love Lucy,Rawhide, Maverick . . . I associate television in thelate 1950s and early 60s with children and laughter.Ours was the first television set in theneighbourhood and our house became a mini-cinema for childhood friends during school holidays.

It all seems very idyllic now. If there were nastythings happening in the world, I was blissfully unaware of them. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 which I recall as endingall this, the horror magnified by the still relativelynovel colour transmission. I was too young toexperience the best of the 1960s, but just oldenough to realise that things were beginning to gowrong in Northern Ireland. Terence O’Neill seemedthe great white hope against the gathering forces of evil. My family gathered around thetelevision to watch him deliver his ‘Ulster at the cross-roads’ speech in December 1968, and, moresombrely, the first broadcast of James Chichester-Clark after O’Neill’s resignation.

I was working as a student in the United Stateswhen the province erupted in August 1969. It wasthe beginning of my recognition that from now ononly negative things about Northern Ireland wouldbe reported internationally and the first of manyoccasions when I tried to explain to outsiders thatwe in Northern Ireland were not all the violentmonsters depicted on their television screens.

How far all this had an impact on my future writingis hard to say. I am unsure where my passion forFrance came from. Perhaps the allure of those sleekblack Citroëns and the femme-fatale chic of the Maigret detective series sowed the seeds. The passion for Irish history was bred at home. Butit also had something to do with the memory ofhow things had been in a mixed North Belfastcommunity (and all those unthreatening televisionprogrammes noted earlier), when contrasted withthe bleaker memories from the increasinglysophisticated current-affairs programmes of the1960s and 1970s. I suppose I have been on amission ever since to explain how history does notwork in the black-and-white polarities whichproduced the Troubles.

Image courtesy of Marianne Elliot

We might not have a radio at all, were it not for myfather’s illness. In the late 1950s he suffers a seriesof strokes and as a result we become eligible for a‘welfare wireless’. It is an imposing piece offurniture – a wooden box with substantial knobsand a curved finish. Even when it is not in use, ithas an aura of mystery and promise, as though thepush of a finger, the turn of a dial might give usaccess to anywhere.

But it is my father’s wireless, so in practice‘anywhere’ means Athlone and so Radio Eireannrather than the BBC becomes our main source ofnews, weather, music, religion and sport.

My father’s sporting interests are not confined toGaelic football and hurling, however. He is also adevotee of horse racing, so that my earliestmemories of listening to the BBC are tied in withthe geography of race-course England. On aSaturday afternoon we are linked, through theracing results, to Catterick and Hurst Park, Redcarand Wincanton, Newmarket and Uttoxeter. If oneof the English classics is on, our heads lean evercloser to the box on the sideboard, thecommentator’s voice gathers volume all through thefinal furlong, we are wired to the syllables of the chosen horse’s name.

One other memory persists from that period. We are settling down in the calm of a Saturdayevening to our weekly dose of Jack Loudan’s serial,Mrs Lally’s Lodgers, on the Northern Ireland HomeService. For me the programme is a twenty-minuteordeal, a peculiar compound of anticipation andpubertal dread. The focus of all this is a characternamed Lancelot Magowan. It is appallingly clearthat Lancelot has the hots for Mrs Lally and theunspeakable minutes arrive when he must utter hisfeelings. He does so in a voice that can only bedescribed as throbbing and Mrs L, thoughdecorously controlling his advances, is notunreceptive. The wireless exudes ragged breathing,strangled passion and the odd shameful silence andI stare tensely at the floor. What a relief when it istime for the Deep River Boys to give us some Negrospirituals. At this point, my mother usually turnsthe wireless off, to ‘save the battery’, presumably forLancelot’s next hormonal gallop.

Never to be forgotten, this first precious access tothe airwaves, this total immersion, so natural and comprehensive that it is as if the radio itself has disappeared.

© Leon McAuley & the Gallery Press

It was there, it just wasn’t in our house. Ours wasthe second-last house in the street to get electricity,so radio and television were not a part of mygrowing-up. My grandparents lived on theBallygomartin Road and they did have a radio.When we stayed with them my younger brotherand I would dance around the room in our longnightgowns, to the signature music of TheMcCooeys. Then we’d eat our tapioca, a double treat,and go to bed. My father and I once listened to PaulRobeson, and I became a fan for life. Years later, inthe army, after lights out we would stick a wirecoathanger in the radio as an aerial, and listen toRadio Luxemburg. It really was a matter of ‘airwaves’, as the sound rose and fell, but it was myintroduction to Jim Reeves and Roy Orbison!

