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The Living Air
Writers on Broadcasting
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Contents
Page 2
Extravagant Sky,
Living Air
by Fabian Monds
Page 3
Worlds Near
and Far
by Anna Carragher
Page 4
Introduction
by Anne Tannahill
6
8
10
12
14
Sam
McAughtry
A.T.Q.
Stewart
John
Morrow
Christina
Reid
Michael
Longley
16
18
20
22
24
Jonathan
Bardon
Seamus
Heaney
Bernard
MacLaverty
Sam
McBratney
Marianne
Elliott
26
28
30
32
34
Frank
Ormsby
Graham
Reid
Ciaran
Carson
Annie
McCartney
Martin
Lynch
36
38
40
42
44
Medbh
McGuckian
Malachi
O’Doherty
Paul
Muldoon
David
Park
Anne
Devlin
46
48
50
52
54
Glenn
Patterson
Colin
Bateman
Sinead
Morrissey
Jo
Baker
Daragh
Carville
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Extravagant Sky, Living Air
by Fabian Monds
This bouquet of memories is a treasury of literary riches,
and its value is enhanced by the directness of their
personal connections with our lives, homes and
communities. The reflections and reminiscences are
mainly 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 a
better knowledge of our local world, is evident
throughout the writings and perhaps is best captured
by Seamus Heaney in these lines from his poem
‘The Skylight’:
Worlds Near and Far
I found myself also thinking of the innovation that
makes the air alive, from Marconi’s radio experiments of
over a century ago between Ballycastle and Rathlin, to
the creative and technical skills of today’s programme
makers and broadcasters. From my childhood, I
remember well my own first hand-crafted one-valve
radio receiver, with coils lovingly wound and capacitors
carefully adjusted, and the excitement of listening to
radio stations from far away. As darkness fell, the
population of competing stations grew, and so did the
diversity of content. In today’s digital broadcasting
world, choice and diversity can be somewhat
overwhelming, making quality, always the key, all the
more precious.
The BBC’s public service responsibilities are nowadays
often characterised in terms of quality and in the values
of citizenship, culture, education, connecting with
communities and a global perspective. This collection
brings life, affection, understanding and relevance to
these critical elements of public value. Our contributors
have made it so, through their originality, insight and
generosity, and they are most deserving of our thanks.
But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
So it is with The Living Air. The value of this collection
is in its literary excellence, eclectic span and individual
sense of connection and access.
Professor Fabian Monds
BBC National Governor for Northern Ireland
As a small child I had a passion for all things Chinese and
one evening my father woke me up – at half past eight! –
and took me downstairs in my dressing gown to listen to
a programme about China on the Home Service. It was
rare for anyone in our large family ever to have our
parents all to ourselves so that evening – me, them, the
radio – is vivid and alive nearly half a century later.
by Anna Carragher
If there was a time before radio I don’t remember it.
A brown, Bakelite presence, glowing valves and sounds
that crackled out of nowhere to live among us and
become part of our lives. It is Proustian in its intensity –
Mrs Dale is my mother listening as she ironed; the
rhythmic, helter-skelter commentary from Clones or
Croke Park is the smell of my father’s Sweet Afton
cigarettes; Two Way Family Favourites the noise and
bustle of Sunday lunch; Listen with Mother and
Children’s Hour my little sisters and brothers clapping
and joining in the singing. It was geography – those
strange, exotic places, Hilversum, Athlone, Cologne; it
was history as presidents, prime ministers, poets,
musicians, film stars talked in our living room; it was
education, concerts on the Third at home, music
and stories in Miss McArdle’s dusty,
cream-painted classroom.
And suddenly, magically it was mine. Miss McArdle
entered a poem I had written in class for a BBC
Northern 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 baby
brothers and sisters sat on the floor in silent amazement
as my voice came out of the brown Bakelite box. One of
them cried, thinking I had gone to live in radio land.
By the time they were in secondary school I was at
Queen’s and soon after I was going through those doors
in Broadcasting House, first in London, then again in
Belfast every day. The children were right – I did go to
radio land.
Anna Carragher
Controller, BBC Northern Ireland
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4
Introduction
This idea of the air being alive, full of crackling energy,
suggested the title for the anthology. It’s from ‘Tintern
Abbey’, Wordsworth’s poem about the past being caught,
held and handed on by ‘something . . ./ Whose dwelling
is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the
living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man . . .’
Arranging the contributions in roughly chronological
order revealed an intriguing shift between the narrow
intimacy of older writers’ memories and the wider
horizons of television-age writers like Sinead Morrissey,
Jo Baker and Daragh Carville.
by Anne Tannahill
When Mark Adair of BBC NI suggested that I compile
a short anthology of writers reminiscing about listening
and viewing, it sounded like a pleasant enough little
project. The first indication that it was going to be
something altogether more interesting was when I tried
the idea out on a few writers and realised that something
was 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 tide
of the ether’, about the laughing policeman and the old
woman who swallowed a fly. In a startling image, Anne
Devlin recalled feeling so spellbound by Miss Havisham
in Great Expectations that ‘I go up close and push myself
through the glass wall of the TV’. Ciaran Carson
remembered the back being taken off the family radio,
allowing him to wander for days in ‘the labyrinth of
colour-coded wires’. The young Medbh McGuckian was
fascinated that voices could be ‘magically transmitted
through the air and walls. Into heads’.
Michael Longley described huddling with his brother
inside a wigwam pitched in the living room, not really
understanding the jokes on ITMA, but full of happy
contentment at their parents’ overheard laughter.
Sam McAughtry recalled BBC concerts being broadcast
from the Ulster Museum seventy years ago, and he and
his mother stopping what they were doing ‘to listen to
Mozart, Bizet, Verdi, or to switch off Wagner’.
A.T.Q. Stewart remembered his confusion when his
father said that he had just seen Franco (a neighbour’s
nickname, as it turned out): how had the Spanish
general, whose advance on Madrid was being reported
on the radio news, ‘time to go gallivanting on one of our
old Belfast red trams?’ An early memory for Annie
McCartney was ‘the rush of happiness from seeing my
mother in a giddy mood’ waltzing the baby to radio
music. Christina Reid helped her mother to polish the
brasses on Sunday afternoons as they listened to radio
comedy shows, without which, ‘I swear to God, I might
have died young of boredom in Belfast’.
For Frank Ormsby, his father’s ‘welfare wireless’ had ‘an
aura of mystery and promise’ that ‘might give us access
to anywhere’. And while ‘the lit blips of the stations,
London, Hilversum, Athlone, Helsinki, Moscow’ hinted
at a wider world for Ciaran Carson and the late-night
shipping forecasts told Seamus Heaney that ‘the world
would be watched over until you woke again’, for some
writers it was the advent of television that brought the
outside world into sharper focus. Marianne Elliott’s
family 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 with
the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
All too soon, instead of merely listening to and watching
the news, we ourselves became the News. Martin Lynch,
on his way to Broadcasting House to talk about
a new community play, witnessed an assassination and
found himself in demand for the news bulletin as well as
the arts programme. Malachi O’Doherty began to
realise that the apparently safe world, under the control
of Richard Baker’s civilised ‘balance’, was in fact
anything but safe. Marianne Elliott, studying in the US
when ‘the province erupted’, recognised that ‘from now
on only negative things would be reported about
Northern 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 outraged
sense of the difference between the measured tones of
the news items and the obscene reality of the maimed
people he saw in hospital became the spark for his first
play. 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 work
for a living’. Bernard MacLaverty discovered that ‘the
more words you took out the better the story got’.
