writers on broadcasting

The Living A

ir

Writers on Broadcasting

11137 BBC LIVING AIR final 28/10/05 2:33 pm

Contents

6

Sam McAughtry

8

A.T.Q.Stewart

10

John Morrow

12

Christina Reid

14

Michael Longley

18

Seamus Heaney

20

Bernard MacLaverty

22

Sam McBratney

24

Marianne Elliott

26

Frank Ormsby

28

Graham Reid

30

CiaranCarson

32

Annie McCartney

34

Martin Lynch

36

Medbh McGuckian

38

Malachi O’Doherty

40

Paul Muldoon

42

David Park

44

Anne Devlin

46

Glenn Patterson

48

Colin Bateman

50

Sinead Morrissey

52

Jo Baker

54

Daragh Carville

16

Jonathan Bardon

Extravagant Sky,Living Airby Fabian Monds

Page 3Worlds Near and Farby Anna Carragher

Page 4Introduction

by Anne Tannahill

11137 BBC LIVING AIR final 28/10/05 2:33 pm Page 3

by Anna Carragher

If there was a time before radio I don’t remember it. A brown, Bakelite presence, glowing valves and soundsthat crackled out of nowhere to live among us andbecome part of our lives. It is Proustian in its intensity –Mrs Dale is my mother listening as she ironed; therhythmic, helter-skelter commentary from Clones orCroke Park is the smell of my father’s Sweet Aftoncigarettes; Two Way Family Favourites the noise andbustle of Sunday lunch; Listen with Mother andChildren’s Hour my little sisters and brothers clappingand joining in the singing. It was geography – thosestrange, exotic places, Hilversum, Athlone, Cologne; itwas history as presidents, prime ministers, poets,musicians, film stars talked in our living room; it waseducation, concerts on the Third at home, musicand stories in Miss McArdle’s dusty,cream-painted classroom.

As a small child I had a passion for all things Chinese andone evening my father woke me up – at half past eight! –and took me downstairs in my dressing gown to listen toa programme about China on the Home Service. It wasrare for anyone in our large family ever to have ourparents all to ourselves so that evening – me, them, theradio – is vivid and alive nearly half a century later.

And suddenly, magically it was mine. Miss McArdleentered a poem I had written in class for a BBCNorthern Ireland Children’s Hour competition. It won,and aged ten I came into Broadcasting House, Belfast,for the first time. I read the poem live on air and my babybrothers and sisters sat on the floor in silent amazementas my voice came out of the brown Bakelite box. One ofthem cried, thinking I had gone to live in radio land.

By the time they were in secondary school I was atQueen’s and soon after I was going through those doorsin Broadcasting House, first in London, then again inBelfast every day. The children were right – I did go toradio land.

Anna CarragherController, BBC Northern Ireland

by Fabian Monds

This bouquet of memories is a treasury of literary riches,and its value is enhanced by the directness of theirpersonal connections with our lives, homes andcommunities. The reflections and reminiscences aremainly based on the content of remembered broadcasts,on broadcasting itself and on consequential influences.The sense of gaining access to the wide world, and to abetter knowledge of our local world, is evidentthroughout the writings and perhaps is best captured by Seamus Heaney in these lines from his poem‘The Skylight’:

But when the slates came off, extravagantSky entered and held surprise wide open.

So it is with The Living Air. The value of this collectionis in its literary excellence, eclectic span and individual

sense of connection and access.

I found myself also thinking of the innovation thatmakes the air alive, from Marconi’s radio experiments ofover a century ago between Ballycastle and Rathlin, tothe creative and technical skills of today’s programmemakers and broadcasters. From my childhood, Iremember well my own first hand-crafted one-valveradio receiver, with coils lovingly wound and capacitorscarefully adjusted, and the excitement of listening toradio stations from far away. As darkness fell, thepopulation of competing stations grew, and so did thediversity of content. In today’s digital broadcastingworld, choice and diversity can be somewhatoverwhelming, making quality, always the key, all themore precious.

The BBC’s public service responsibilities are nowadaysoften characterised in terms of quality and in the valuesof citizenship, culture, education, connecting withcommunities and a global perspective. This collectionbrings life, affection, understanding and relevance tothese critical elements of public value. Our contributorshave made it so, through their originality, insight andgenerosity, and they are most deserving of our thanks.

Professor Fabian MondsBBC National Governor for Northern Ireland

Extravagant Sky, Living Air

2 3

Worlds Near and Far


4 5

by Anne Tannahill

When Mark Adair of BBC NI suggested that I compilea short anthology of writers reminiscing about listeningand viewing, it sounded like a pleasant enough littleproject. The first indication that it was going to besomething altogether more interesting was when I triedthe idea out on a few writers and realised that somethingwas starting to hum – they could hardly wait to begin.

Then the contributions started to arrive, bringing with them a buzzing web of recollection and reflection.David Park yearned to hear again, ‘through the dark tideof the ether’, about the laughing policeman and the oldwoman who swallowed a fly. In a startling image, AnneDevlin recalled feeling so spellbound by Miss Havishamin Great Expectations that ‘I go up close and push myselfthrough the glass wall of the TV’. Ciaran Carsonremembered the back being taken off the family radio,allowing him to wander for days in ‘the labyrinth ofcolour-coded wires’. The young Medbh McGuckian wasfascinated that voices could be ‘magically transmittedthrough the air and walls. Into heads’.

This idea of the air being alive, full of crackling energy,suggested the title for the anthology. It’s from ‘TinternAbbey’, Wordsworth’s poem about the past being caught,held and handed on by ‘something . . ./ Whose dwellingis the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and theliving air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man . . .’

Arranging the contributions in roughly chronologicalorder revealed an intriguing shift between the narrowintimacy of older writers’ memories and the widerhorizons of television-age writers like Sinead Morrissey,Jo Baker and Daragh Carville.

Michael Longley described huddling with his brotherinside a wigwam pitched in the living room, not reallyunderstanding the jokes on ITMA, but full of happycontentment at their parents’ overheard laughter.

Sam McAughtry recalled BBC concerts being broadcastfrom the Ulster Museum seventy years ago, and he andhis mother stopping what they were doing ‘to listen toMozart, Bizet, Verdi, or to switch off Wagner’.

A.T.Q. Stewart remembered his confusion when hisfather said that he had just seen Franco (a neighbour’snickname, as it turned out): how had the Spanishgeneral, whose advance on Madrid was being reportedon the radio news, ‘time to go gallivanting on one of ourold Belfast red trams?’ An early memory for AnnieMcCartney was ‘the rush of happiness from seeing mymother in a giddy mood’ waltzing the baby to radiomusic. Christina Reid helped her mother to polish thebrasses on Sunday afternoons as they listened to radiocomedy shows, without which, ‘I swear to God, I mighthave died young of boredom in Belfast’.

For Frank Ormsby, his father’s ‘welfare wireless’ had ‘anaura of mystery and promise’ that ‘might give us accessto anywhere’. And while ‘the lit blips of the stations,London, Hilversum, Athlone, Helsinki, Moscow’ hintedat a wider world for Ciaran Carson and the late-nightshipping forecasts told Seamus Heaney that ‘the worldwould be watched over until you woke again’, for some writers it was the advent of television that brought theoutside world into sharper focus. Marianne Elliott’sfamily bought the first television set in the neighbourhood to watch the Grace Kelly wedding, and‘our house became a mini-cinema’. A few years later, a harsher world was brought into the living room withthe assassination of John F. Kennedy.

All too soon, instead of merely listening to and watchingthe news, we ourselves became the News. Martin Lynch, on his way to Broadcasting House to talk about a new community play, witnessed an assassination andfound himself in demand for the news bulletin as well asthe arts programme. Malachi O’Doherty began torealise that the apparently safe world, under the controlof Richard Baker’s civilised ‘balance’, was in factanything but safe. Marianne Elliott, studying in the USwhen ‘the province erupted’, recognised that ‘from nowon only negative things would be reported aboutNorthern Ireland’.

Glenn Patterson had a sudden flashback memory of a car exploding on Scene Around Six and rushed home to complete his third novel. Graham Reid’s outragedsense of the difference between the measured tones ofthe news items and the obscene reality of the maimedpeople he saw in hospital became the spark for his firstplay. In turn, Reid’s Billy plays for BBC television were‘galvanising’ for Colin Bateman.

The BBC’s crucial role as talent scout and coach was warmly acknowledged by many of the writers. A succession of producers taught Sam McAughtry that‘radio sets a stern test for writing. Every word must workfor a living’. Bernard MacLaverty discovered that ‘themore words you took out the better the story got’.Jonathan Bardon, writing history programmes forschools, was excited at being involved ‘in a collectivecampaign to show that the real history of an increasinglyfractured country was not dull, but could be grippingand enlightening’. And the financial side was not to besniffed at: BBC commissions were for John Morrow ‘anoutlet for my early work at a fraught time’ and for SamMcBratney, it was ‘amazing to write something, send itaway, and hear it on the radio. And get paid for it!’

For all the writers, there was a clear link between whatDavid Park called ‘the perfect catalysts of the child’simagination’ provided by radio and television and theirown developing urge to write. And Paul Muldoon,beginning his career at BBC NI, found that the power of the imagination to ‘summon the smell of the sea . . .the taste of herring from a few evocative words’ becamethe underpinning for his work as a poet as well as a radio producer.

Compiling this anthology has been not just a pleasurebut an unexpectedly moving experience for me, bringingmemories of much-loved programmes and of the half-forgotten voices of family, friends and neighbours, of‘other days around me’. I hope that it does the same for you.

Anne Tannahill – Editor: Anne Tannahill, managing director of the Belfast publisher Blackstaff Press until herretirement in 2003, currently works as a freelance editor and publishing consultant.

Introduction


‘Do you hear them all coughing when the music stops?’ I sai

d to

Mot

her.

‘If I were to go there and cough, you could tell all the neighbours: “That's my son coughing on the wireless”.’