There are memories of television dramas, written byone of our schoolteachers, Stewart Love: The BigDonkey; The Randy Dandy; A Headful of Crocodiles,though maybe not in that order. One line sticks inmy mind, I don’t know from which play. During afamily row a son turns angrily to his father and says:‘Why don’t you go to Windsor Park and loseyourself in the crowd’. A crushing, hurtful put-down.

I also recall Over the Bridge on television, but thevery first radio play I ever listened to was one of my own!

Indirectly it was the news reports on radio andtelevision that started me writing. When a reportcame in of someone having been shot or caught upin an explosion, two questions formed in my mind:was it someone I knew? Did they live? If the answerto the first was ‘no’, and the answer to the secondwas ‘yes’, then I assumed everything was all right. Itwasn’t until I went to work in Musgrave ParkHospital as a ward orderly that I realised everythingwasn’t all right. When I first walked into the wardthe great majority of the patients were victims of‘the Troubles’. There they all were, paralysed,maimed, people I’d heard about on the radio andtelevision. Their lives and the lives of their lovedones ruined, changed forever. The experience hurtme a great deal. I in turn wanted to hurt others, toshatter any easy assumptions that to ‘live’ was allthat mattered.

At the time I wasn’t a writer, but I knew that I hadto write about this experience. A play? A poem? Anovel? I didn’t know what. Three years after thatscarring experience I wrote The Death of HumptyDumpty. It was accepted by the Abbey Theatre.

© Wilfred Green

Most homes had a wireless then. Ours was a bigsquare box in the fireplace alcove, where it sat on a lace-trimmed tablecloth on a console table. It hummed when you turned the milled half-crownof the knob till it clicked. It needed time to warmup. You could tell by the glow and the noise that would dawn from the sunburst fascia. It gave outthe Weather.

Sometimes it would drizzle, or the News would beswept aside by the weather. I’d spin the big milledknob past the lit blips of the stations, London,Hilversum, Athlone, Helsinki, Moscow, throughbeeping Morse and the wind in the chimney andwaves of static, orchestras that played in dim-litrooms behind competing urgent voices,overlapping languages that rose and fell like music,or the oceanic swell collapsing onto shingle,muezzins crying from the minarets of Araby, jazzquartets in Paris, silver jubilees in London, and anunderlying fundamental buzz that came fromeverywhere, from nowhere.

There was a whole world out there. There was a whole world in there. When my father took theback of the radio off to see what was happening itlooked like an alien temple. For days I wandered inthe labyrinth of colour-coded wires between the tallforbidding bulbs of the valves. Years went by.

I’d flip the switch to short-wave radio, and slip theneedle in between the stations for the crackling ofan intercom, army and police jeeps calling to eachother in the dark, the streets awash with static,swash of window-wipers and a broken fizz of neonletters, the city demarcated by a coded alphabet.Bombs went off, reverberating through the consoleas the news became the News, and three or fouralarms rang out in different keys like faulty echoesof each other, making ghostly enclaves of acousticspace. I’d switch it off and go to bed at dawn.

And years went by. I’m listening to Talkback rightnow, and there’s talk of talks, and some are pro andsome are con, and some remain tight-lipped, andsome go on and on.

And, wanting to get lost, I twist the knob that little bit to slip between the stations, past the whining of a steel guitar, through urban funk and hip-hopyack, and fading punk, and broken soul, to reach the fundamental buzz that comes from everywhere,from nowhere.

© Granta Books

Earliest memories of radio: the soothing sounds ofthe Third Programme floating through the house,and the rush of happiness from seeing my motherin a giddy mood once waltzing the baby to ‘TheBlue Danube’. Then in first class, singing alongwith the school radio, a Bush, which was plonkedon the window ledge in each classroom. Glad for abreak from sums, we marched around the room tostirring songs like Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije: ‘OhKije was a hussar bold, /A hussar bold was he . . .’