Jonathan Bardon, writing history programmes for
schools, was excited at being involved ‘in a collective
campaign to show that the real history of an increasingly
fractured country was not dull, but could be gripping
and enlightening’. And the financial side was not to be
sniffed at: BBC commissions were for John Morrow ‘an
outlet for my early work at a fraught time’ and for Sam
McBratney, it was ‘amazing to write something, send it
away, and hear it on the radio. And get paid for it!’
For all the writers, there was a clear link between what
David Park called ‘the perfect catalysts of the child’s
imagination’ provided by radio and television and their
own 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’ became
the underpinning for his work as a poet as well as
a radio producer.
Compiling this anthology has been not just a pleasure
but an unexpectedly moving experience for me, bringing
memories of much-loved programmes and of the halfforgotten 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 her
retirement in 2003, currently works as a freelance editor
and publishing consultant.
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6
Sam McAughtry
Image courtesy of Sam McAughtry
I made my first broadcast around seventy years ago,
when the wireless reached the bedrock classes through
the hire-purchase system. In the early 1930s light and
classical music was broadcast weekly by the local BBC
from the Ulster Museum and my mother and I would
stop 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, you
could tell all the neighbours: “That’s my son coughing
on 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 the
once, in the first break.’
‘I know, I said, ‘that’s because, after that, they threw
me out.’
‘Do you hear them
‘If I were to
go
all coug
there and coug
h, you c
hing
w
id
to Mother.
In October 1977, I took part in my first real live
broadcast. The occasion was the publication of my
first book, The Sinking of the Kenbane Head
(Blackstaff Press).
ould hen th
sa
e mus
tell
I
’
?
all
s
i
c stop
the
on the w
neig
coughing
hbour
n
irel
o
s
y
m
s: “That's
ess
”.’
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.
1
2
I was very nervous. High on fear, instead of answering
questions about the book I began to talk about the antics
of an uncle of mine who overstayed his leave during
World War One and was locked up in Carrickfergus
Castle. Excited faces appeared at the glass window.
After the show Gloria Hunniford asked for more stories
like that. My broadcasting brand was set in concrete.
I suppose there wasn’t a lot of Protestant humour around
at that time.
Radio sets a stern test for writing. Every word must work
for a living. An apprenticeship on this medium helps
enormously in the task of snipping the long nails off the
work. Conversely, reaching radio writing standards
means that, when set out on the page, the voice of the
author is always there.
In the last twenty-eight years I have covered most
broadcasting fields – drama, documentaries, presenting,
script writing, and religious broadcasting. The patience
of many a producer has been tried, and I well know it.
Like many a writer I am in debt to the likes of Paul
Muldoon, 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 just
dipped 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.
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9
A.T.Q. Stewart
Image courtesy of A.T.Q. Stewart
I have been trying to work out when I heard my first
radio broadcast and I think it must have been about the
time of the Franco incident. My father came home from
work one evening and said that Franco had been on the
tram. I was puzzled by this. I could not understand how
the Spanish general, with four columns advancing on
Madrid and a fifth column in the city itself, had time to
go gallivanting on one of our old Belfast red trams.
Later it was explained to me. My father had nicknamed
a neighbour who looked like the man in the news.
It was the age of ITMA and the variety shows and dance
bands – Ambrose and his orchestra, Billy Cotton – and
crooners singing ‘Smoke gets in your eyes’ and ‘When
they begin the beguine’. And of course there was radio
drama. My father said it would never work, because the
disembodied voice could not capture the magic of the
theatre. Within weeks he was listening with the zeal of
the converted. Television still lay in the future. All the
accents were received English, and there was very little
regional input.
I certainly remember hearing the radio in my
grandparents’ home when one of my aunts, who had a
fine soprano voice, gave a song recital from the local
station. Our own radio set arrived in 1939, and changed
life for ever. My clearest memories are of the wartime
broadcasts. Listening to the chimes of Big Ben and the
nine o’clock news was a daily ritual, and newsreaders
Bruce Belfrage and Alvar Liddell became almost like
members of the family. At 10 pm you could, if you
wanted, tune in to Hamburg and hear the Nazi version
of the news, read by the traitor William Joyce. He had
an affected upper-class accent and always began with the
words ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling’. Very cleverly,
the government never jammed the station, and ‘Lord
Haw-Haw’ became a figure of fun, a morale-booster
instead of the opposite.
I can’t say that radio much influenced my early desire to
write, but it did occur to my adolescent mind that the
BBC might be a market for budding authors. I prepared
a script about the ancient Celtic monastery at Nendrum
and sent it to Ormeau Avenue. It was politely returned.
I made a vow never to have anything more to do with
either the BBC or Irish history. I would become
a creative artist, a poet or a novelist. How the gods must
have laughed! I was destined to find my career in Irish
history, and to make many broadcasts from Ormeau
Avenue. But it has left me with a curious sensation that
somehow I have not yet finished my school homework.
I still want to be a writer
when I grow up.
me
ost like
ame
alm
bec
nd
ew
n
3
the
tual, a
y ri
ail
Listening to
news was
ad
’clock
o
e
in
n
e
h
nd t
a
n
e
Big B
f
o
s
chime
4
5
ers of the fam
ily.
mb
l
del
d
i
srea
L
lvar
ders B
A
d
n
a
ruce Belfrage
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.
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10
Image courtesy of John Morrow
John Morrow
My uncle James guided my infant right hand to the cat’s
whisker, 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 tutorial
provided by radio, Hollywood and, later, television –
plus books, of course. ‘Elementary’ schooling in those
days meant just that: a litany of English monarchs,
geography the red patches on an atlas (but we were early
readers, thanks largely to comics).
Uncle James gave us an accumulator (wet battery) set
and on it we followed the progress of the Second World
War, laughed at ITMA and listened to The Brains Trust.
I recall vividly hearing Professor Joad mention General
Wolfe at Quebec and the ‘French and Indian’ wars in
America. Indians! . . . Cowboys?. . . thinks I, and with
the help of my library ticket was soon up to my neck in
the mire of personalities, politics and mayhem that was
the eighteenth century – a mire in which, sixty-odd
years on, I still wallow happily.
The
fac
es i n
t he
glo
w
It was from a footnote in a condensed history of
revolutionary France that I first heard about the 1798
rebellion in Ireland. Then, in a radio programme
written by Sam Hanna Bell, I discovered
that the rebels were Presbyterians
and that our own church in
- a of tod
nd ay’s
if n electro
nic h
ot,
earth are g rally rapt
the
ene
rem
ot e i
s to ha
nd.
6
John Morrow – Writer and Broadcaster: Born in Belfast in 1930, he left school at fourteen to work in the shipbuilding and linen
industries 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 of
programmes for Radio Ulster on the writer’s craft.
7
May Street had been a hotbed of sedition, with muskets
secreted 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 it
provided an outlet for my early work at a fraught time
when outlets were few. It also brought me the voice of the
great Frank O’Connor, reading and discussing his work.
It was a revelation. For all his fame, O’Connor
considered himself to be in the line of the hearthside
seanchaí, 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 are
generally 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 ‘flannelled
fools to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom’.
Age and the box have brought this fool a weekly
microcosm of all the intrigue, greed and vanity of the
eighteenth century: Premiership football. For that I am
eternally grateful.