I made my first broadcast around seventy years ago,when the wireless reached the bedrock classes throughthe hire-purchase system. In the early 1930s light andclassical music was broadcast weekly by the local BBCfrom the Ulster Museum and my mother and I wouldstop what we were doing to listen to Mozart, Bizet,Verdi, or to switch off Wagner.

‘Do you hear them all coughing when the music stops?’,I said to Mother. ‘If I were to go there and cough, youcould tell all the neighbours: “That’s my son coughingon the wireless”.’ She just rolled her eyes as usual but I went the following week to the Museum anyway.When I got home I said to Mother, ‘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 answeringquestions about the book I began to talk about the anticsof an uncle of mine who overstayed his leave duringWorld War One and was locked up in CarrickfergusCastle. Excited faces appeared at the glass window. After the show Gloria Hunniford asked for more storieslike that. My broadcasting brand was set in concrete. I suppose there wasn’t a lot of Protestant humour aroundat that time.

Radio sets a stern test for writing. Every word must workfor a living. An apprenticeship on this medium helpsenormously in the task of snipping the long nails off thework. Conversely, reaching radio writing standardsmeans that, when set out on the page, the voice of theauthor is always there.

In the last twenty-eight years I have covered mostbroadcasting fields – drama, documentaries, presenting,script writing, and religious broadcasting. The patienceof many a producer has been tried, and I well know it.Like many a writer I am in debt to the likes of PaulMuldoon, Sam Hanna Bell, Paul Evans, Jim Sheridan,Bernagh Brims, John Boyd and many others. For regional broadcasting to exist, local talent is vital. It says a good deal for Radio Ulster that it hasn't justdipped into a pool that was there: it has nurtured and

created artistic talent that, under the miasma of the Troubles, might otherwise have never

lightened our day.

Sam McAughtry

Sam McAughtry – Writer and Broadcaster: Born 1923 in Belfast, he served in the RAF from 1940 until 1946. He became a civil servant, with a late-flowering second career as a journalist and broadcaster. His first book, The Sinking of the Kenbane Head (1977), was a tribute to a brother who died in the Battle of the Atlantic and his numerous other publications include fiction, travel and memoirs. BBC Radio Ulster contributions include Talkback, McAughtry’s Country and Good Company and BBC television features include Walking the Stones.

76

Image courtesy of Sam McAughtry

1 2


Listening to the chimes of Big Ben and the nine o’clock news was a daily ritual, and newsreaders Bruce Belfrage and Alvar Liddell

beca

me a

lmos

t lik

e mem

bers of the family.

A.T.Q. Stewart – Historian: A.T.Q. Stewart is one of Ireland’s most distinguished historians and has written extensively on Irish affairs. His 1967 book The Ulster Crisis: Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–1914 remains the definitive text on this period.Further works such as The Narrow Ground (1977) and The Shape of Irish History (2001) examined various aspects of Irish and, in particular, Ulster history and were published to widespread critical acclaim.

I have been trying to work out when I heard my firstradio broadcast and I think it must have been about thetime of the Franco incident. My father came home fromwork one evening and said that Franco had been on thetram. I was puzzled by this. I could not understand howthe Spanish general, with four columns advancing onMadrid and a fifth column in the city itself, had time togo gallivanting on one of our old Belfast red trams. Later it was explained to me. My father had nicknameda neighbour who looked like the man in the news.

I certainly remember hearing the radio in mygrandparents’ home when one of my aunts, who had afine soprano voice, gave a song recital from the localstation. Our own radio set arrived in 1939, and changedlife for ever. My clearest memories are of the wartimebroadcasts. Listening to the chimes of Big Ben and thenine o’clock news was a daily ritual, and newsreadersBruce Belfrage and Alvar Liddell became almost likemembers of the family. At 10 pm you could, if youwanted, tune in to Hamburg and hear the Nazi versionof the news, read by the traitor William Joyce. He hadan affected upper-class accent and always began with thewords ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling’. Very cleverly,the government never jammed the station, and ‘LordHaw-Haw’ became a figure of fun, a morale-boosterinstead of the opposite.

It was the age of ITMA and the variety shows and dancebands – Ambrose and his orchestra, Billy Cotton – andcrooners singing ‘Smoke gets in your eyes’ and ‘Whenthey begin the beguine’. And of course there was radiodrama. My father said it would never work, because thedisembodied voice could not capture the magic of thetheatre. Within weeks he was listening with the zeal ofthe converted. Television still lay in the future. All theaccents were received English, and there was very littleregional input.

I can’t say that radio much influenced my early desire towrite, but it did occur to my adolescent mind that theBBC might be a market for budding authors. I prepareda script about the ancient Celtic monastery at Nendrumand sent it to Ormeau Avenue. It was politely returned.I made a vow never to have anything more to do witheither the BBC or Irish history. I would become a creative artist, a poet or a novelist. How the gods musthave laughed! I was destined to find my career in Irishhistory, and to make many broadcasts from OrmeauAvenue. But it has left me with a curious sensation thatsomehow I have not yet finished my school homework.

I still want to be a writerwhen I grow up.

A.T.Q. Stewart

8 9

Image courtesy of A.T.Q. Stewart

3 4 5


- and if not, the remote is to hand.

The faces in the glow of today’s electronic hearth are generally rapt

John Morrow – Writer and Broadcaster: Born in Belfast in 1930, he left school at fourteen to work in the shipbuilding and linenindustries and later as an administrator with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. His first novel, The Confessions of Proinsias O’Toole(1977) was adapted for a BBC NI broadcast. Other books include Northern Myths (1979) and The Annals of Ballyturdeen (1996). Many of his stories and essays were commissioned for the BBC Radio Ulster series Bazaar and he has also presented a number ofprogrammes for Radio Ulster on the writer’s craft.

My uncle James guided my infant right hand to the cat’swhisker, the half of a headphone clutched to my left ear. . . And suddenly, shockingly, a fat lady sang (screeched,rather: Dame Nellie Melba, the toast of Wogga Wogga,I learnt later).

And thus began for me a lifelong, haphazard tutorialprovided by radio, Hollywood and, later, television –plus books, of course. ‘Elementary’ schooling in thosedays meant just that: a litany of English monarchs,geography the red patches on an atlas (but we were earlyreaders, thanks largely to comics).

Uncle James gave us an accumulator (wet battery) setand on it we followed the progress of the Second WorldWar, laughed at ITMA and listened to The Brains Trust.I recall vividly hearing Professor Joad mention GeneralWolfe at Quebec and the ‘French and Indian’ wars inAmerica. Indians! . . . Cowboys?. . . thinks I, and withthe help of my library ticket was soon up to my neck inthe mire of personalities, politics and mayhem that wasthe eighteenth 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 the 1798

rebellion in Ireland. Then, in a radio programmewritten by Sam Hanna Bell, I discovered

that the rebels were Presbyteriansand that our own church in

May Street had been a hotbed of sedition, with musketssecreted in the roof 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 fraught timewhen outlets were few. It also brought me the voice of thegreat Frank O’Connor, reading and discussing his work.It was a revelation. For all his fame, O’Connorconsidered himself to be in the line of the hearthsideseanchai, telling his tale to the ‘rapt faces in the firelight’.The ‘literary’ writer who lost sight of those faces, he said,did so at his peril.

The faces in the glow of today’s electronic hearth aregenerally rapt – and if not, the remote is to hand. Critics may carp, but that other presence in the living-room has become a great comfort and companion,not least for the often solitary folk of my 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 of theeighteenth century: Premiership football. For that I ameternally grateful.

John Morrow

1110

Image courtesy of John Morrow

6 7


On Sundays, I swear to God, I might have died young of boredom in Belfast,

if it hadn’t been for the wireless.

Christina Reid – Playwright: Born in Belfast in 1942, Christina Reid is the writer of award-winning plays which examine the effectof violence, class and sectarianism on Belfast communities. These include Tea in a China Cup (1983), Did You Hear the One Aboutthe Irishman? (1985) and Joyriders (1986). Writer-in-residence at the Lyric Theatre 1983–84 and at The Young Vic in London 1988–89. Adaptations for the BBC include The Last of A Dying Race (radio 1986/television 1987) and My Name Shall I Tell You My Name? (1987).

I’d like to thank the BBC for helping me to survive thelongest day of the week in my childhood. On Sundays,I swear to God, I might have died young of boredom inBelfast, if it hadn't been for the wireless. Everything elseabout Sunday was dire. Sunday School in Sunday-Best-Clothes; Best Behaviour; No Rowdy Playing in the street. And no point in going to the local playground, even if you were allowed out, because the swings androundabouts were padlocked on the Lord’s Day by orderof Belfast Corporation.

Sunday afternoon was given over to the tedious task ofhelping my mother to clean her collection of brassornaments. She handed me the blue-and-white tin ofcotton wadding impregnated with Brasso, ‘You rub it in,and I'll polish it off ’ and then she turned the radio on. I still associate the heady smell of Duraglit with theglorious years of radio comedy shows starring Al Read,Jimmy Clitheroe, Ted Ray, Jimmy Edwards, DickBentley, June Whitfield, and Elsie and Doris Waters. And the ventriloquist Peter Brough with his woodendummy Archie Andrews. My mother swore that PeterBrough never ever moved his lips when he wasprojecting the voice of Archie. ‘Catch yourself on,’laughed my father, ‘why would the man be bothered todo that on the wireless where nobody can see him?’ My mother advised me to pay no heed. ‘It’s whateveryou think yourself,' she said.

And that’s what I still love about theradio, whether I’m listening to it orwriting for it. The visual imagesthat words and sound conjure inthe mind’s eye know no bounds. In the imagination of every listener, it can be ‘whatever you think yourself ’.

The first drama I ever heard and saw in mymind’s eye was BBC Northern Ireland’s The McCooeys. It was a family favourite.Every character in it was just likesomebody we knew. Bella McCoubreyfrom the Stoney Mountain was asreal to me as the big woman fromthe country who lived up our street.In those pre-TV days, the wireless wasthe magic box. And still is.

Don’t get me wrong. These days I enjoytelevision and I love the theatre. But radiowill always be special to me. The childhoodfriend who inspired my imagination andrescued me from the banality of the threeBs – Boredom, Brasso and Belfast Corporation.