My Nanny Simpson’s radio had to be warmed up. It was a big imposing radiogram and the mostimportant piece of furniture in the parlour.Everyone on it sounded posh and spoke properly asif they had been to hundreds of elocution lessons –all except The McCooeys who were common.

At home on our less impressive set, we listened toUncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites, and never tired ofsongs like ‘Inchworm’, ‘Sparky and the lost chord’and ‘The little engine who could’.

Later on in school, I came to love the plays fromToday and Yesterday in Northern Ireland featuringViking invasions, sad tales of the Potato Famine andswashbuckling stories about wrecked Armadas. We would sit enthralled, hearts in mouths, as theactors drowned convincingly in the roaring watersof the Atlantic. Perhaps then the notion that radiohas the best pictures was sown.

We were slow to get a television; and at first we werejust allowed to watch children’s TV. An avid reader, I revelled in dramatisations of my favouritebooks – The Silver Sword, The Railway Children,Treasure Island.

Then there was the forbidden delight of RadioLuxembourg. On Sunday nights, we sat on thestairs listening to The Top Twenty – our first taste ofcommercial radio, with its endless ads for Stablondand Brunitex shampoos. Radio Caroline came nextand played our favourite tunes non-stop – endlessBeatles and Rolling Stones. Then the sixteenth-birthday present of a transistor of my own. I wouldswing it nonchalantly on a Sunday afternoon walk,listening to Alan Freeman count down the Pick ofthe Pops on BBC Radio One

The radio is never off, either in the house or the car.According to a friend in the business, I am what isknown demographically as a ‘heavily promiscuous’listener. I listen a lot and change channels a lot.Afternoon plays, short stories, panel games,political discussions. I listen all day to Radios 3 and4 and during the night when I can’t sleep, I listen onan earphone to Radio 5. It influences my writing inthe sense that it keeps my imagination fired.

© Darragh Casey

Growing up in our house in the 1950s, my firstawareness of BBC Radio was on Sunday mornings.When we got back from 10’clock mass at StPatrick’s, Donegall Street, my father would belistening to Family Favourites followed by The BillyCotton Band Show. The rest of the week we listenedto what he and everybody else then called RadioAthlone. I have no idea when it happened butsometime in the 1960s Radio Athlone bit the dustand was heard of no more. Since The Billy CottonBand Show also disappeared, I suspect it was moreto do with the increasing domination of televisionthan with any political viewpoint of my father’s.

My earliest memory of drama on TV was watching a play with my father as he commented out loud,occasionally cursed and generally appeared agitated. It was called Over The Bridge. I wouldn’t have beenthat aware of Northern Ireland politics at the timebut I could make out that it was about the Belfastshipyards and my father was going on about theOrange Order and Protestant bigotry. I alsoremember the face of a frightened Catholic worker– in fact I never forgot it. Later I learnt it was thatof Donal Donnelly. That play, its Belfast accentsand its explosive atmosphere stuck with me for years.

You have to fast-forward a number of years for mynext experience of what we now call Radio Ulster.In the late 1970s I started writing plays for the TurfLodge Fellowship Community Theatre. Along witha cast member we were invited onto the WalterLove programme to talk about our latest play. So early one Tuesday morning we found ourselvessitting in a black taxi at the top of the WhiterockRoad waiting on it to fill up with passengers to startour journey to the BBC. Suddenly, we were witnessto a frightening gun attack in the butcher’s shop tenyards away. An assistant in the shop was shot fourtimes in the chest. The gunman strolled right pastus on his way to a waiting car. When breathlesslyrelating this story to Walter Love before going onair, we were overheard by newshound NormanStockton. Quick as a flash, the enterprisingNorman arranged to interview us for the nextRadio Ulster news bulletin the minute we werefinished with Walter.

I’ve since been a regular guest on various BBCRadio Ulster programmes over the years but Idoubt if I have ever contributed with the urgency ofthat first Norman Stockton news bulletin.

© Pacemaker

Irene. The girl next door, Irene, playing ‘IreneGoodnight’ on her radio. Words, names, people’svoices – sounds, magically transmitted through theair and walls. Into heads.