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13
Christina Reid
© Darragh Casey
I’d like to thank the BBC for helping me to survive the
longest day of the week in my childhood. On Sundays,
I swear to God, I might have died young of boredom in
Belfast, if it hadn't been for the wireless. Everything else
about Sunday was dire. Sunday School in SundayBest-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 and
roundabouts were padlocked on the Lord’s Day by order
of Belfast Corporation.
Sunday afternoon was given over to the tedious task of
helping my mother to clean her collection of brass
ornaments. She handed me the blue-and-white tin of
cotton 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 the
glorious years of radio comedy shows starring Al Read,
Jimmy Clitheroe, Ted Ray, Jimmy Edwards, Dick
Bentley, June Whitfield, and Elsie and Doris Waters.
And the ventriloquist Peter Brough with his wooden
dummy Archie Andrews. My mother swore that Peter
Brough never ever moved his lips when he was
projecting the voice of Archie. ‘Catch yourself on,’
laughed my father, ‘why would the man be bothered to
do that on the wireless where nobody can see him?’
My mother advised me to pay no heed. ‘It’s whatever
you think yourself,' she said.
O
s, I swear to God, I
might
unday
have
nS
And that’s what I still love about the
radio, whether I’m listening to it or
writing for it. The visual images
that words and sound conjure in
the 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 my
mind’s eye was BBC Northern Ireland’s
The McCooeys. It was a family favourite.
Every character in it was just like
somebody we knew. Bella McCoubrey
from the Stoney Mountain was as
real to me as the big woman from
the country who lived up our street.
In those pre-TV days, the wireless was
the magic box. And still is.
Don’t get me wrong. These days I enjoy
television and I love the theatre. But radio
will always be special to me. The childhood
friend who inspired my imagination and
rescued me from the banality of the three
Bs – Boredom, Brasso and Belfast
Corporation.
in Belfast,
redom
o
b
f
o
wireless.
died young
for the
n
if it hadn’t bee
8
9
10
Christina Reid – Playwright: Born in Belfast in 1942, Christina Reid is the writer of award-winning plays which examine the effect
of violence, class and sectarianism on Belfast communities. These include Tea in a China Cup (1983), Did You Hear the One About
the 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).
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14
© BBC
Michael Longley
My twin Peter and I are huddled inside a faded secondhand wigwam which we have pitched in the middle of
the green carpet in our seldom-used living room. I can
still hear my father’s rather formal baritone laugh, my
mother’s jolly descant. They are listening to ITMA,
Tommy Handley’s weekly progression of brief
encounters with colourful regulars whose voices and
catch phrases have entered the national consciousness to
such an extent that after only a word or two they are
applauded by the studio audience: Colonel Chinstrap,
Mrs Mop (‘Can I do you now, sir?’), Mona Lot (‘It’s
being so cheerful that keeps me going’). Peter and I are
far too young to follow the comedy, but we feel
happy eavesdropping on our parents’ laughter. Perhaps
not understanding the jokes mysteriously increases
our contentment.
So
me
of
t
he
Dick Barton, Special Agent stars on the Light Programme
and therefore can be contacted only in the living room.
Do I really want to exile myself from the warmth and
companionship of the kitchen? This tension anticipates a
much later perception: that the experience of art is both
individual and communal. In 1948 my father extends
the world of our imaginations by hiring another radio
that is receptive to more than the Home Service – for one
shilling and six pence per week. In less than a
decade, as well as being addicted to
Journey into Space and The
Goons, I shall be trying out
some new things on the
Third Programme.
k
e
un nd
e t ire a
tur e f
na cok
sig o the
ba
c
We have two radios in our house: in the large chilly
living room the good one that receives all the stations; in
the cosy kitchen-cum-breakfast-room a wee Bakelite box
that delivers only the Home Service, its dial a parchment
glow. Children’s Hour is part of the familial fug: Toy
Town with Larry the Lamb, Mr Mayor, Mr Plod; the
stories and songs of Auntie Vi; Uncle Mac; Commander
Stephen King-Hall who ends his broadcasts, ‘Be very
good and very quiet, but
not so good and so
quiet that
somebody says “What are you doing?” ’; and from BBC
Northern Ireland the fanfare of kazoos that introduces
Cicely Matthews’ I want to be an actor. (My friend Jim
Fitzpatrick’s appearance on this show brings him brief
celebrity in Bristow Park.) Some of the signature tunes
(Toy Town’s ‘The Dance of the Little Tin Soldiers’, for
instance, or ‘The Jewels of the Madonna’ which
introduces – I think – the magical Box of Delights) will
always transport me back to the coke fire and the
cream walls turned browny-yellow by my parents’
chain-smoking.
t
sw
th
e
ill
a
l
cre ways tr
g.
ansport me
am
kin
o
wall
-sm
s tur
hain
c
ned br
’
s
t
n
owny-yellow by my pare
11
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 for
Poetry in 2001. A long-time contributor to BBC literary programmes, he collaborated with Douglas Carson on educational
programmes in the 1970s. Corner of the Eye, a BBC NI profile of his life, was screened in 1988.
12
13
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17
Jonathan Bardon
Image courtesy of Jonathan Bardon
‘We ought to listen to that,’ my father said, pointing to
the Radio Times. It was Blues and Greys, a ballad
documentary on the American Civil War. I was about
fourteen: not only did the programme reinforce my
fascination with history but this was the first occasion
when I became dimly aware of the skills and craft
required to make a compelling broadcast. Recollection
of my childhood in Dublin is crowded with memories of
BBC Home Service and Light Programme radio.
‘I would try to start off by getting them to sit down,’ the
Principal, John Malone, advised shortly after I had
begun my teaching career in east Belfast in 1964.
I turned for help to the Today and Yesterday in Northern
Ireland programmes being made in the new Schools
Department. Would the boys sit quietly? My anxiety was
unnecessary: hubbub lapsed into quiet absorption as
they became familiar with the writings of Sam Hanna
Bell, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and others.
It was in the Schools Department that I cut my teeth as
a writer. James Hawthorne – creator of the groundbreaking Two Centuries of Irish History – produced my
very first programme, on the Battle of Clontarf, and he
insisted on driving me down to Dollymount strand so
that I could set the scene as vividly as
possible. My mentor thereafter
was Douglas Carson.
His series, Modern Irish History: People and Events, had
exacting objectives: each programme was to draw on
contemporary sources to dramatise just one pivotal event
over no more than a twenty-four hour period. The
challenge was to lift young listeners into another time
and place to create a coherent, accurate and compelling
story using the voices of the past. Each programme
forced the writer to search out old documents, some
being brought to light for the first time. David
Hammond was usually on hand to resurrect longforgotten ballads. We were buoyed up by the enthusiasm
of the actors who were grateful that they, too, had
learned a little more about their past. We seemed to be
involved in a collective campaign to show that the real
history of an increasingly fractured country was not dull
but could be gripping and enlightening.
Finally, I am firmly of the view that the most perfectly
crafted local radio programme ever was Wings of a
Seraphim, Douglas Carson’s account of growing up in
Belfast during the most terrible years in modern history
while some of his cousins were storming the Normandy
beaches and most of his German cousins were dying for
the Reich as the Red Army advanced. I play it to my
Queen’s students once a year: without fail, the classes are
transfixed and some are
moved to tears.
o create a co
place t
her
and
ent
e
m
i
,
t
r
e
h
t
o
n
a
o
of the pa
s
nt
voice
ers i
e
n
e
h
t
t
s
i
sing
ung l
lift yo
t or y u
s
o
t
g
s
n
a
i
ll
enge w
compe
The chall
ate and
st.
accur
14
15
16
Jonathan Bardon – Historian: Born 1941 in Dublin and educated at TCD and QUB. He taught for many years at the Belfast
Institute of Further and Higher Education and is now a lecturer at the School of History, QUB. His many books include A History
of Ulster (1992) and Beyond the Studio: A History of BBC Northern Ireland (2000). A frequent broadcaster on Irish history, he has also
scripted a number of BBC NI schools series including Modern Irish History.