Christina Reid

12 13

© Darragh Casey

8 9 10


Some of the signature tunes will always transport me

back to the coke fire and the cream walls turned browny-yellow by my parents’ chain-smoking.

1514

Michael Longley – Poet: Born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at TCD, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1991. His poetry collections include No Continuing City (1969), The Echo Gate (1979), Gorse Fires (1991), The Weather in Japan (2000) and Snow Water (2004) and he was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2000 and the Queen’s Medal forPoetry in 2001. A long-time contributor to BBC literary programmes, he collaborated with Douglas Carson on educationalprogrammes in the 1970s. Corner of the Eye, a BBC NI profile of his life, was screened in 1988.

My twin Peter and I are huddled inside a faded second-hand wigwam which we have pitched in the middle ofthe green carpet in our seldom-used living room. I canstill hear my father’s rather formal baritone laugh, mymother’s jolly descant. They are listening to ITMA,Tommy Handley’s weekly progression of briefencounters with colourful regulars whose voices andcatch phrases have entered the national consciousness tosuch an extent that after only a word or two they areapplauded by the studio audience: Colonel Chinstrap,Mrs Mop (‘Can I do you now, sir?’), Mona Lot (‘It’sbeing so cheerful that keeps me going’). Peter and I arefar too young to follow the comedy, but we feel happy eavesdropping on our parents’ laughter. Perhapsnot understanding the jokes mysteriously increases our contentment.

We have two radios in our house: in the large chillyliving room the good one that receives all the stations; inthe cosy kitchen-cum-breakfast-room a wee Bakelite boxthat delivers only the Home Service, its dial a parchmentglow. Children’s Hour is part of the familial fug: ToyTown with Larry the Lamb, Mr Mayor, Mr Plod; thestories and songs of Auntie Vi; Uncle Mac; CommanderStephen King-Hall who ends his broadcasts, ‘Be very

good and very quiet, butnot so good and so

quiet that

somebody says “What are you doing?” ’; and from BBCNorthern Ireland the fanfare of kazoos that introducesCicely Matthews’ I want to be an actor. (My friend JimFitzpatrick’s appearance on this show brings him briefcelebrity in Bristow Park.) Some of the signature tunes(Toy Town’s ‘The Dance of the Little Tin Soldiers’, forinstance, or ‘The Jewels of the Madonna’ whichintroduces – I think – the magical Box of Delights) willalways transport me back to the coke fire and thecream walls turned browny-yellow by my parents’chain-smoking.

Dick Barton, Special Agent stars on the Light Programmeand therefore can be contacted only in the living room.Do I really want to exile myself from the warmth andcompanionship of the kitchen? This tension anticipates amuch later perception: that the experience of art is bothindividual and communal. In 1948 my father extendsthe world of our imaginations by hiring another radiothat is receptive to more than the Home Service – for one

shilling and six pence per week. In less than adecade, as well as being addicted to

Journey into Space and TheGoons, I shall be trying out

some new things on the Third Programme.

Michael Longley© BBC

11 12 13


The challenge was to lift young listeners into another tim

e and place to create a coherent,

accurate and compelling story using the voices of the past.

16 17

Jonathan Bardon – Historian: Born 1941 in Dublin and educated at TCD and QUB. He taught for many years at the BelfastInstitute of Further and Higher Education and is now a lecturer at the School of History, QUB. His many books include A Historyof Ulster (1992) and Beyond the Studio: A History of BBC Northern Ireland (2000). A frequent broadcaster on Irish history, he has alsoscripted a number of BBC NI schools series including Modern Irish History.

‘We ought to listen to that,’ my father said, pointing tothe Radio Times. It was Blues and Greys, a balladdocumentary on the American Civil War. I was aboutfourteen: not only did the programme reinforce myfascination with history but this was the first occasionwhen I became dimly aware of the skills and craftrequired to make a compelling broadcast. Recollectionof my childhood in Dublin is crowded with memories ofBBC Home Service and Light Programme radio.

‘I would try to start off by getting them to sit down,’ thePrincipal, John Malone, advised shortly after I hadbegun my teaching career in east Belfast in 1964. I turned for help to the Today and Yesterday in NorthernIreland programmes being made in the new SchoolsDepartment. Would the boys sit quietly? My anxiety wasunnecessary: hubbub lapsed into quiet absorption asthey became familiar with the writings of Sam HannaBell, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and others.

It was in the Schools Department that I cut my teeth asa writer. James Hawthorne – creator of the ground-breaking Two Centuries of Irish History – produced myvery first programme, on the Battle of Clontarf, and heinsisted on driving me down to Dollymount strand sothat I could set the scene as vividly as possible. My mentor thereafterwas Douglas Carson.

His series, Modern Irish History: People and Events, hadexacting objectives: each programme was to draw oncontemporary sources to dramatise just one pivotal eventover no more than a twenty-four hour period. Thechallenge was to lift young listeners into another timeand place to create a coherent, accurate and compellingstory using the voices of the past. Each programmeforced the writer to search out old documents, somebeing brought to light for the first time. DavidHammond was usually on hand to resurrect long-forgotten ballads. We were buoyed up by the enthusiasmof the actors who were grateful that they, too, hadlearned a little more about their past. We seemed to beinvolved in a collective campaign to show that the realhistory of an increasingly fractured country was not dullbut could be gripping and enlightening.

Finally, I am firmly of the view that the most perfectlycrafted local radio programme ever was Wings of aSeraphim, Douglas Carson’s account of growing up inBelfast during the most terrible years in modern historywhile some of his cousins were storming the Normandybeaches and most of his German cousins were dying forthe Reich as the Red Army advanced. I play it to myQueen’s students once a year: without fail, the classes are

transfixed and some aremoved to tears.

Jonathan Bardon Image courtesy of Jonathan Bardon

14 15 16


o much the weathers

s that flowed longest and deepest in the channels of the ear,

ping forecast most of all.

But in the end, it wasn’t so much

as the weather forecasts that flo

and the shipping fo

My earliest and most unforgettable radio experience: a play on the Northern Ireland Home Service beinglistened to by grown-ups in the kitchen, but overheardby me in the dark of the bedroom, when I was supposedto be asleep.

It told the story of the Cooneen ghost, of a Fermanaghfamily haunted out of house and home, and pursuedacross the ocean to their new home in America. Whatterrified me most was the recurrent knocking of thepoltergeist, at first behind the walls of the family homeand then, unremittingly and ever more menacingly,from behind the walls of their cabin on the transatlanticliner. If I heard it now, it might just strike me as a primitive sound effect, but at the time it had uncanny,unsettling power. It made a space for nightmare, a space that opened fitfully and a little frightfully foryears afterwards.

Radio has the power to flow into your dream life, whichis one reason why schools broadcasts proved so effective,particularly in the realm of language and literature.

Some teachers probably regarded a class period spentlistening to the wireless as a waste of time, but no

class period in all my years at school left as deepa mark as the one when I first heard Thomas

Hardy’s poem ‘Weathers’ read by an actorfrom the BBC’s repertory company.

A big, commanding, standard English voice, that shookthe speakers in the classroom and seemed to possess aforce that equalled the natural forces at work in Hardy’slandscape, ‘When showers betumble the chestnutspikes,/And nestlings fly’.

But in the end, it wasn’t so much the weathers as theweather forecasts that flowed longest and deepest in thechannels of the ear, and the shipping forecast most of all.Night after night, year after year, at the moment of close-down, that solemn invocation of the names of theregions of the sea told you that the world would bewatched over until you woke again. It operated as a kindof mantra, and in fact it was only in the 1970s, when I started to live near the coast in Co. Wicklow, that I fullyrealized the seriousness and consequence of the phrase‘attention all shipping’: after a stormy night I’dsometimes see French trawlers at anchor in the shelteredbut 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.

Seamus Heaney – Poet: Born 1939 in Bellaghy and educated at QUB and St Joseph’s College, Belfast. He taught at St Thomas’sIntermediate School, Belfast from 1962 to 1963 and later at QUB, Carysfort, Harvard and Oxford. Poetry collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), North (1975), The Spirit Level (1996) and Electric Light (2001). Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literaturein 1995, he has also received the Somerset Maugham Award (1967), the Duff Cooper Prize (1975) and the Whitbread Award (1987 and 2000). His work has featured in many BBC programmes including the 1970s schools’ series Explorations, a 1972 profile to mark the publication of Wintering Out and a 1987 recital at QUB.

Seamus Heaney© BBC

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18 19

18


At first I was indignant.

Then I discovered that the more words you took out the better

the story got.

Our house was quiet voices. Grandma and Granda andGreat Aunt Mary, my mother and father. But there wasanother voice mixed in with it. The only voice whichdidn’t have a Belfast accent. The wireless. It was alwaysthere in the background as my mother baked. FamilyFavourites. And if there was a song she knew she wouldjoin in, beating the mixture in time to the tune. Maybe even dancing.

But some programmes weren’t background – they wereto be sat down and listened to. Like The McCooeys.Everybody laughing at the goings on of James Young asDerek the window cleaner. And J.G. Devlin as GrandaMcCooey. And one time there was a neighbour – a woman two doors away who was an English teacherand she was actually in a play. So we all gathered roundand listened. A woman spoke.

Is that her? No. Maybe she’s acting. And she doesn’t sound like herself.

Everybody was anxious for her – but she was fine and weall laughed when we recognised her voice and Grandaraised an eyebrow to indicate he was in the 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. Brightonand Hove Albion – one, Sheffield Wednesday – nil. Little bits of bacon – two, a slice of potato bread – one.Many years later I stopped on a train at a platform calledPreston North End. And I could nearly taste the fry.Preston North End was my Adlestrop.

Then there were the days you were off sick from schooland you got the wireless brought up to your bedroom.I learned more than I ever did in any class. There was adramatisation of Lenz by George Büchner, about poorLenz’s descent into madness. It was scored by theRadiophonic Workshop – electronic swoops of Dr-Who-likemusic before its time. Scared the wits out of me. That radio play made its way into a novel of mine, Grace Notes, many years later.