Chimes of Big Ben at nine, the solemndisapproving news. Did my mother send me toelocution to learn how to say such sad things?Twenty Questions, Friday Night is Music Night,Music While You Work in her morning scullery. The tune made her smile and she warmed. But notto the up and down of the Saturday afternoonfootball results. The assonance and alliteration ofWolverhampton Wanderers – nil, SheffieldWednesday – late kick-off. The strange mountingexcitement of horse racing and boxing, the gracefulcricket. Stories where people spoke intimately.

The chubby walnut-effect Bush arrived after my 11-plus. Our hunger at the wavy wobbly lines. Thedespair of valves’ frequent explosions, thebottomless tube that left for weeks. My grannydoing her bun and best slippers for Richard Bakerwho, she fully credited, could, like God, see herback. We were only allowed to watch children’stelevision but on Sundays while she dozed weswallowed matinées and Brains Trusts. I learned a lotof words from these. How beautiful people could be. The Railway Children, Little Women. Their opening music haunted, but was no match

for the astounding and rousing chords of Dr Who,always on at confession time. Why were TheWednesday Play and That Was The Week alwayssnapped off at the seemingly most interestingmoment?

The animals and close-ups and underwater frolicsof David Attenborough and Hans and Lotte. The wild depth of their narrations. Westerns likeWells Fargo, Laramie, Cheyenne, The Lone Rangerprepared us for violence to come. The Sky at Nightfor the moon landings, Crackerjack.

Christmas revolved around the pantomime orcircus they showed. Because my mother liked BillyCotton and the Black and White Minstrels andRuss Conway and Val Doonican and Vera Lynn butnot the Miss World we saw a lot of them. I have afriend now in a Pilates class who used to be aTelevision Topper. I said to my husband the otherday, you are getting more and more like that manFyfe Robertson, out of Tonight. Tales of theRiverbank, the mellifluous seduction of JohnnyMorris, a river in itself and as near to a caress as oneexperienced, in those days. For which, all of it,though my children would not agree, I aminexpressibly grateful.

© Paul Sherwood & the Gallery Press

The BBC represents a balance of authority andhumour that has intrigued me since the televisionfirst came into our home in about 1961. Indeed, itwas on the wireless before that. My earliestmemories of radio include Mrs Dale’s Diary and thebroadcasts from Hungary during the Russianinvasion. The BBC mediated a huge and complexworld but opened that window also on domesticdrama in which problems were always resolved. The Russians might not get out of Hungary butMrs Dale would make a good flan.

Ours was a big argumentative family that wascalmed by the mystery of Richard Baker’s poise. He spoke to us in even tones that we heard from noadult in the real world – parents and teachers wereas moody as the children; they were the ones we gotit from. Baker – or Robert Dougal – could tell yousolemnly that the Americans were taking losses atTet, that a tiger cub had been born at Whipsnade –wherever that was – and that the wind was comingfrom the west. He seemed to suggest that this wasall we needed to know and his limited emotionalrange, from a tight frown to a soft chuckle, seemedsufficient to encompass the whole world.

Even if we didn’t understand politics andinternational affairs, we went to bed with a sensethat everything was under control, Richard Baker’scontrol. News, he seemed to say, was the opposite

of drama. Drama serial episodes always ended onthe brink of crisis. Sergeant Doubleday, in thecinema serial, always died at the end and wasrevealed the following week to have escaped afterall. Richard Baker didn’t keep you waiting insuspense like that. His little smile and goodnighttold you that famine and war were transitory thingswhile good sense and maturity endured.

Ever since, this poise has been a challenge to me. I rebel at times and launch challenges against thepatrician reassurance of balance and try to importanger, cynicism and contempt into broadcastsincluding paper reviews – the closest I ever come tobeing a newsreader.

But I am challenged to find my inner RichardBaker too.

Authoritative poise and anarchic emotion are thepoles I move between and the BBC has become likea wise parent I am devoted to but whose shinssometimes need a good kicking.