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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18
19
© BBC
Seamus Heaney
s
’t
p
asn
eca hi
t w r for he s
d, i
athe and t
he en
But in t as the we
so
mu
ch
th
ts
tha
t
f
My earliest and most unforgettable radio experience:
a play on the Northern Ireland Home Service being
listened to by grown-ups in the kitchen, but overheard
by me in the dark of the bedroom, when I was supposed
to be asleep.
A big, commanding, standard English voice, that shook
the speakers in the classroom and seemed to possess a
force that equalled the natural forces at work in Hardy’s
landscape, ‘When showers betumble the chestnut
spikes,/And nestlings fly’.
It told the story of the Cooneen ghost, of a Fermanagh
family haunted out of house and home, and pursued
across the ocean to their new home in America. What
terrified me most was the recurrent knocking of the
poltergeist, at first behind the walls of the family home
and then, unremittingly and ever more menacingly,
from behind the walls of their cabin on the transatlantic
liner. 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 for
years afterwards.
But in the end, it wasn’t so much the weathers as the
weather forecasts that flowed longest and deepest in the
channels of the ear, and the shipping forecast most of all.
Night after night, year after year, at the moment of closedown, that solemn invocation of the names of the
regions of the sea told you that the world would be
watched over until you woke again. It operated as a kind
of mantra, and in fact it was only in the 1970s, when
I started to live near the coast in Co. Wicklow, that I fully
realized the seriousness and consequence of the phrase
‘attention all shipping’: after a stormy night I’d
sometimes see French trawlers at anchor in the sheltered
but still rolling waters of the bay:
Radio has the power to flow into your dream life, which
is one reason why schools broadcasts proved so effective,
particularly in the realm of language and literature.
Some teachers probably regarded a class period spent
listening to the wireless as a waste of time, but no
class period in all my years at school left as deep
a mark as the one when I first heard Thomas
Hardy’s poem ‘Weathers’ read by an actor
from the BBC’s repertory company.
e we
athers
pin lowed
long
gf
est an
o re
d deepe
st in the channels of the ear,
cast
m o st
of all.
17
Seamus Heaney – Poet: Born 1939 in Bellaghy and educated at QUB and St Joseph’s College, Belfast. He taught at St Thomas’s
Intermediate 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 Literature
in 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.
18
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud ‘a haven’,
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.
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21
20
© Jude MacLaverty
Bernard MacLaverty
Our house was quiet voices. Grandma and Granda and
Great Aunt Mary, my mother and father. But there was
another voice mixed in with it. The only voice which
didn’t have a Belfast accent. The wireless. It was always
there in the background as my mother baked. Family
Favourites. And if there was a song she knew she would
join in, beating the mixture in time to the tune.
Maybe even dancing.
But some programmes weren’t background – they were
to be sat down and listened to. Like The McCooeys.
Everybody laughing at the goings on of James Young as
Derek the window cleaner. And J.G. Devlin as Granda
McCooey. And one time there was a neighbour –
a woman two doors away who was an English teacher
and she was actually in a play. So we all gathered round
and 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 we
all laughed when we recognised her voice and Granda
raised an eyebrow to indicate he was in the presence
of poshness.
There were programmes which were linked to other
sensations. For tea on Saturday we always had a fry
and we’d eat listening to the football results. Brighton
and 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 called
Preston 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 school
and you got the wireless brought up to your bedroom.
I learned more than I ever did in any class. There was a
dramatisation of Lenz by George Büchner, about poor
Lenz’s descent into madness. It was scored by the
Radiophonic Workshop – electronic swoops of Dr-Who-like
music 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 did
the liking and he invited me in – told me Morning Story
was 2800 words and my story was far too long. At first
I was indignant. Then I discovered that the more words
you 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.
Th At
story got.
e
en first
h
t
r
Id
ette
b
isco I was in
the
dignant.
vere
t
u
d tha
ko
o
o
t the m
t
u
ore words yo
19
20
21
Bernard MacLaverty – Novelist and Short-story Writer: Born in Belfast in 1942 and worked as a medical laboratory assistant
before taking a degree at QUB, and moving to Scotland in 1975. His first short-story collection Secrets and Other Stories was
published in 1977 and his novels Lamb and Cal were memorably adapted for film in 1983 and 1984. Recent novels include
Grace Notes (1997; nominated for the Booker Prize) and The Anatomy School (2001). His television play My Dear Palestrina was
produced by BBC NI in 1980 and he is a regular broadcaster with BBC Radio 3 and BBC Scotland.
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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23
22
© Walker Books
Sam McBratney
We didn’t have a television in our house until the late
fifties, so my early memories of the BBC are of listening
to the wireless.
Listening to the wireless introduced me to many things,
including science fiction. In the wee back room of our
house in Lisburn, beneath the five delft ducks flying up
the wall, there sits my mother, half asleep in front of the
coal fire while her shins melt in the heat. Behind us,
from a corner of the room, a dramatic voice announces
the next episode of Journey Into Space. Mars, I think
it was. A character called . . . was it Whittaker? . . . got
into a spot of bother with the local aliens. What a boost
it was for the imagination – what a step up from the
Beano, the Eagle and the Topper. I’ve enjoyed space
stories ever since, and had a go at the genre when
I developed the ambition to write myself.
In
th
e
h
we
eb
be ack room
ne a
of our house in Lisburn,
al f
th t
he fiv
asl
e delft ducks f
eep
lying up
in f
the w
ront
al
there si
of the co
ts m l,
al fire w
ym
hile
her
shi oth
er,
ns
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.
m
elt
he heat.
in t
22
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 brought
massive 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).
23
You see, being a writer is one tough business. There really
is not much money in it unless you get lucky. If I'm
truthful, the definition of writer that has guided me
through the years is crude and simple: if you can’t
support 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 writer
began about 1967, when I was in my twenties. A man
called John Boyd at the BBC accepted a script called The
Tenant Shall Not . . . It was a fifteen-minute talk about
moving in to 43 Maralin Avenue – a house on the new
estate being built at Knockmore, Lisburn. No words of
mine had been published before, so how amazing it was
to write something, send it away, and hear it on the
radio. And get paid for it! I didn’t know it then, but the
apprentice years had begun. In the three decades to come
there 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 Corporation
quickened the hope that I might be a writer some day,
and has been an open market for creative thinking and
writing for as long as I can remember; may it remain so.
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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24
25
Marianne Elliott
Image courtesy of Marianne Elliott
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: endless
American imports – Sergeant Bilko, The Lone Ranger,
I Love Lucy, Rawhide, Maverick . . . I associate television
in the late 1950s and early 60s with children and
laughter. Ours was the first television set in the
neighbourhood and our house became a mini-cinema
for 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 by
the still relatively novel colour
transmission. I was too young to
experience the best of the 1960s, but
just old enough to realise that
things were beginning to go wrong
in Northern Ireland. Terence
O’Neill seemed the great white
hope against the gathering
forces of evil. My family
gathered around the
Ou
rs w
as t
h
a nd
television to watch him deliver his ‘Ulster at the
cross-roads’ speech in December 1968, and, more
sombrely, the first broadcast of James Chichester-Clark
after O’Neill’s resignation.