The first money I earned as a writer was from the BBC.I sent a story which they liked. It was John Boyd who didthe liking and he invited me in – told me Morning Storywas 2800 words and my story was far too long. At first I was indignant. Then I discovered that the more wordsyou took out the better the story got. Up to a point. If you went too far down that road you’d end up writing nothing.

Bernard MacLaverty

Bernard MacLaverty – Novelist and Short-story Writer: Born in Belfast in 1942 and worked as a medical laboratory assistantbefore taking a degree at QUB, and moving to Scotland in 1975. His first short-story collection Secrets and Other Stories waspublished in 1977 and his novels Lamb and Cal were memorably adapted for film in 1983 and 1984. Recent novels includeGrace Notes (1997; nominated for the Booker Prize) and The Anatomy School (2001). His television play My Dear Palestrina wasproduced by BBC NI in 1980 and he is a regular broadcaster with BBC Radio 3 and BBC Scotland.

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© Jude MacLaverty

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In the wee back room of our house in Lisburn,beneath the five delft ducks flying up the wall,

half asleep in front of the coal fire while her shins melt in the heat.

there sits my mother,

We didn’t have a television in our house until the latefifties, so my early memories of the BBC are of listeningto the wireless.

Listening to the wireless introduced me to many things,including science fiction. In the wee back room of ourhouse in Lisburn, beneath the five delft ducks flying upthe wall, there sits my mother, half asleep in front of thecoal fire while her shins melt in the heat. Behind us,from a corner of the room, a dramatic voice announcesthe next episode of Journey Into Space. Mars, I think it was. A character called . . . was it Whittaker? . . . gotinto a spot of bother with the local aliens. What a boostit was for the imagination – what a step up from theBeano, the Eagle and the Topper. I’ve enjoyed spacestories ever since, and had a go at the genre when I developed the ambition to write myself.

And now, looking back over forty years of having a go at writing myself, I see how much

I value the BBC as a writer as well as a listener and viewer.

You see, being a writer is one tough business. There reallyis not much money in it unless you get lucky. If I'mtruthful, the definition of writer that has guided methrough the years is crude and simple: if you can’tsupport your family through what you write and sell,you’re someone with a day-job, by no means yet a writer.

And for me, the long haul to being a professional writerbegan about 1967, when I was in my twenties. A mancalled John Boyd at the BBC accepted a script called TheTenant Shall Not . . . It was a fifteen-minute talk aboutmoving in to 43 Maralin Avenue – a house on the newestate being built at Knockmore, Lisburn. No words ofmine had 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, but theapprentice years had begun. In the three decades to comethere would follow contributions to Morning Story,network radio plays, scripts for Schools TV and radio,and special commissions.

No doubt about it, the British Broadcasting Corporationquickened the hope that I might be a writer some day,and has been an open market for creative thinking andwriting for as long as I can remember; may it remain so.

Sam McBratney

Sam McBratney – Children’s Writer: Born in Belfast in 1943 and educated at TCD, he had enjoyed relative success as a children’s writer for some twenty years when the publication of his picture-book Guess How Much I Love You? in 1994 broughtmassive sales and international recognition. His first novel, Mark Time, was written in the late 1960s, but not published until 1976.Awards include the Silvereen Griffel (1995) and American Bookseller Book of the Year (1996).

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© Walker Books

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Ours was the first television set in the neighbourhood and our house became a mini-cinema for childhood friends

during school holidays.

Marianne Elliott – Historian: From Belfast and educated at QUB, she is currently Director of the Institute of Irish Studies and Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool. A member of the Opsahl Commission on Northern Ireland (1993)and co-author of its report A Citizens’ Inquiry, she was awarded an OBE in 2000 and elected to the Fellowship of the BritishAcademy in 2001. Her books include Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence and The Catholics of Ulster.

We acquired our first television set in 1956 to watch the wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly. But the first broadcast to make a huge negative impact was the funeral of Pope Pius XII in 1958. In contrast, I over-indulged in television’s sheer escapism: endlessAmerican imports – Sergeant Bilko, The Lone Ranger, I Love Lucy, Rawhide, Maverick . . . I associate televisionin the late 1950s and early 60s with children andlaughter. Ours was the first television set in theneighbourhood and our house became a mini-cinemafor childhood friends during school holidays.

It all seems very idyllic now. If there were nasty things happening in the world, I was blissfully

unaware of them. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 which I recall as

ending all this, the horror magnified bythe still relatively novel colour

transmission. I was too young toexperience the best of the 1960s, butjust old enough to realise thatthings were beginning to go wrongin Northern Ireland. TerenceO’Neill seemed the great white

hope against the gathering forces of evil. My family

gathered around the

television to watch him deliver his ‘Ulster at the cross-roads’ speech in December 1968, and, moresombrely, the first broadcast of James Chichester-Clarkafter O’Neill’s resignation.

I was working as a student in the United States when theprovince erupted in August 1969. It was the beginning ofmy recognition that from now on only negative things about Northern Ireland would be reportedinternationally and the first of many occasions when I tried to explain to outsiders that we in Northern Irelandwere not all the violent monsters depicted on theirtelevision screens.

How far all this had an impact on my future writing ishard to say. I am unsure where my passion for Francecame from. Perhaps the allure of those sleek blackCitroëns and the femme-fatale chic of the Maigretdetective series sowed the seeds. The passion for Irishhistory was bred at home. But it also had something todo with the memory of how things had been in a mixedNorth Belfast community (and all those unthreateningtelevision programmes noted earlier), when contrastedwith the bleaker memories from the increasinglysophisticated current-affairs programmes of the 1960sand 1970s. I suppose I have been on a mission ever sinceto explain how history does not work in the black-and-white polarities which produced the Troubles.

Marianne Elliott

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Image courtesy of Marianne Elliott

24 25 26


Even when it is not in use,

it has an aura of mystery and promise,as though the push of a finger, the turn of a dial m

ight give us access to anywhere

.

Frank Ormsby – Poet and Editor: Born in Enniskillen in 1947 and educated at QUB, he has taught at the Royal BelfastAcademical Institution since 1971. His poetry collections include A Store of Candles (1977) and The Ghost Train (1995) and he has edited a number of anthologies including Poets from the North of Ireland (1979) and Northern Windows (1987). Winner of the Eric Gregory Award in 1974, he edited the Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989. He has been a frequent contributor to BBC NI radio in programmes such as Causeway (1972/3), Poetry Now (1978) and Passing the Time (1990).

2726

We might not have a radio at all, were it not for myfather’s illness. In the late 1950s he suffers a series ofstrokes and as a result we become eligible for a ‘welfarewireless’. It is an imposing piece of furniture – a woodenbox with substantial knobs and a curved finish. Even when it is not in use, it has an aura of mystery andpromise, as though the push of a finger, the turn of a dialmight give us access to anywhere.

But it is my father’s wireless, so in practice ‘anywhere’means Athlone and so Radio Eireann rather than theBBC becomes our main source of news, weather, music,religion and sport.

My father’s sporting interests are not confined to Gaelicfootball and hurling, however. He is also a devotee ofhorse racing, so that my earliest memories of listening tothe BBC are tied in with the geography of race-courseEngland. On a Saturday afternoon we are linked,through the racing results, to Catterick and Hurst Park,Redcar and Wincanton, Newmarket and Uttoxeter. If one of the English classics is on, our heads lean evercloser to the box on the sideboard, the commentator’svoice gathers volume all through the final furlong, we are wired to the syllables of the chosen horse’s name.

One other memory persists from that period. We aresettling down in the calm of a Saturday evening to ourweekly dose of Jack Loudan’s serial, Mrs Lally’s Lodgers,on the Northern Ireland Home Service. For me theprogramme is a twenty-minute ordeal, a peculiarcompound of anticipation and pubertal dread. The focusof all this is a character named Lancelot Magowan. It isappallingly clear that Lancelot has the hots for Mrs Lallyand the unspeakable minutes arrive when he must utterhis feelings. He does so in a voice that can only bedescribed as throbbing and Mrs L, though decorouslycontrolling his advances, is not unreceptive. The wirelessexudes ragged breathing, strangled passion and the oddshameful silence and I stare tensely at the floor. What a relief when it is time for the Deep River Boys togive us some Negro spirituals. At this point, my motherusually turns the wireless off, to ‘save the battery’,presumably for Lancelot’s next hormonal gallop.

Never to be forgotten, this first precious access to theairwaves, this total immersion, so natural andcomprehensive that it is as if theradio itself has disappeared.

Frank Ormsby© Leon McAuley & the Gallery Press

27 28


There they all were, paralysed, maimed, people I’d heard about on the radio and television.Their lives and the lives of their loved ones ruined, changed forever.

Graham Reid – Playwright: Born in Belfast in 1945. Graduated from QUB in 1976 and after university spent a number of years as a history teacher. After coming to prominence with his first play The Death of Humpty Dumpty (1979), Reid left teaching toconcentrate on writing full time. Subsequent plays such as The Closed Door (1980) and The Hidden Curriculum (1982) cemented his reputation as a ‘Troubles’ playwright. Between 1982 and 1984 Reid wrote the acclaimed trilogy of Billy plays for BBC NI.Other BBC television work included the series Ties of Blood (1985) and one-off drama The Precious Blood (1996).

It was there, it just wasn’t in our house. Ours was thesecond-last house in the street to get electricity, so radioand television were not a part of my growing-up. My grandparents lived on the Ballygomartin Road andthey did have a radio. When we stayed with them myyounger brother and I would dance around the room in our long nightgowns, to the signature music of The McCooeys. 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, in thearmy, after lights out we would stick a wire coathangerin the radio as an aerial, and listen to Radio Luxemburg.It really was a matter of ‘air waves’, as the sound roseand fell, but it was my introduction to Jim Reeves andRoy Orbison!

There are memories of television dramas, written by oneof our schoolteachers, Stewart Love: The Big Donkey;The Randy Dandy; A Headful of Crocodiles, thoughmaybe not in that order. One line sticks in my mind, I don’t know from which play. During a family row a sonturns angrily to his father and says: ‘Why don’t you goto Windsor Park and lose yourself in the crowd’.