Image courtesy of Malachi O’Doherty

The radio was in a cupboard to the right of themantelpiece, just where the saltbox might havehung in the mud-walled cottage my mother hadbeen brought up in, and it was with something ofthe same ceremony that the door of the cupboardwas opened and the radio turned on. My motherwas a schoolteacher and used the radio in theclassroom, so it was quite natural for her to seasonthe meat and potatoes of our everyday existencewith Schools and Children’s Programmes from theBBC. Our favourites were Children’s Hour withCicely Mathews and John D. Stewart and GraemeRoberts, and some version of Music and Movement,a programme that encouraged a connectionbetween song and dance, reading and writhing, thatwe’ve rather lost sight of, even in these peas-in-an-iPod days.

There was always that other song and dance of thepolitical toings and froings, of course, and thatinfluenced our listening in predictable ways. Forbetter or worse, there was a greater likelihood of ourtuning in for news, and more, to Radio Eireannthan the faintly Glengall-Street-tinted BBC,preferring an Angelus-tainted herald to DuncanHearle. The BBC broadcasts we listened to tendedto come from the UK, a particular favourite beingBeyond Our Ken, with that looney of loonies,Kenneth Horne, whose way with puns and double-entendres had as much influence on me as Joyce,I’m certain.

This changed when I began to make moreconnections with voices on BBC Northern Ireland,particularly the voices of Sean O’Baoill and JerryHicks, two singers and folklorists who alsohappened to be my teachers in St. Patrick’s College,Armagh. In the classroom, I vividly remember SeanO’Baoill explaining the phenomenon of ‘potatoesand point’, whereby a poor peasant would point hisor her meagre spud at a herring or a bit of baconhanging up to the right of the fire – not too farfrom the saltbox, probably – and simply point thepotato at the herring or bit of bacon and imaginethe taste.

It’s an image that often came back to me when, tenyears later, I went to work for BBC NorthernIreland and had barely been issued with mystopwatch when I fell in happily with the greatmantra on the difference between radio andtelevision, i.e. on radio, the pictures are better. The power of the imagination to summon the smellof the sea, the sound of a thousand horsemencoming over a hill, the taste of herring from a fewevocative words, was one on which I would base thenext thirteen years of my life, not only as a radioproducer but as a poet. It was all part of the sameline that ran back all the way through to thecupboard door closing until the next time.

© Wilfred Green

Every Saturday morning, when I was a child, a woman came to my house and swallowed a fly andbecause this fly wriggled and tickled inside her, theunfortunate swallowed a series of increasingly large creatures in an attempt to catch this irritating insect. The eagerly anticipated endingwhich culminated in swallowing a horse was concise tragic comedy – ‘she’s dead of course’. Thiswas the radio world of Saturday morning Children’sFavourites, a world soon to be swept away by the pop revolution where beat and rhythm replaced narrative.

In this Big Rock Candy Mountain realm of theimagination a boy called Sparky searched for hismissing voice and a bad’un called Big Johnredeemed a worthless life through self-sacrifice in amining disaster. And in the midst of these littlesnow-globes of sentimentality and melodrama – theperfect catalysts of the child’s imagination – therewas, too, the swirl of humour. How that laughingpoliceman laughed!

The songs flew out of the Bush radio with its red-faced dial – the model now sold as a piece ofnostalgic retro chic – and so many memories ofgrowing up and family are intimately related toboth television and radio. Television entertainedand educated; it showed us the march of historyand the unseen face of the world we lived in.Sometimes it showed us ourselves.

Although a writer of prose, I found stimulus in theBBC’s tradition of radical drama such as the seriesPlay For Today. Here was the provocative challengeof ideas, of honest criticism of our society and afaithfulness to realities however painful. BBC Northern Ireland kept this torch lit even inthose dark years when we faced a fragmentingsociety. As a teacher, as well as a writer, I have alsobeen impressed by the quality of schools’broadcasting where the strengths of our own culturehave been celebrated and explored in creative ways.

Now, however, I am no longer a child waiting forthe visit of that afflicted woman but just for amoment I see again the red face of that dial and partof me strains to hear its voice journeying throughthe dark tide of the ether. Perhaps if I listen hardenough it will teach me how to redeem my life,where to look to find my voice. Perhaps it will showme how to laugh. How to really, really laugh.

© Bloomsbury

Via . . . Who is speaking when I speak? 1953. I amborn. First memories? A cream silk tapestry curtainclose up turns out to be: the woven screen on theradio. And pips. Pip. Pip. Pip. Behind the silkscreen tapestry curtain is the world and a man’svoice from London: here is the news at nine o’clock.Hungary . . . China . . . Mau Mau . . .