I was working as a student in the United States when the
province erupted in August 1969. It was the beginning of
my recognition that from now on only negative
things about Northern Ireland would be reported
internationally and the first of many occasions when
I tried to explain to outsiders that we in Northern Ireland
were not all the violent monsters depicted on their
television screens.
How far all this had an impact on my future writing is
hard to say. I am unsure where my passion for France
came from. Perhaps the allure of those sleek black
Citroëns and the femme-fatale chic of the Maigret
detective series sowed the seeds. The passion for Irish
history was bred at home. But it also had something to
do with the memory of how things had been in a mixed
North Belfast community (and all those unthreatening
television programmes noted earlier), when contrasted
with the bleaker memories from the increasingly
sophisticated current-affairs programmes of the 1960s
and 1970s. I suppose I have been on a mission ever since
to explain how history does not work in the black-andwhite polarities which produced the Troubles.
ef
our irst televis
s
io
ho u s
ood
i en d
r
e beca n set in the neighbourh
f
d
o
me a mini-cinema for childho
during school holidays.
24
25
26
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 British
Academy in 2001. Her books include Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence and The Catholics of Ulster.
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27
26
© Leon McAuley & the Gallery Press
Frank Ormsby
We might not have a radio at all, were it not for my
father’s illness. In the late 1950s he suffers a series of
strokes and as a result we become eligible for a ‘welfare
wireless’. It is an imposing piece of furniture – a wooden
box with substantial knobs and a curved finish.
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
might give us access to anywhere.
One other memory persists from that period. We are
settling down in the calm of a Saturday evening to our
weekly dose of Jack Loudan’s serial, Mrs Lally’s Lodgers,
on the Northern Ireland Home Service. For me the
programme is a twenty-minute ordeal, a peculiar
compound of anticipation and pubertal dread. The focus
of all this is a character named Lancelot Magowan. It is
appallingly clear that Lancelot has the hots for Mrs Lally
and the unspeakable minutes arrive when he must utter
his feelings. He does so in a voice that can only be
described as throbbing and Mrs L, though decorously
controlling his advances, is not unreceptive. The wireless
exudes ragged breathing, strangled passion and the odd
shameful silence and I stare tensely at the floor.
What a relief when it is time for the Deep River Boys to
give us some Negro spirituals. At this point, my mother
usually turns the wireless off, to ‘save the battery’,
presumably for Lancelot’s next hormonal gallop.
But it is my father’s wireless, so in practice ‘anywhere’
means Athlone and so Radio Eireann rather than the
BBC becomes our main source of news, weather, music,
religion and sport.
My father’s sporting interests are not confined to Gaelic
football and hurling, however. He is also a devotee of
horse racing, so that my earliest memories of listening to
the BBC are tied in with the geography of race-course
England. 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 ever
closer to the box on the sideboard, the commentator’s
voice gathers volume all through the final furlong,
we are wired to the syllables of the
chosen horse’s name.
n use,
it is not i
n
e
h
w
Even as an aura of mystery and promise
,
it h
the push of a finger, the tur
h
g
u
o
h
t
no
as
f
Never to be forgotten, this first precious access to the
airwaves, this total immersion, so natural and
comprehensive that it is as if the
radio itself has disappeared.
a
dia
.
giv
eu
ere
28
l might
27
Frank Ormsby – Poet and Editor: Born in Enniskillen in 1947 and educated at QUB, he has taught at the Royal Belfast
Academical 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).
s acc
ess to anywh
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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29
Graham Reid
It was there, it just wasn’t in our house. Ours was the
second-last house in the street to get electricity, so radio
and television were not a part of my growing-up.
My grandparents lived on the Ballygomartin Road and
they did have a radio. When we stayed with them my
younger 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 Paul
Robeson, and I became a fan for life. Years later, in the
army, after lights out we would stick a wire coathanger
in the radio as an aerial, and listen to Radio Luxemburg.
It really was a matter of ‘air waves’, as the sound rose
and fell, but it was my introduction to Jim Reeves and
Roy Orbison!
There are memories of television dramas, written by one
of our schoolteachers, Stewart Love: The Big Donkey;
The Randy Dandy; A Headful of Crocodiles, though
maybe not in that order. One line sticks in my mind,
I don’t know from which play. During a family row a son
turns angrily to his father and says: ‘Why don’t you go
to Windsor Park and lose yourself in the crowd’.
A crushing, hurtful
put-down.
© Wilfred Green
I also recall Over the Bridge on television, but the very
first radio play I ever listened to was one of my own!
Indirectly it was the news reports on radio and television
that started me writing. When a report came in of
someone 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 assumed
everything was all right. It wasn’t until I went to work in
Musgrave Park Hospital as a ward orderly that I realised
everything wasn’t all right. When I first walked into the
ward 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 easy
assumptions that to ‘live’ was all that mattered.
At the time I wasn’t a writer, but I knew that I had to
write about this experience. A play? A poem? A novel?
I didn’t know what. Three years after that scarring
experience I wrote The Death of Humpty Dumpty. It was
accepted by the Abbey Theatre.
The
re th
ey a
ll we
The re, paralysed,
o n.
maimed
d televisi
ir liv
n
a
o
i
d
a
r
,
people I’d heard about on the
es an
d the li
29
ves of their loved ones ruined, changed forever.
30
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 to
concentrate 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).
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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30
© Granta Books
Ciaran Carson
Most homes had a wireless then. Ours was a big square
box in the fireplace alcove, where it sat on a lacetrimmed tablecloth on a console table. It hummed when
you turned the milled half-crown of the knob till it
clicked. It needed time to warm up. You could tell by the
glow and the noise that would dawn from the sunburst
fascia. It gave out the Weather.
Sometimes it would drizzle, or the News would be swept
aside by the weather. I’d spin the big milled knob past
the lit blips of the stations, London, Hilversum,
Athlone, Helsinki, Moscow, through beeping Morse and
the wind in the chimney and waves of static, orchestras
that played in dim-lit rooms behind competing urgent
voices, overlapping languages that rose and fell like
music, or the oceanic swell collapsing onto shingle,
muezzins crying from the minarets of Araby, jazz
quartets in Paris, silver jubilees in London, and an
underlying fundamental buzz that came from
everywhere, 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 looked
like an alien temple. For days I wandered in the
labyrinth 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 needle
in 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-wipers
and a broken fizz of neon letters, the city demarcated by
a coded alphabet. Bombs went off, reverberating through
the console as the news became the News, and three or
four alarms rang out in different keys like faulty echoes
of 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 from
everywhere, from nowhere.
wh
io off to see
here. ere.
d
t
t
a
u
r
o
e
d
rl
th
th
whole wo
ck of
orld in
There was a was a whole w r took the ba
There
y fathe
When m
32
loo
at was hap
pening it
31
d
ke
Ciaran Carson – Poet: Born in Belfast in 1948 and educated at QUB, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until
1988 and is currently Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre and Professor of Poetry at QUB. Award-winning collections of poetry
include The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1990), First Language (1993) and Breaking News (2003) and prose works include
The 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).
lik
ea
n al
ien te
mple.