A crushing, hurtful put-down.

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

Indirectly it was the news reports on radio and televisionthat started me writing. When a report came in ofsomeone having been shot or caught up in an explosion,two questions formed in my mind: was it someone I knew? Did they live? If the answer to the first was ‘no’,and the answer to the second was ‘yes’, then I assumedeverything was all right. It wasn’t until I went to work inMusgrave Park Hospital as a ward orderly that I realisedeverything wasn’t all right. When I first walked into theward the great majority of the patients were victims of‘the Troubles’. There they all were, paralysed, maimed,people I’d heard about on the radio and television. Their lives and the lives of their loved ones ruined,changed forever. The experience hurt me a great deal. I in turn wanted to hurt others, to shatter any easyassumptions that to ‘live’ was all that mattered.

At the time I wasn’t a writer, but I knew that I had towrite about this experience. A play? A poem? A novel? I didn’t know what. Three years after that scarringexperience I wrote The Death of Humpty Dumpty. It wasaccepted by the Abbey Theatre.

Graham Reid

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© Wilfred Green

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There was a whole world out there.

There was a whole world in there.

When my father took the back of the radio off to see what was happening it looked like an alien temple.

Most homes had a wireless then. Ours was a big squarebox in the fireplace alcove, where it sat on a lace-trimmed tablecloth on a console table. It hummed whenyou turned the milled half-crown of the knob till itclicked. It needed time to warm up. You could tell by theglow and the noise that would dawn from the sunburstfascia. It gave out the Weather.

Sometimes it would drizzle, or the News would be sweptaside by the weather. I’d spin the big milled knob pastthe lit blips of the stations, London, Hilversum,Athlone, Helsinki, Moscow, through beeping Morse andthe wind in the chimney and waves of static, orchestrasthat played in dim-lit rooms behind competing urgentvoices, overlapping languages that rose and fell likemusic, 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 the back

of the radio off to see what was happening it lookedlike an alien temple. For days I wandered in thelabyrinth of colour-coded wires between the tall

forbidding bulbs of the valves. Years went by.

I’d flip the switch to short-wave radio, and slip the needlein between the stations for the crackling of an intercom,army and police jeeps calling to each other in the dark,the streets awash with static, swash of window-wipersand a broken fizz of neon letters, the city demarcated bya coded alphabet. Bombs went off, reverberating throughthe console as the news became the News, and three orfour alarms rang out in different keys like faulty echoesof each other, making ghostly enclaves of acoustic space.I’d switch it off and go to bed at dawn.

And years went by. I’m listening to Talkback right now,and there’s talk of talks, and some are pro and some are con, and some remain tight-lipped, and some 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-hop yack,and fading punk, and broken soul, to reach the fundamental buzz that comes fromeverywhere, from nowhere.

Ciaran Carson

Ciaran Carson – Poet: Born in Belfast in 1948 and educated at QUB, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until1988 and is currently Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre and Professor of Poetry at QUB. Award-winning collections of poetryinclude The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1990), First Language (1993) and Breaking News (2003) and prose works includeThe Star Factory (1997) and the novel Shamrock Tree (2001). He also contributed to BBC NI programmes Poets from the North of Ireland (1991) and Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland (1984).

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© Granta Books

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Everyone on it sounded posh and spoke properly

as if they had been to hundreds of elocution lessons

– all except The McCooeys who were common.

Earliest memories of radio: the soothing sounds of theThird Programme floating through the house, and therush of happiness from seeing my mother in a giddymood once waltzing the baby to ‘The Blue Danube’.Then in first class, singing along with the school radio,a Bush, which was plonked on the window ledge in eachclassroom. Glad for a break from sums, we marchedaround the room to stirring songs like Prokofiev’sLieutenant Kije: ‘Oh Kije was a hussar bold, /A hussarbold was he . . .’

My Nanny Simpson’s radio had to be warmed up. It wasa big imposing radiogram and the most important piece of furniture in the parlour. Everyone on it soundedposh and spoke properly as if they had been to hundreds of elocution lessons – all except The McCooeys who were common.

At home on our less impressive set, we listened to UncleMac’s Children’s Favourites, and never tired of songs like ‘Inchworm’, ‘Sparky and the lost chord’ and

‘The little engine who could’.

Later on in school, I came to love theplays from Today and Yesterday in

Northern Ireland featuringViking invasions, sad tales

of the Potato Famine andswashbuckling stories

about wrecked Armadas. We would sit enthralled, heartsin mouths, as the actors drowned convincingly in theroaring waters of the Atlantic. Perhaps then the notionthat radio has the best pictures was sown.

We were slow to get a television; and at first we were justallowed to watch children’s TV. An avid reader, I revelledin dramatisations of my favourite books – The SilverSword, The Railway Children, Treasure Island.

Then there was the forbidden delight of RadioLuxembourg. On Sunday nights, we sat on the stairslistening 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 of thePops 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, politicaldiscussions. I listen all day to Radios 3 and 4 and duringthe night when I can’t sleep, I listen on an earphone toRadio 5. It influences my writing in the sense thatit keeps my imagination fired.

Annie McCartney

Annie McCartney – Novelist and Broadcaster: Born in Belfast in 1948 and educated at QUB, she has worked as an actor in the theatre and on radio. She began her writing career in 1994, winning the RTE P.J. O’Connor Award for her first play. Her debut novel Desire Lines (2001) was a BBC Radio 4 World Book Day winner in 2003 and her second novel Your Cheatin’ Heartwas published in 2005. She has had several plays and a comedy series, Two Doors Down, broadcast by BBC Radio 4.

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© Darragh Casey

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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.

My earliest memory of drama on TV was watching a play w

as he commented out loud, occa

and generally app

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 St Patrick’s,Donegall Street, my father would be listening to FamilyFavourites followed by The Billy Cotton Band Show. The rest of the week we listened to what he andeverybody else then called Radio Athlone. I have no ideawhen it happened but sometime in the 1960s RadioAthlone bit the dust and was heard of no more. Since The Billy Cotton Band Show also disappeared, I suspect it was more to do with the increasingdomination of television than with any politicalviewpoint 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 been thataware of Northern Ireland politics at the time but I could make out that it was about the Belfast shipyardsand my father was going on about the Orange Orderand Protestant bigotry. I also remember the face of a frightened Catholic worker – in fact I never forgot it.

Later I learnt it was that of Donal Donnelly. That play, its Belfast accents and its explosive

atmosphere stuck with me for years.

You have to fast-forward a number of years for my nextexperience of what we now call Radio Ulster. In the late1970s I started writing plays for the Turf LodgeFellowship Community Theatre. Along with a castmember we were invited onto the Walter Loveprogramme to talk about our latest play. So early oneTuesday morning we found ourselves sitting in a blacktaxi at the top of the Whiterock Road waiting on it to fillup with passengers to start our journey to the BBC.Suddenly, we were witness to a frightening gun attack inthe butcher’s shop ten yards away. An assistant in theshop was shot four times in the chest. The gunmanstrolled right past us on his way to a waiting car. When breathlessly relating this story to Walter Lovebefore going on air, we were overheard by newshoundNorman Stockton. Quick as a flash, the enterprisingNorman arranged to interview us for the next RadioUlster news bulletin the minute we were finished with Walter.

I’ve since been a regular guest on various BBC RadioUlster programmes over the years but I doubt if I haveever contributed with the urgency of that first Norman Stockton news bulletin.

Martin Lynch

Martin Lynch – Playwright: Born 1950 in Belfast and resident writer at the Lyric Theatre and at the University of Ulster during the 1980s. One of the foremost advocates for community arts, many of his plays were first written for community drama groups.His best known work includes Dockers and The History of the Troubles Accordin’ to my Da. BBC Radio Ulster has broadcast his featureson the Sailortown area of Belfast. BBC Radio plays include Needles and Pins and Pictures of Tomorrow.

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© Pacemaker

36 37 38


Words, names, people’s voices – sounds, magically transmittedthrough the air and walls. Into heads.

Words, names, people’s voices – sounds, magically transmittedthrough the air and walls. Into heads.

Medbh McGuckian – Poet: Born Belfast 1950 and educated at QUB, she has held the posts of writer-in-residence at QUB and TCD and was visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her award-winning poetry includes the collections The Flower Master (1982), On Ballycastle Beach (1988) and The Book of the Angel (2004). BBC Radio Ulster broadcasts includePoetry Now (1980), New Poems from Ulster (1983), Medbh McGuckian (1984), a programme exploring her life and work, and The Wreck of the Hesperus (1986), an autobiographical exploration of Belfast.

Irene. The girl next door, Irene, playing ‘IreneGoodnight’ on her radio. Words, names, people’s voices– sounds, magically transmitted through the air andwalls. Into heads.

Chimes of Big Ben at nine, the solemn disapprovingnews. Did my mother send me to elocution to learn howto say such sad things? Twenty Questions, Friday Night isMusic Night, Music While You Work in her morningscullery. The tune made her smile and she warmed. Butnot to the up and down of the Saturday afternoonfootball results. The assonance and alliteration ofWolverhampton Wanderers – nil, Sheffield Wednesday– late kick-off. The strange mounting excitement of horse racing and boxing, the graceful cricket. Stories where people spoke intimately.

The chubby walnut-effect Bush arrived after my 11-plus.Our hunger at the wavy wobbly lines. The despair ofvalves’ frequent explosions, the bottomless tube that leftfor weeks. My granny doing her bun and best slippers

for Richard Baker who, she fully credited,could, like God, see her back.

We were only allowed to watch children’s television

but on Sundays

while she dozed we swallowed matinées and Brains Trusts. I learned a lot of words from these. How beautiful people could be. The Railway Children,Little Women. Their opening music haunted, but was nomatch for the astounding and rousing chords of Dr Who,always on at confession time. Why were The WednesdayPlay and That Was The Week always snapped off at theseemingly most interesting moment?