Maimi, my grandmother, leans over her cracklingpaper to steady the wavering signal; she is searchingfor something . . . I am looking through thesteaming folds of clotheshorse washing from mysick bed on the sofa. I have cotton in my ears andmy head is boiling . . . A burst of music from a placecalled Luxembourg: ‘When I was just a little girl Iasked my mother what will I be?’.

We are the last in our neighbourhood to get TV. I will go anywhere to see it. I crash into AuntiePeggy’s Sunday afternoons in Lady Street; they areso fed up with me they all go out. I take to visitingmy other granny, Anna, even though there’s clearlya feud between my father and his mother. I learnvery early on to distinguish between his feuds andmy own – my granny has TV.

With her I discover the Sunday serial. Dickens,Dumas – the BBC must have been workingthrough the adaptations alphabetically. The Countof Monte Cristo had thirteen episodes and I missedthe last one! This still feels like deprivation . . .

Que sera , sera . . . Oh what will I be?

Granny Anna is sitting bolt upright on herbedsettee when I catch my first sight of MissHavisham, whose icy white locks seem to gather inthat nesting wedding cake and wrap themselvesaround the very legs of the table. So I go up closeand push myself through the glass wall of the TV. It seems to me that in my efforts to move throughthe glassy screen that separates the world of my twogrannies from the one which I see, it’s as if the glassyscreen is moving through me, a molten river of suchslippery cleanness nothing could live there, even the fish.

As soon as I am able I am walking Maimi Nicoleacross the park and down the Falls to Anna Livia fora word.

Your lipstick’s a rotten colour.

I know. But I like it.

© Faber

If I had a great big medal I’d pin it on the personwho dreamt up Scene Around Six. I’m sure the playon ‘seen’ was intentional. From that first syllable –sibilant – it was unmistakably of this place, wheremost of us are only ever an excited slip of thetongue away from the wrong end of the seen-saw.(And though Seen Around Six was grammaticallycorrect, I half expected London to give us acollective slap: ‘You saw it around six.’)

I don’t remember news programmes before SAScame along, though I’m told they were muchbriefer. It must have seemed a gamble in 1968 togive Northern Ireland twenty minutes of nightlynews to fill, but, credit where credit’s due, NorthernIreland rose to the challenge, serving up, in Scenearound Six’s sixteen years, a constant diet of murderand mayhem for its cameras to feed off; feed us on.

It was on Scene Around Six I saw the car bombexplode. Maybe you saw it yourself. Yes, that one: a soldier in the foreground ducks just before thevehicle becomes less and more than the sum of itssuddenly lethal parts. I saw worse things back then,on screen and off, but that seemed to me the perfectsymbol of a society whereeveryday objects, and thelives they furnished, were no longer reliable.

It’s probably too simplistic to say (but I’m anovelist, it won’t stop me) all this fuelled mychildhood desire for escapism: the SaturdayMorning Club at the Majestic, the James CagneySeason on the BBC. I loved Cagney the tough guy,of course, but I loved him too in Yankee DoodleDandy, the bio-pic of George M. Cohan. I imagined myself the ‘old timer’ not recognised on the street as he left the White House with amedal for the song all the Doughboys were singing,‘Over There’.

Aged about seven, I tried writing my own song. I tried writing a lot of other things over the nexttwenty years before I tried a novel and, when thatfinally worked, tried another.

I was writing my third – was on the bus home from the pictures (Lulu, with Louise Brooks) – when Iremembered the car bomb clip. I ran into the houseand typed a passage. From then until the book waspublished, I didn’t change a word, which is rare forme. As rare as deconstructing cars are these days,thank God; as rare as Sean Rafferty on ourtelevisions, more’s the pity.

© Michael Donald

I think many of us regard ourselves as ‘British’rather than ‘Irish’ because of the BBC – it’s notabout politics or religion or geography, it’s becausewe grew up watching Blue Peter and Jackanory andDr Who and Match of the Day and there wasabsolutely no room at all for anything that might beconsidered Irish. There was no locally-produced TVdrama, and the closest we had to a local superstarwas comedian James Young on a Saturday nightafter the football and James Ellis’s Belfast accent onZ Cars. Irish League soccer highlights showed howwoefully inadequate the local game was, with a fewhundred hardy souls attending the matches. I hadno idea that tens of thousands followed Gaelicfootball, or that it even existed. I thought camogiewas something you ordered in an Italian restaurant.