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33
Annie McCartney
© Darragh Casey
Earliest memories of radio: the soothing sounds of the
Third Programme floating through the house, and the
rush of happiness from seeing my mother in a giddy
mood 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 each
classroom. Glad for a break from sums, we marched
around the room to stirring songs like Prokofiev’s
Lieutenant Kije: ‘Oh Kije was a hussar bold, /A hussar
bold was he . . .’
My Nanny Simpson’s radio had to be warmed up. It was
a big imposing radiogram and the most important
piece of furniture in the parlour. 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.
At home on our less impressive set, we listened to Uncle
Mac’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 the
plays from Today and Yesterday in
Northern Ireland featuring
Viking invasions, sad tales
of the Potato Famine and
swashbuckling stories
about wrecked Armadas. We would sit enthralled, hearts
in mouths, as the actors drowned convincingly in the
roaring waters of the Atlantic. Perhaps then the notion
that radio has the best pictures was sown.
We were slow to get a television; and at first we were just
allowed to watch children’s TV. An avid reader, I revelled
in dramatisations of my favourite books – The Silver
Sword, The Railway Children, Treasure Island.
Then there was the forbidden delight of Radio
Luxembourg. On Sunday nights, we sat on the stairs
listening to The Top Twenty – our first taste of
commercial radio, with its endless ads for Stablond
and Brunitex shampoos. Radio Caroline came next
and played our favourite tunes non-stop – endless
Beatles and Rolling Stones. Then the sixteenthbirthday present of a transistor of my own. I would
swing it nonchalantly on a Sunday afternoon walk,
listening to Alan Freeman count down the Pick of the
Pops on BBC Radio One
The radio is never off, either in the house or the car.
According to a friend in the business, I am what is
known demographically as a ‘heavily promiscuous’
listener. I listen a lot and change channels a lot.
Afternoon plays, short stories, panel games, political
discussions. I listen all day to Radios 3 and 4 and during
the night when I can’t sleep, I listen on an earphone to
Radio 5. It influences my writing in the sense that
it keeps my imagination fired.
n
ryo
Eve
eo
ni
t so
und
as i ed pos
f th
h and
ey h
spoke p
ad b
roperly
een to
hundred
s of elocution lessons
– al
l except
33
The McCooeys who were common.
34
35
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’ Heart
was published in 2005. She has had several plays and a comedy series, Two Doors Down, broadcast by BBC Radio 4.
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34
© Pacemaker
Martin Lynch
Growing up in our house in the 1950s, my first
awareness 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 Family
Favourites followed by The Billy Cotton Band Show.
The rest of the week we listened to what he and
everybody else then called Radio Athlone. I have no idea
when it happened but sometime in the 1960s Radio
Athlone 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 increasing
domination of television than with any political
viewpoint of my father’s.
My earliest memory of drama on TV was watching
a play with my father as he commented out loud,
occasionally cursed and generally appeared agitated.
It was called Over The Bridge. I wouldn’t have been that
aware of Northern Ireland politics at the time but
I could make out that it was about the Belfast shipyards
and my father was going on about the Orange Order
and 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.
My ear
lies
You have to fast-forward a number of years for my next
experience of what we now call Radio Ulster. In the late
1970s I started writing plays for the Turf Lodge
Fellowship Community Theatre. Along with a cast
member we were invited onto the Walter Love
programme to talk about our latest play. So early one
Tuesday morning we found ourselves sitting in a black
taxi at the top of the Whiterock Road waiting on it to fill
up with passengers to start our journey to the BBC.
Suddenly, we were witness to a frightening gun attack in
the butcher’s shop ten yards away. An assistant in the
shop was shot four times in the chest. The gunman
strolled right past us on his way to a waiting car.
When breathlessly relating this story to Walter Love
before going on air, we were overheard by newshound
Norman Stockton. Quick as a flash, the enterprising
Norman arranged to interview us for the next Radio
Ulster news bulletin the minute we were finished
with Walter.
I’ve since been a regular guest on various BBC Radio
Ulster programmes over the years but I doubt if I have
ever contributed with the urgency of that first
Norman Stockton news bulletin.
he r
my fat
h
t
i
w
y
la
t memory of d
sed
rama on TV was watching a p
ly c ur
l
as he commented out loud, occasiona
ted.
a
t
i
g
a
and generally appeared
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 features
on the Sailortown area of Belfast. BBC Radio plays include Needles and Pins and Pictures of Tomorrow.
36
37
38
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37
Medbh McGuckian
© Paul Sherwood & the Gallery Press
Irene. The girl next door, Irene, playing ‘Irene
Goodnight’ on her radio. Words, names, people’s voices
– sounds, magically transmitted through the air and
walls. Into heads.
Chimes of Big Ben at nine, the solemn disapproving
news. Did my mother send me to elocution to learn how
to say such sad things? Twenty Questions, Friday Night is
Music Night, Music While You Work in her morning
scullery. The tune made her smile and she warmed. But
not to the up and down of the Saturday afternoon
football results. The assonance and alliteration of
Wolverhampton 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 of
valves’ frequent explosions, the bottomless tube that left
for 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 no
match for the astounding and rousing chords of Dr Who,
always on at confession time. Why were The Wednesday
Play and That Was The Week always snapped off at the
seemingly most interesting moment?
The animals and close-ups and underwater frolics of
David Attenborough and Hans and Lotte. The wild
depth of their narrations. Westerns like Wells Fargo,
Laramie, Cheyenne, The Lone Ranger prepared us for
violence to come. The Sky at Night for the moon
landings, Crackerjack.
Christmas revolved around the pantomime or circus they
showed. Because my mother liked Billy Cotton and the
Black and White Minstrels and Russ Conway and Val
Doonican and Vera Lynn but not the Miss World we saw
a lot of them. I have a friend now in a Pilates class who
used to be a Television Topper. I said to my husband the
other day, you are getting more and more like that man
Fyfe 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 children
would not agree, I am inexpressibly grateful.
Wo
rd
d
thr s, names
i t te
m
, peop
ou g
s
n
tra
le’s voic
h th
es – sounds, magically
e air
and wa
lls. Into heads
.
39
40
41
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 include
Poetry 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.
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38
Image courtesy of Malachi O’Doherty
Malachi O’Doherty
The BBC represents a balance of authority and humour
that has intrigued me since the television first came into
our home in about 1961. Indeed, it was on the wireless
before that. My earliest memories of radio include
Mrs Dale’s Diary and the broadcasts from Hungary
during the Russian invasion. The BBC mediated a huge
and complex world but opened that window also on
domestic drama in which problems were always
resolved. The Russians might not get out of Hungary
but Mrs Dale would make a good flan.
Ours was a big argumentative family that was calmed by
the mystery of Richard Baker’s poise. He spoke to us in
even 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 Americans
were taking losses at Tet, that a tiger cub had
been born at Whipsnade – wherever that
was – and that the wind was coming
from the west. He seemed to
Ev
suggest that this was all
en
we needed to know
if
.
i
th trol
n
co
’s
s,
air
aff
s
al
on
wa
ati ng
we
un went we did
de to n’t
r c be und
on d ers
tro wit tand
l, R h a po
ich sen litics
ard se t and
Ba hat e inte
ke ver rn
r y
Malachi O’Doherty – Writer and Broadcaster: Born in Muff, County Donegal, in 1951, he grew up in Belfast and was educated in
the 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 fronted
several documentaries for the BBC and has written on Irish affairs for, amongst others, the New Statesman, the Belfast Telegraph
and Fortnight, which he edited for a number of years.