The animals and close-ups and underwater frolics ofDavid Attenborough and Hans and Lotte. The wild depth of their narrations. Westerns like Wells Fargo,Laramie, Cheyenne, The Lone Ranger prepared us forviolence to come. The Sky at Night for the moonlandings, Crackerjack.

Christmas revolved around the pantomime or circus theyshowed. Because my mother liked Billy Cotton and theBlack and White Minstrels and Russ Conway and ValDoonican and Vera Lynn but not the Miss World we sawa lot of them. I have a friend now in a Pilates class whoused to be a Television Topper. I said to my husband theother day, you are getting more and more like that manFyfe Robertson, out of Tonight. Tales of the Riverbank, the mellifluous seduction of Johnny Morris, a river in itself and as near to a caress as one experienced, in those days. For which, all of it, though my childrenwould not agree, I am inexpressibly grateful.

Medbh McGuckian

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© Paul Sherwood & the Gallery Press

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Even if we didn’t understand politics and international affairs,

we went to bed with a sense that everything was

under control, Richard Baker’s control.

The BBC represents a balance of authority and humourthat has intrigued me since the television first came intoour home in about 1961. Indeed, it was on the wirelessbefore that. My earliest memories of radio include Mrs Dale’s Diary and the broadcasts from Hungaryduring the Russian invasion. The BBC mediated a hugeand complex world but opened that window also ondomestic drama in which problems were alwaysresolved. The Russians might not get out of Hungarybut Mrs Dale would make a good flan.

Ours was a big argumentative family that was calmed bythe mystery of Richard Baker’s poise. He spoke to us ineven tones that we heard from no adult in the real world– parents and teachers were as moody as the children;they were the ones we got it from. Baker – or Robert

Dougal – could tell you solemnly that the Americanswere taking losses at Tet, that a tiger cub had

been born at Whipsnade – wherever thatwas – and that the wind was coming

from the west. He seemed tosuggest that this was all

we needed to know

and his limited emotional range, from a tight frown to a soft chuckle, seemed sufficient to encompass the whole world.

Even if we didn’t understand politics and internationalaffairs, we went to bed with a sense that everything wasunder control, Richard Baker’s control. News, he seemedto say, was the opposite of drama. Drama serial episodesalways ended on the brink of crisis. Sergeant Doubleday,in the cinema serial, always died at the end and wasrevealed the following week to have escaped after all.Richard Baker didn’t keep you waiting in suspense likethat. His little smile and goodnight told you that famineand war were transitory things while good sense andmaturity endured.

Ever since, this poise has been a challenge to me. I rebelat times and launch challenges against the patricianreassurance of balance and try to import anger, cynicismand contempt into broadcasts including paper reviews –the closest I ever come to being a newsreader.

But I am challenged to find my inner Richard Baker too.

Authoritative poise and anarchic emotion are the poles I move between and the BBC has

become like a wise parent I am devoted to but whose shins sometimes need

a good kicking.

Malachi O’Doherty

Malachi O’Doherty – Writer and Broadcaster: Born in Muff, County Donegal, in 1951, he grew up in Belfast and was educated inthe city’s Glen Road CBS and later lived abroad for spells. The author of The Trouble With Guns (1998) and I Was A Teenage Catholic(2003), he is a regular commentator on political and cultural affairs on BBC NI’s Talkback and Hearts and Minds. He has frontedseveral documentaries for the BBC and has written on Irish affairs for, amongst others, the New Statesman, the Belfast Telegraphand Fortnight, which he edited for a number of years.

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Image courtesy of Malachi O’Doherty

42 43


There was always that other song and dance of the political to

ings and fro

ings,

of course, and that influenced our listening in predictable ways.

Paul Muldoon – Poet and Broadcaster: Born in Portadown in 1951, he grew up near the Moy and was educated at QUB. As a producer for BBC Radio Ulster from 1973 to 1985, he was responsible for landmark arts broadcasts including Irish Poetryand Bazaar. He moved to the USA in the 1980s, and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton. His nine collections of poetry from New Weather (1973) to Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) have earned him numerous awards, including the T.S. Eliot Award in1994 and a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

The radio was in a cupboard to the right of themantelpiece, just where the saltbox might have hung inthe mud-walled cottage my mother had been broughtup in, and it was with something of the same ceremonythat the door of the cupboard was opened and the radioturned on. My mother was a schoolteacher and used theradio in the classroom, so it was quite natural for her toseason the meat and potatoes of our everyday existencewith Schools and Children’s Programmes from the BBC.Our favourites were Children’s Hour with CicelyMathews and John D. Stewart and Graeme Roberts, andsome version of Music and Movement, a programme thatencouraged a connection between song and dance,reading and writhing, that we’ve rather lost sight of, evenin 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. For betteror worse, there was a greater likelihood of our tuning infor news, and more, to Radio Eireann than the faintlyGlengall-Street-tinted BBC, preferring an Angelus-tainted herald to Duncan Hearle. The BBC broadcastswe listened to tended to come from the UK, a particularfavourite being Beyond Our Ken, with that looney ofloonies, Kenneth Horne, whose way with puns anddouble-entendres had as much influence on me as Joyce,I’m certain.

This changed when I began to make more connectionswith voices on BBC Northern Ireland, particularly thevoices of Sean O’Baoill and Jerry Hicks, two singers andfolklorists who also happened to be my teachers in St. Patrick’s College, Armagh. In the classroom, I vividlyremember Sean O’Baoill explaining the phenomenon of‘potatoes and point’, whereby a poor peasant wouldpoint his or her meagre spud at a herring or a bit ofbacon hanging up to the right of the fire – not too farfrom the saltbox, probably – and simply point the potatoat the herring or bit of bacon and imagine the taste.

It’s an image that often came back to me when, ten yearslater, I went to work for BBC Northern Ireland and hadbarely been issued with my stopwatch when I fell inhappily with the great mantra on the difference betweenradio and television, i.e. on radio, the pictures are better.The power of the imagination to summon the smell ofthe sea, the sound of a thousand horsemen coming overa hill, the taste of herring from a few evocative words,was one on which I would base the next thirteen years ofmy life, not only as a radio producer but as a poet. It wasall part of the same line that ran back all the way throughto the cupboard door closing until the next time.

Paul Muldoon

40 41

© Wilfred Green

44 45


of history and the unseen face of the world we lived in.

Television entertained and educated; it showed us the march

Every Saturday morning, when I was a child, a womancame to my house and swallowed a fly and because thisfly wriggled and tickled inside her, the unfortunateswallowed a series of increasingly large creatures in anattempt to catch this irritating insect. The eagerlyanticipated ending which culminated in swallowing a horse was concise tragic comedy – ‘she’s dead of course’.This was the radio world of Saturday morning Children’sFavourites, a world soon to be swept away by the poprevolution where beat and rhythm replaced narrative.

In this Big Rock Candy Mountain realm of theimagination a boy called Sparky searched for his missingvoice and a bad’un called Big John redeemed a worthless life through self-sacrifice in a mining disaster. And in the midst of these little snow-globes of sentimentalityand melodrama – the perfect catalysts of the child’s

imagination – there was, too, the swirl of humour. How that laughing

policeman laughed!

The songs flew out of the Bush radio with its red-faceddial – the model now sold as a piece of nostalgic retro chic – and so many memories of growing up andfamily are intimately related to both television and radio.Television entertained and educated; it showed us themarch of history and the unseen face of the world welived in. Sometimes it showed us ourselves.

Although a writer of prose, I found stimulus in the BBC’stradition of radical drama such as the series Play ForToday. Here was the provocative challenge of ideas, of honest criticism of our society and a faithfulness to realities however painful. BBC Northern Ireland keptthis torch lit even in those dark years when we faced a fragmenting society. As a teacher, as well as a writer, I have also been impressed by the quality of schools’broadcasting where the strengths of our own culture havebeen celebrated and explored in creative ways.

Now, however, I am no longer a child waiting for thevisit of that afflicted woman but just for a moment I seeagain the red face of that dial and part of me strains tohear its voice journeying through the dark tide of theether. Perhaps if I listen hard enough it will teach me howto redeem my life, where to look to find my voice.

Perhaps it will show me how to laugh. How to really, really laugh.

David Park

David Park – Novelist: Born in Belfast in 1953, he has written a number of critically acclaimed novels including Stone Kingdoms (1996) and The Big Snow (2002), with his most recent novel Swallowing the Sun (2004) being short-listed for the Hughes & Hughes/Sunday Independent Novel of the Year Award. He has also published a collection of short stories, Oranges from Spain (1990) and now lives in County Down where he works as a schoolteacher.

4342

© Bloomsbury

46 47


We are the las

t in our n

eighb

ourh

ood

to g

et T

V.

I will

go an

ywhe

re to

see

it.

Anne Devlin – Playwright and Short-story Writer: Born in Belfast in 1953, she was winner of the 1982 Hennessy Award for hershort story Passages (adapted for television as A Woman Calling) and recipient of other awards including the Beckett Award (1984)and Blackburn Prize (1986). She wrote the screenplays for Titanic Town and Wuthering Heights and her short fiction was collected asThe Way-Paver (1986). Visiting lecturer in playwriting at the University of Birmingham in 1987, and writer-in-residence at theUniversity of Lund, Sweden, in 1990.

Via . . . Who is speaking when I speak? 1953. I am born.First memories? A cream silk tapestry curtain close up turns out to be: the woven screen on the radio. And pips. Pip. Pip. Pip. Behind the silk screen tapestry curtain is the world and a man’s voice fromLondon: here is the news at nine o’clock. Hungary . . .China . . . Mau Mau . . .

Maimi, my grandmother, leans over her crackling paperto steady the wavering signal; she is searching forsomething . . . I am looking through the steaming foldsof clotheshorse washing from my sick bed on the sofa. I have cotton in my ears and my head is boiling . . . Aburst of music from a place called Luxembourg: ‘WhenI was just a little girl I asked my mother what will I be?’.

We are the last in our neighbourhood to get TV. I willgo anywhere to see it. I crash into Auntie Peggy’s Sundayafternoons in Lady Street; they are so fed up with methey all go out. I take to visiting my other granny, Anna,even though there’s clearly a feud between my father andhis mother. I learn very early on to distinguish betweenhis feuds and my own – my granny has TV.