It wasn’t until the early 1980s when Graham Reid’s A Matter of Choice for Billy, which was followed bytwo sequels, exploded onto our screens, that I evenbecame aware of local drama. Coming from a non-theatre background, it was the first time I’d seen myown country properly portrayed on screen – thesense of humour, the sarcasm, the bigotry, the sheerbloody madness of it all and it had such agalvanizing effect on me, and I wouldn’t besurprised if it inspired dozens of aspiring writers. Itwas real ‘water cooler’ television. I just thought itwas fantastic, and for months after it I was quotinglines (although interestingly, the critic in me was

already playing that game we have all grown to love– spot the dodgy Northern Ireland accent. It wasKenneth Branagh’s TV debut and even though he was originally from Belfast, his accent soundedsuspiciously middle-class compared to the rest ofhis on-screen family).

BBC Northern Ireland has always made fantasticdrama, but the problem remains that it’s tooexpensive just to make for local consumption, andthere’s not enough interest in it on the mainland tomake it anything other than a rare event. It’s a hugepity, because there are thousands of stories to betold here, and in some ways there are even morenow that we’ve begun to throw off the shackles of‘The Troubles’. What’s more we’re the only BBCregion without our own soap opera – now imaginethat! The Scots have it, the Welsh, the English,obviously. I grew up hearing old folks talkingwistfully about a radio soap called The McCooeys –which ran for seven years in the 1950s. Seven years!Come on BBC Northern Ireland, I’m ready and I’m willing.

© Mark Dale

Anything to do with poets or poetry on the BBCwas a huge event in my early life. A dramatisationof the letters of Sylvia Plath that my mother hadswitched on by accident when I was thirteen hadme transfixed (like Jo March upon her threshold). I hadn’t heard of Sylvia Plath, though I’d heard ofher husband, and even read one or two of his poemsin the Touchstones anthology in school. A womanspoke directly into the camera about getting up atsix every morning, when the sleeping tablets arebeginning to wear off, and writing the greatestpoems of her life. I was rapt, already deeply happyfor her, as though it was clear to me what that couldmean. I made a trip to Greene’s bookshop andfound a copy of her selected poems, and from thenuntil I was eighteen, fell headlong into a Plathobsession, which, for all its decidedly mixedinfluence on my own early poetry, neverthelessclarified one essential thing in my mind: I wantedto write. Writing was what I wanted to do with my life.

Snippets of other poetry programmes throughoutmy teens. One Easter Sunday, a camera exploringthe wooden face of a crucified Christ, while all ofGeorge Herbert’s heart-rending study of the Passionwas read aloud in a low, sonorous voice. Whatevergrief like mine. And then came Alan Bennett’smarvellous series on modern poetry when I was in

sixth form. He perched on a stool and gave a lectureeach on Housman, Auden, MacNeice, Larkin,interspersing his own text with poems, quietly butpowerfully delivered, with that understated,omnipresent melancholy Bennett does so well.

And local programmes on Irish writers that openedmy consciousness to writing in this time, from thisplace. Glenn Patterson, writer-in-residence atQueen’s (was there such a thing?), talking about theperceived culture vacuum in the Protestantcommunity, and how unfair this perception was. I thought he looked so young to be so eloquent andon television. I was impressed. And finally, a lovingdocumentary of John McGahern that was to meanso much more when I met him at the Kavanaghweekend in Iniskeen in 1990, where I’d gone tocollect my prize. He wrote only in the mornings, he said. You can’t maintain the kind ofconcentration you need to write properly for morethan a few hours. And then he took us outside andshowed us the land and the two lakes (or was itthree?) that bounded his world.

© Conor Morrissey

There were four of us in my year at primary school.Helen, Neil, Marie and me. The school radio waskept in the staff-room, and was never moved, so wehad to troop in there to listen to BBC School Radiobroadcasts. This, in brief, is the plot of aprogramme we heard in the summer term of 1984,our last year at primary school.