42
43
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 international
affairs, we went to bed with a sense that everything was
under control, Richard Baker’s control. News, he seemed
to say, was the opposite of drama. Drama serial episodes
always ended on the brink of crisis. Sergeant Doubleday,
in the cinema serial, always died at the end and was
revealed the following week to have escaped after all.
Richard Baker didn’t keep you waiting in suspense like
that. His little smile and goodnight told you that famine
and war were transitory things while good sense and
maturity endured.
Ever since, this poise has been a challenge to me. I rebel
at times and launch challenges against the patrician
reassurance of balance and try to import anger, cynicism
and 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.
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41
Paul Muldoon
There was always that other song and dance of the
political toings and froings, of course, and that
influenced our listening in predictable ways. For better
or worse, there was a greater likelihood of our tuning in
for news, and more, to Radio Eireann than the faintly
Glengall-Street-tinted BBC, preferring an Angelustainted herald to Duncan Hearle. The BBC broadcasts
we listened to tended to come from the UK, a particular
favourite being Beyond Our Ken, with that looney of
loonies, Kenneth Horne, whose way with puns and
double-entendres had as much influence on me as Joyce,
I’m certain.
This changed when I began to make more connections
with voices on BBC Northern Ireland, particularly the
voices of Sean O’Baoill and Jerry Hicks, two singers and
folklorists who also happened to be my teachers in
St. Patrick’s College, Armagh. In the classroom, I vividly
remember Sean O’Baoill explaining the phenomenon of
‘potatoes and point’, whereby a poor peasant would
point his or her meagre spud at a herring or a bit of
bacon hanging up to the right of the fire – not too far
from the saltbox, probably – and simply point the potato
at the herring or bit of bacon and imagine the taste.
It’s an image that often came back to me when, ten years
later, I went to work for BBC Northern Ireland and had
barely been issued with my stopwatch when I fell in
happily with the great mantra on the difference between
radio and television, i.e. on radio, the pictures are better.
The power of the imagination to summon the smell of
the sea, the sound of a thousand horsemen coming over
a hill, the taste of herring from a few evocative words,
was one on which I would base the next thirteen years of
my life, not only as a radio producer but as a poet. It was
all part of the same line that ran back all the way through
to the cupboard door closing until
the next time.
s,
The radio was in a cupboard to the right of the
mantelpiece, just where the saltbox might have hung in
the mud-walled cottage my mother had been brought
up in, and it was with something of the same ceremony
that the door of the cupboard was opened and the radio
turned on. My mother was a schoolteacher and used the
radio in the classroom, so it was quite natural for her to
season the meat and potatoes of our everyday existence
with Schools and Children’s Programmes from the BBC.
Our favourites were Children’s Hour with Cicely
Mathews and John D. Stewart and Graeme Roberts, and
some version of Music and Movement, a programme that
encouraged a connection between song and dance,
reading and writhing, that we’ve rather lost sight of, even
in these peas-in-an-iPod days.
© Wilfred Green
nd
g
ys.
a
w
table
c
i
d
e
pr
a
l i ti c
o
p
th e
ce of
n
a
d
d
n
g in
There was always that other song a
listenin
a
gs
n
i
l to
in
fro
of course, and that influenced our
44
45
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 Poetry
and 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.
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42
© Bloomsbury
David Park
Every Saturday morning, when I was a child, a woman
came to my house and swallowed a fly and because this
fly wriggled and tickled inside her, the unfortunate
swallowed a series of increasingly large creatures in an
attempt to catch this irritating insect. The eagerly
anticipated 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’s
Favourites, a world soon to be swept away by the pop
revolution where beat and rhythm replaced narrative.
The songs flew out of the Bush radio with its red-faced
dial – the model now sold as a piece of nostalgic
retro chic – and so many memories of growing up and
family are intimately related to both television and radio.
Television entertained and educated; it showed us the
march of history and the unseen face of the world we
lived in. Sometimes it showed us ourselves.
Although a writer of prose, I found stimulus in the BBC’s
tradition of radical drama such as the series Play For
Today. Here was the provocative challenge of ideas,
of honest criticism of our society and a faithfulness
to realities however painful. BBC Northern Ireland kept
this 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 have
been celebrated and explored in creative ways.
In this Big Rock Candy Mountain realm of the
imagination a boy called Sparky searched for his missing
voice 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 sentimentality
and melodrama – the perfect catalysts of the child’s
imagination – there was, too, the swirl
of humour. How that laughing
policeman laughed!
Now, however, I am no longer a child waiting for the
visit of that afflicted woman but just for a moment I see
again the red face of that dial and part of me strains to
hear its voice journeying through the dark tide of the
ether. Perhaps if I listen hard enough it will teach me how
to redeem my life, where to look to find my voice.
Perhaps it will show me how to laugh.
How to really, really laugh.
l
Te
e
46
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.
47
v
of ision
his en
tor ter
y a tain
nd ed a
the nd e
un duca
see
t
n f ed; it sh
ace
o
of t wed us t
he m
he w
arch
orld
we li
ved in
.
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Anne Devlin
© Faber
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 from
London: here is the news at nine o’clock. Hungary . . .
China . . . Mau Mau . . .
With her I discover the Sunday serial. Dickens, Dumas –
the BBC must have been working through the
adaptations alphabetically. The Count of Monte Cristo had
thirteen episodes and I missed the last one! This still feels
like deprivation . . .
Maimi, my grandmother, leans over her crackling paper
to steady the wavering signal; she is searching for
something . . . I am looking through the steaming folds
of clotheshorse washing from my sick bed on the sofa.
I have cotton in my ears and my head is boiling . . . A
burst of music from a place called Luxembourg: ‘When
I was just a little girl I asked my mother what will I be?’.
Granny Anna is sitting bolt upright on her bedsettee
when I catch my first sight of Miss Havisham, whose icy
white locks seem to gather in that nesting wedding cake
and wrap themselves around the very legs of the table.
So I go up close and push myself through the glass wall
of the TV. It seems to me that in my efforts to move
through the glassy screen that separates the world of my
two grannies from the one which I see, it’s as if the glassy
screen is moving through me, a molten river of such
slippery cleanness nothing could live there,
even the fish.
bo
u
an rho
yw od
he
re to ge
to
see t TV.
it.
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.
ie gh
rn
u
o
n
i
I
last
ll
go
I know. But I like it.
wi
We are the last in our neighbourhood to get TV. I will
go anywhere to see it. I crash into Auntie Peggy’s Sunday
afternoons in Lady Street; they are so fed up with me
they all go out. I take to visiting my other granny, Anna,
even though there’s clearly a feud between my father and
his mother. I learn very early on to distinguish between
his feuds and my own – my granny has TV.
Que sera , sera . . . Oh what will I be?
e th
r
a
e
W
48
e
49
Anne Devlin – Playwright and Short-story Writer: Born in Belfast in 1953, she was winner of the 1982 Hennessy Award for her
short 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 as
The Way-Paver (1986). Visiting lecturer in playwriting at the University of Birmingham in 1987, and writer-in-residence at the
University of Lund, Sweden, in 1990.
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46
© Michael Donald
Glenn Patterson
If I had a great big medal I’d pin it on the person who
dreamt up Scene Around Six. I’m sure the play on ‘seen’
was intentional. From that first syllable – sibilant – it
was unmistakably of this place, where most of us are
only ever an excited slip of the tongue away from the
wrong end of the seen-saw. (And though Seen Around
Six was grammatically correct, I half expected London
to give us a collective slap: ‘You saw it around six.’)