With her I discover the Sunday serial. Dickens, Dumas –the BBC must have been working through theadaptations alphabetically. The Count of Monte Cristo hadthirteen episodes and I missed the last one! This still feelslike deprivation . . .

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

Granny Anna is sitting bolt upright on her bedsetteewhen I catch my first sight of Miss Havisham, whose icywhite locks seem to gather in that nesting wedding cakeand wrap themselves around the very legs of the table. So I go up close and push myself through the glass wallof the TV. It seems to me that in my efforts to movethrough the glassy screen that separates the world of mytwo grannies 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 Nicole across the park and down the Falls to Anna Livia for a word.

Your lipstick’s a rotten colour.

I know. But I like it.

Anne Devlin

44 45

© Faber

48 49


Scene Around Six came along, though I’m told they were much briefer.

I don’t remember news programmes before

If I had a great big medal I’d pin it on the person whodreamt up Scene Around Six. I’m sure the play on ‘seen’was intentional. From that first syllable – sibilant – itwas unmistakably of this place, where most of us areonly ever an excited slip of the tongue away from thewrong end of the seen-saw. (And though Seen AroundSix was grammatically correct, I half expected Londonto give us a collective slap: ‘You saw it around six.’)

I don’t remember news programmes before SAS camealong, though I’m told they were much briefer. It musthave seemed a gamble in 1968 to give Northern Irelandtwenty minutes of nightly news to fill, but, credit wherecredit’s due, Northern Ireland rose to the challenge,serving up, in Scene around Six’s sixteen years, a constantdiet of murder and mayhem for its cameras to feed off;feed us on.

It was on Scene Around Six I saw the car bomb explode.Maybe you saw it yourself. Yes, that one: a soldier in theforeground ducks just before the vehicle becomes lessand more than the sum of its suddenly lethal parts. I sawworse things back then, on screen and off, but that seemed to me the perfect symbol of a society whereeveryday objects, and the lives they furnished, were no longer reliable.

It’s probably too simplistic to say (but I’m a novelist, itwon’t stop me) all this fuelled my childhood desire forescapism: the Saturday Morning Club at the Majestic,the James Cagney Season on the BBC. I loved Cagneythe tough guy, of course, but I loved him too in YankeeDoodle Dandy, the bio-pic of George M. Cohan. I imagined myself the ‘old timer’ not recognised on thestreet as he left the White House with a medal for the song all the Doughboys were singing, ‘Over There’.

Aged about seven, I tried writing my own song. I triedwriting a lot of other things over the next twenty yearsbefore I tried a novel and, when that finally worked, tried another.

I was writing my third – was on the bus home from the pictures (Lulu, with Louise Brooks) – when I remembered the car bomb clip. I ran into the house andtyped a passage. From then until the book was published,I didn’t change a word, which is rare for me. As rare asdeconstructing cars are these days, thank God; as rare as Sean Rafferty on our televisions, more’s the pity.

Glenn Patterson

Glenn Patterson – Novelist: Born in Belfast in 1961, he studied at the University of East Anglia, taking a Creative Writing MAunder the tutelage of Malcolm Bradbury. Returning to Northern Ireland in 1988, he took the post of writer-in-the-community for Lisburn/Craigavon and has since been writer-in-residence at the universities of Cork and East Anglia and at QUB. His first novel Burning Your Own (1988) won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize; subsequent novels include Fat Lad(1992), The International (1999) and the recent That Which Was (2004).

4746

© Michael Donald

50 51 52


I had no idea that tens of thousands followed Gaelic football,

or that it even existed. I thought camogie was something you

ordered in an Italian restaurant.

Colin Bateman – Novelist: Born 1962 in Bangor and educated at Bangor Grammar School, he worked as a journalist and deputy editor for the County Down Spectator from 1979 to 1995, receiving a Journalist’s Fellowship to Oxford University in 1990. His many satirical crime novels include Cycle of Violence (1995) and Divorcing Jack (published in 1995 and screened by the BBC in 2000). A further BBC feature film Wild About Harry also premiered in 2000. More recently he was the creator of the BBC Network Television series Murphy’s Law.

I think many of us regard ourselves as ‘British’ ratherthan ‘Irish’ because of the BBC – it’s not about politicsor religion or geography, it’s because we grew upwatching Blue Peter and Jackanory and Dr Who andMatch of the Day and there was absolutely no room at allfor anything that might be considered Irish. There wasno locally-produced TV drama, and the closest we hadto a local superstar was comedian James Young on aSaturday night after the football and James Ellis’s Belfastaccent on Z Cars. Irish League soccer highlights showedhow woefully inadequate the local game was, with a fewhundred hardy souls attending the matches. I had noidea that tens of thousands followed Gaelic football, or that it even existed. I thought camogie was somethingyou 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 by twosequels, exploded onto our screens, that I even becameaware of local drama. Coming from a non-theatrebackground, it was the first time I’d seen my owncountry properly portrayed on screen – the sense ofhumour, the sarcasm, the bigotry, the sheer bloodymadness of it all and it had such a galvanizing effect onme, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired dozens ofaspiring writers. It was real ‘water cooler’ television. I just thought it was fantastic, and for months after it I was quoting lines (although interestingly, the critic in

me was already playing that game we have all grown tolove – 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 of his on-screen family).

BBC Northern Ireland has always made fantastic drama,but the problem remains that it’s too expensive just tomake for local consumption, and there’s not enoughinterest in it on the mainland to make it anything otherthan a rare event. It’s a huge pity, because there arethousands of stories to be told here, and in some waysthere are even more now that we’ve begun to throw offthe shackles of ‘The Troubles’. What’s more we’re theonly BBC region without our own soap opera – nowimagine that! The Scots have it, the Welsh, the English,obviously. I grew up hearing old folks talking wistfullyabout a radio soap called The McCooeys – which ran forseven years in the 1950s. Seven years! Come on BBC Northern Ireland, I’m ready and I’m willing.

Colin Bateman

48 49

© Mark Dale

53 54 55


And local programmes o

n Irish write

rs opened m

y con

sciou

sn

ess

to writing in th

is tim

e, from th

is pla

ce.

Anything to do with poets or poetry on the BBC was a huge event in my early life. A dramatisation of theletters of Sylvia Plath that my mother had switched onby accident when I was thirteen had me transfixed (likeJo March upon her threshold). I hadn’t heard of SylviaPlath, though I’d heard of her husband, and even readone or two of his poems in the Touchstones anthology inschool. A woman spoke directly into the camera aboutgetting up at six every morning, when the sleepingtablets are beginning to wear off, and writing thegreatest poems of her life. I was rapt, already deeplyhappy for her, as though it was clear to me what thatcould mean. I made a trip to Greene’s bookshop andfound a copy of her selected poems, and from then untilI was eighteen, fell headlong into a Plath obsession,which, for all its decidedly mixed influence on my ownearly poetry, nevertheless clarified one essential thing in

my mind: I wanted to write. Writing was what I wanted to do with my life.

Snippets of other poetryprogrammes throughout

my teens. One EasterSunday, a camera

exploring the wooden face of a crucified Christ, while allof George Herbert’s heart-rending study of the Passionwas read aloud in a low, sonorous voice. Whatever grieflike mine. And then came Alan Bennett’s marvellousseries on modern poetry when I was in sixth form. He perched on a stool and gave a lecture each onHousman, Auden, MacNeice, Larkin, interspersing hisown text with poems, quietly but powerfully delivered,with that understated, omnipresent melancholy Bennettdoes so well.

And local programmes on Irish writers that opened myconsciousness to writing in this time, from this place.Glenn Patterson, writer-in-residence at Queen’s (was there such a thing?), talking about the perceivedculture vacuum in the Protestant community, and howunfair this perception was. I thought he looked so youngto be so eloquent and on television. I was impressed. And finally, a loving documentary of John McGahernthat was to mean so much more when I met him at theKavanagh weekend in Iniskeen in 1990, where I’d goneto collect my prize. He wrote only in the mornings, he said. You can’t maintain the kind of concentration youneed to write properly for more than a few hours. And then he took us outside and showed us the land andthe two lakes (or was it three?) that bounded his world.

Sinead Morrissey

Sinead Morrissey – Poet: Born in Portadown in 1972 and spent her first six years there before moving to Belfast. She was educatedat TCD and her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award (1990) and the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award (2002); she was alsoshortlisted for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Award. Currently writer-in-residence at QUB, she has published three collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002) and The State of the Prisons (2005).

5150

© Conor Morrissey

56 57


All children have this facility for creative, imaginative play. Mostly it gets shed or withers away under the inevitable pressures of life.

There were four of us in my year at primary school.Helen, Neil, Marie and me. The school radio was keptin the staff-room, and was never moved, so we had totroop in there to listen to BBC School Radio broadcasts.This, in brief, is the plot of a programme we heard in thesummer term of 1984, our last year at primary school.

The Earth is so polluted that it’s no longer habitable: a vast spaceship has been built to take everyone toanother planet. Onboard are two classes of passenger:the wealthy, housed in luxury, and the overcrowdedpoor. A friendship blossoms between a wealthy girl anda boy from steerage.

Disease breaks out amongst the poor. Scientists developa vaccine, but they cannot make enough for everyone.The wealthy are vaccinated; the poor are left to die.

The boy falls ill. The girl, risking her own life, shares hermedicine with him. He recovers. But then the wealthypassengers begin to die. The scientists had miscalculatedthe dose. It was double the 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: they must make their lives there.

For the rest of term we immersed ourselves in the worldof that story. Me, Marie, Helen and Neil surviving onthe new planet. Out of bounds, in the fields, we collectedgrass seeds and hips and haws. We built ourselves a shelter, roofed with pilfered sack-race sacks. The narrative extended, evolved. We were so deep in it,we didn’t notice trailing shoelaces, bramble-scratches, theneed to pee.

And then it was the end of term, and the leaving service.In September we started at different secondary schools,where no-one played games like this and there were a hundred and thirty-two people in my year, not four.