The Earth is so polluted that it’s no longerhabitable: a vast spaceship has been built to takeeveryone to another planet. Onboard are two classesof passenger: the wealthy, housed in luxury, and theovercrowded poor. A friendship blossoms between awealthy girl and a boy from steerage.

Disease breaks out amongst the poor. Scientistsdevelop a vaccine, but they cannot make enough foreveryone. The wealthy are vaccinated; the poor areleft to die.

The boy falls ill. The girl, risking her own life,shares her medicine with him. He recovers. Butthen the wealthy passengers begin to die. Thescientists had miscalculated the dose. It was doublethe safe level.

The ship, now a charnel house, arrives at the newplanet. The children take an escape pod to thesurface. The planet is pristine, unpopulated: theymust make their lives there.

For the rest of term we immersed ourselves in theworld of that story. Me, Marie, Helen and Neilsurviving on the new planet. Out of bounds, in thefields, we collected grass seeds and hips and haws.We built ourselves a shelter, roofed with pilferedsack-race sacks. The narrative extended, evolved.We were so deep in it, we didn’t notice trailingshoelaces, bramble-scratches, the need to pee.

And then it was the end of term, and the leavingservice. In September we started at differentsecondary schools, where no-one played games likethis and there were a hundred and thirty-twopeople in my year, not four.

For me, this story is as indelible as the barbed-wirescar on my left calf muscle that I got climbingthrough the fence. In part, this is because it was abeautifully-crafted, challenging, open-ended piece;but it also has to do with who I am as a writer andthe fact that this was the last great epic narrativegame I played as a child. All children have thisfacility for creative, imaginative play. Mostly it getsshed or withers away under the inevitable pressuresof life. For writers (or at least for me) it remains,like a vestigial tail, evidence of an earlier stage ofdevelopment. Now, when I write, howeverintellectual I’m trying to be, however adult thematerial, it’s the little girl in the playground whotakes over. I get lost in whatever story she’s playing.

© Jill Jennings

As a writer, as a dramatist, I owe everything totelevision. Earlier generations grew up with radio,the family gathered round the wireless, tuning thedial into the scratchy sounds of the Home Service;or with movies, back when even as small a place asArmagh had three or four cinemas.

But my generation was the television generation.

Even now there’s something faintly shameful aboutsaying that. As children we have the idea drilledinto us that watching TV is a waste of time and thatreal life is spent out of doors; and don’t get mewrong, much of my childhood was spentscrambling around in the open air, getting bloodyknees and noses, getting stung by nettles, and allthat Seamus Heaney kind of stuff. But for all that,my childhood is most vividly conjured back intolife – the real Proustian rush happens – when I hear,say, the theme tune to White Horses, a 1968Czechoslovakian children’s programme dubbed intoEnglish and shown on the BBC in the early 1970s.

I was born in 1969 and grew up in Armagh. By mytime Armagh had only one cinema left, the Ritz onMarket Street, and even that didn’t last long. And ifaccess to the cinema was limited, access to thetheatre was non-existent. That I ended upbecoming a playwright and screenwriter, then, haseverything to do with television. And television was

extraordinary then, children’s television especially, astrange cultural ecosystem of its own, where WhiteHorses could rub shoulders with an old Abbott andCostello movie, or a homegrown cartoon like MrBenn could run alongside the French-dubbed-into-English swashbuckler The Flashing Blade.

The heroes of my childhood included people whowere, unknown to me, long dead. The BBC used tofill out the schedule with old Harold Lloyd orBuster Keaton movies, or, our particular favourite,the obscure cross-eyed silent comedian Ben Turpin.For the BBC no doubt these were just cheap fillers,but for me they were magical. Then there were theadventure serials from the 1930s, Flash Gordon andBuck Rogers. Or a choice of Tarzans – JohnnyWeismuller in black and white, Ron Ely in colour (though that may – God forbid – have beenon ITV).

These were the stories that first fired myimagination. From before I could even read, thesewere the stories that made me fall in love withstorytelling. They were stories that were carriedfrom the living room to the playground, and onfrom there, folded away and packed in the memory. It was because of these stories that Ibecame a writer.

© Jill Jennings