For me, this story is as indelible as the barbed-wire scaron my left calf muscle that I got climbing through thefence. In part, this is because it was a beautifully-crafted,challenging, open-ended piece; but it also has to do withwho I am as a writer and the fact that this was the lastgreat epic narrative game I played as a child. All childrenhave this facility for creative, imaginative play. Mostly itgets shed or withers away under the inevitable pressures

of life. For writers (or at least for me) it remains,like a vestigial tail, evidence of an earlier stage of development. Now, when I write, howeverintellectual I’m trying to be, however adult the

material, it’s the little girl in the playground whotakes over. I get lost in whatever story she’s playing.

Jo Baker

Jo Baker – Novelist: Born 1973 in Lancashire and educated at Oxford and later at QUB, she published her first novel Offcomer in2001. She has written for BBC Radio 4 and her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies. Artistic Director of theBelfast Literary Festival from 2001–2003, she published a second novel, The Mermaid’s Child, in 2004.

52 53

© Jill Jennings

5958


That I ended up becoming a playwright and screenwriter

has everything to do with television.

As a writer, as a dramatist, I owe everything to television.Earlier generations grew up with radio, the familygathered round the wireless, tuning the dial into thescratchy sounds of the Home Service; or with movies,back when even as small a place as Armagh had three orfour cinemas.

But my generation was the television generation.

Even now there’s something faintly shameful aboutsaying that. As children we have the idea drilled into usthat watching TV is a waste of time and that real life isspent out of doors; and don’t get me wrong, much of mychildhood was spent scrambling around in the open air,getting bloody knees and noses, getting stung by nettles,and all that Seamus Heaney kind of stuff. But for allthat, my childhood is most vividly conjured back intolife – the real Proustian rush happens – when I hear, say,the theme tune to White Horses, a 1968 Czechoslovakianchildren’s programme dubbed into English and shown

on the BBC in the early 1970s.

I was born in 1969 and grew up in Armagh.By my time Armagh had only one

cinema left, the Ritz on MarketStreet, and even that didn’t last

long. And if access to thecinema was limited,

access to the theatre

was non-existent. That I ended up becoming a playwright and screenwriter, then, has everything to dowith television. And television was extraordinary then,children’s television especially, a strange culturalecosystem of its own, where White Horses could rubshoulders with an old Abbott and Costello movie, or a homegrown cartoon like Mr Benn could runalongside the French-dubbed-into-English swashbucklerThe Flashing Blade.

The heroes of my childhood included people who were,unknown to me, long dead. The BBC used to fill out theschedule with old Harold Lloyd or Buster Keatonmovies, or, our particular favourite, the obscure cross-eyed silent comedian Ben Turpin. For the BBC no doubtthese were just cheap fillers, but for me they weremagical. Then there were the adventure serials from the1930s, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Or a choice ofTarzans – Johnny Weismuller in black and white, RonEly in colour (though that may – God forbid – have been on ITV).

These were the stories that first fired my imagination.From before I could even read, these were the stories thatmade me fall in love with storytelling. They were storiesthat were carried from the living room to theplayground, and on from there, folded away and packedin the memory. It was because of these stories that I became a writer.

Daragh Carville

Daragh Carville – Playwright and Screenwriter: From Armagh, Daragh Carville was born in 1969 and educated at the Universityof Kent. Plays include Language Roulette (1996) and Observatory (1999). Radio work includes Regenerations (BBC Radio 3, 2001)and Dracula (BBC Radio 4, 2003). He has received numerous awards including the 1997 Stewart Parker Award and 1998 Meyer-Whitworth Prize. Writer-in-residence at QUB from 1999 to 2002, he was editor of the anthology New Soundings in 2003and has recently produced the screenplay for his first feature-film, Middletown.

5554

© Jill Jennings

60 61 62


Acknowledgements

Project Manager/Editor: Anne TannahillBiographical/Picture Research: Francis Jones

Producer: Mark AdairDesign: Genesis Advertising Ltd

BBC NI wishes to thank all those who have assisted in the production of this exhibition including: Stephen Beckett,Clifford Harkness, Keith Baker, James Hanna, Trish Hayes and staff at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Michael Donald,

Jude MacLaverty, Katie Bond, Ellie Clarke, Annalie Grainger, Wilfred Green, Pacemaker Press, The Gallery Press, ConorMorrissey, Caroline Kerr, Dorothy Lynch, Melanie Firman, Nicci Praca, David Knight, Matthew de Ville and friends and

colleagues at The Museum and Galleries of Northern Ireland.

Further information about other BBC NI exhibitions is available online at: bbc.co.uk/ni/bbcandyou or from the Accountability,Corporate and Public Affairs Department, BBC Broadcasting House, Ormeau Avenue, Belfast BT2 8HQ.

p 7 Sam McAughtry1. Sam Hanna Bell,BBC NI producer2. Gloria Hunniford,presenter

p 8 A.T.Q. Stewart3. Tommy Handleyin It’s That Man Again(ITMA), 19444. The German identity papers of William Joyce(‘Lord Haw-Haw’)5. Alvar Liddell, the BBC Home Service newsreader and announcer, 1956

p 11 John Morrow6. Frank O’Connor (right) with John Boyd, producer of The Arts In Ulster,19667. TThhee BBrraaiinnss TTrruusstt teamincluding, bottom left, C.E.M. Joad, 1943

p 12 Christina Reid8. Jimmy Clitheroe,‘The Clitheroe Kid’, 19609. Peter Brough and Archie Andrews, 195510. Joseph Tomelty,creator of The McCooeys

p 15 Michael Longley11. DDiicckk BBaarrttoonn,,SSppeecciiaall AAggeenntt,, 194912. TTooyyttoowwnn:: ‘Mr Growser Moves’, 195713. TThhee GGoooonnss:: Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, 1955

p 16 Jonathan Bardon14. David Hammond,BBCNI producer and presenter15. Douglas Carson, BBC NI Schools producer, with a young Rathlin islander16. James Hawthorne,producer, at Lowwood Primary School for Today and Yesterday, 1966

p 19 Seamus Heaney17. Trial television weatherchart, 193618. BBC Broadcasts to Schools, 1953

p 20 Bernard MacLaverty19. James Young (right), ‘Derek the window cleaner’in The McCooeys, with a real-life window cleaner20. RRaaddiioopphhoonniicc WWoorrkksshhoopp::programming a voltage- controlled Electronic Music Synthesiser, 197421. GGrraannddssttaanndd::a cameraman films the football results, 1981

p 23 Sam McBratney22. John Boyd, Senior Talks Producer NI, talks to St. John Ervine on his 80th birthday, 196323. A family of radio listeners in 1951

p 24 Marianne Elliott24. MMaaiiggrreett:: Rupert Daviesas Inspector Maigret, 196125.Tommy Trinder, host of Trinder Box, with guest Phil Silvers (Sergeant Bilko), 195926. Captain Terence O’Neill appearing on the BBC TV programme

Inquiry, 1968

p 27 Frank Ormsby27. Jack Loudan, author of Mrs Lally’s Lodgers28. Peter O’Sullevan, BBC horse-racing commentator and correspondent, 1956

p 28 Graham Reid29. AA MMaatttteerr ooff CChhooiiccee ffoorr BBiillllyy,, 1983 30. TThhee BBiigg DDoonnkkeeyy::a tense moment with principal actors Tom Bell and Joseph Tomelty, 1963

p 31 Ciaran Carson31.Tuning a wireless set,193432. George Cowling with television weather chart, 1954

p 32 Annie McCartney33.TThhee RRaaiillwwaayy CChhiillddrreenn::Jenny Agutter as Bobbie andFrederick Treves as Father, 196834. TThhee SSiillvveerr SSwwoorrdd,, 1970 35. FFlluuffff PPiicckkss OOnnee:: Alan ‘Fluff ’ Freeman in the recording studio, 1988

p 35 Martin Lynch36. Norman Stockton, news journalist and presenter37. TThhee BBiillllyy CCoottttoonn BBaanndd SShhooww:: from the Cotton’s Capers series, 196338. Walter Love, presenter

p 36 Medbh McGuckian39. TThhaatt WWaass tthhee WWeeeekk TThhaatt WWaass:: David Frost, 196340. Johnny Morris as ‘The Hot Chestnut Man’, 196241. DDrr WWhhoo::William Hartnell as the Doctor, 1963

p 39 Malachi O’Doherty42. MMrrss DDaallee’’ss DDiiaarryycast, 195543. Richard Baker reading the BBC TV News, 1954

p 40 Paul Muldoon44. Kenneth Horne and Betty Marsden, Beyond Our Ken, 196045. John D.Stewart,broadcaster

p 43 David Park46. PPllaayy FFoorr TTooddaayy::Bernard Hill and Alison Steadman in Our Flesh and Blood, 1977 47. PPllaayy ffoorr TTooddaayy::Helen Mirren in Blue Remembered Hills, 1978

p 44 Anne Devlin48. TThhee TThhrreeee MMuusskkeetteeeerrss::Brian Blessed as Porthos, 196649. GGrreeaatt EExxppeeccttaattiioonnss::Joan Hickson as Miss Havisham, 1981

p 47 Glenn Patterson50. SScceennee AArroouunndd SSiixx::presenter Barry Cowan51. BBC1 Ident Logo52. BBC Television Centreafter explosion of car bombby controlled detonation, 2001

p 48 Colin Bateman53. MMaattcchh ooff tthhee DDaayy::presenter Jimmy Hill, 197354. ZZ CCaarrss:: James Ellis, Frank Windsor andBrian Blessed, 197855. JJaacckkaannoorryy::‘The Dribblesome Teapots’, read by Kenneth Williams, 1978

p 51 Sinead Morrissey56. Alan Bennett, 196657. John McGahern,novelist

p 52 Jo Baker58. Broadcasts to schools: teachers’ booklets59. HHoorriizzoonn:: ‘Mars 1 – Life on Mars’, 2001

p 55 Daragh Carville60. Hollywood sign in the Hollywood Hills, 200261. Thorn 2000 colour television, 196862. A selection of remote controls, 2005

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