I don’t remember news programmes before SAS came
along, though I’m told they were much briefer. It must
have seemed a gamble in 1968 to give Northern Ireland
twenty minutes of nightly news to fill, but, credit where
credit’s due, Northern Ireland rose to the challenge,
serving up, in Scene around Six’s sixteen years, a constant
diet 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 the
foreground ducks just before the vehicle becomes less
and more than the sum of its suddenly lethal parts. I saw
worse things back then, on screen and off, but that
seemed to me the perfect symbol of a society where
everyday objects, and the lives they furnished, were no
longer reliable.
It’s probably too simplistic to say (but I’m a novelist, it
won’t stop me) all this fuelled my childhood desire for
escapism: the Saturday Morning Club at the Majestic,
the James Cagney Season on the BBC. I loved Cagney
the tough guy, of course, but I loved him too in Yankee
Doodle Dandy, the bio-pic of George M. Cohan.
I imagined myself the ‘old timer’ not recognised on the
street as he left the White House with a medal for
the song all the Doughboys were singing, ‘Over There’.
Aged about seven, I tried writing my own song. I tried
writing a lot of other things over the next twenty years
before 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 and
typed a passage. From then until the book was published,
I didn’t change a word, which is rare for me. As rare as
deconstructing cars are these days, thank God; as rare
as Sean Rafferty on our televisions, more’s the pity.
I don’t remember news programmes bef
Scene Around Six came alo
50
Glenn Patterson – Novelist: Born in Belfast in 1961, he studied at the University of East Anglia, taking a Creative Writing MA
under 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).
51
ore
ng, tho
ugh I
’m to
ld th
52
ey w
ere
mu
ch
bri
e fe
r.
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49
Colin Bateman
© Mark Dale
I think many of us regard ourselves as ‘British’ rather
than ‘Irish’ because of the BBC – it’s not about politics
or religion or geography, it’s because we grew up
watching Blue Peter and Jackanory and Dr Who and
Match of the Day and there was absolutely no room at all
for anything that might be considered Irish. There was
no locally-produced TV drama, and the closest we had
to a local superstar was comedian James Young on a
Saturday night after the football and James Ellis’s Belfast
accent on Z Cars. Irish League soccer highlights showed
how woefully inadequate the local game was, with a few
hundred hardy souls attending the matches. 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.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s when Graham Reid’s
A Matter of Choice for Billy, which was followed by two
sequels, exploded onto our screens, that I even became
aware of local drama. Coming from a non-theatre
background, it was the first time I’d seen my own
country properly portrayed on screen – the sense of
humour, the sarcasm, the bigotry, the sheer bloody
madness of it all and it had such a galvanizing effect on
me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired dozens of
aspiring 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 to
love – spot the dodgy Northern Ireland accent. It was
Kenneth Branagh’s TV debut and even though he
was originally from Belfast, his accent sounded
suspiciously 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 to
make for local consumption, and there’s not enough
interest in it on the mainland to make it anything other
than a rare event. It’s a huge pity, because there are
thousands of stories to be told here, and in some ways
there are even more now that we’ve begun to throw off
the shackles of ‘The Troubles’. What’s more we’re the
only BBC region without our own soap opera – now
imagine that! The Scots have it, the Welsh, the English,
obviously. I grew up hearing old folks talking wistfully
about a radio soap called The McCooeys – which ran for
seven years in the 1950s. Seven years! Come on
BBC Northern Ireland, I’m ready
and I’m willing.
I
or had n
tha o id
,
ord t it e ea that t
ball
t
o
o
ere ven ex ens of thousands followed Gaelic f
d in isted.
ng you
I though
i
h
t
e
an
m
o
s
t camogie was
Italia
n resta
urant.
53
54
55
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.
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50
Sinead Morrissey
© Conor Morrissey
Anything to do with poets or poetry on the BBC was
a huge event in my early life. A dramatisation of the
letters of Sylvia Plath that my mother had switched on
by accident when I was thirteen had me transfixed (like
Jo March upon her threshold). I hadn’t heard of Sylvia
Plath, though I’d heard of her husband, and even read
one or two of his poems in the Touchstones anthology in
school. A woman spoke directly into the camera about
getting up at six every morning, when the sleeping
tablets are beginning to wear off, and writing the
greatest poems of her life. I was rapt, already deeply
happy for her, as though it was clear to me what that
could mean. I made a trip to Greene’s bookshop and
found a copy of her selected poems, and from then until
I was eighteen, fell headlong into a Plath obsession,
which, for all its decidedly mixed influence on my own
early poetry, nevertheless clarified one essential thing in
my mind: I wanted to write. Writing was
what I wanted to do with my life.
lac ess
e.
Snippets of other poetry
programmes throughout
my teens. One Easter
Sunday, a camera
n
us
o
sci p
n
o
y c this
m
d
ne from
pe
,
rs o ime
e
t
t
ri
hw
his
ogr
r
p
l
oca
And l
Iris
nt
i
n
o
g
es
n
riti
amm
to w
56
Sinead Morrissey – Poet: Born in Portadown in 1972 and spent her first six years there before moving to Belfast. She was educated
at TCD and her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award (1990) and the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award (2002); she was also
shortlisted 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).
57
exploring the wooden face of a crucified Christ, while all
of George Herbert’s heart-rending study of the Passion
was read aloud in a low, sonorous voice. Whatever grief
like mine. And then came Alan Bennett’s marvellous
series on modern poetry when I was in sixth form.
He perched on a stool and gave a lecture each on
Housman, Auden, MacNeice, Larkin, interspersing his
own text with poems, quietly but powerfully delivered,
with that understated, omnipresent melancholy Bennett
does so well.
And local programmes on Irish writers that opened my
consciousness to writing in this time, from this place.
Glenn Patterson, writer-in-residence at Queen’s
(was there such a thing?), talking about the perceived
culture vacuum in the Protestant community, and how
unfair this perception was. I thought he looked so young
to be so eloquent and on television. I was impressed.
And finally, a loving documentary of John McGahern
that was to mean so much more when I met him at the
Kavanagh weekend in Iniskeen in 1990, where I’d gone
to collect my prize. He wrote only in the mornings,
he said. You can’t maintain the kind of concentration you
need to write properly for more than a few hours.
And then he took us outside and showed us the land and
the two lakes (or was it three?) that bounded his world.
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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52
53
Jo Baker
© Jill Jennings
There were four of us in my year at primary school.
Helen, Neil, Marie and me. The school radio was kept
in the staff-room, and was never moved, so we had to
troop in there to listen to BBC School Radio broadcasts.
This, in brief, is the plot of a programme we heard in the
summer 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 to
another planet. Onboard are two classes of passenger:
the wealthy, housed in luxury, and the overcrowded
poor. A friendship blossoms between a wealthy girl and
a boy from steerage.
Disease breaks out amongst the poor. Scientists develop
a 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 her
medicine with him. He recovers. But then the wealthy
passengers begin to die. The scientists had miscalculated
the dose. It was double the safe level.
The ship, now a charnel house, arrives at the new
planet. The children take an escape pod to the
surface. The planet is pristine, unpopulated:
they must make their lives there.
For the rest of term we immersed ourselves in the world
of that story. Me, Marie, Helen and Neil surviving on
the new planet. Out of bounds, in the fields, we collected
grass 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, the
need 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 scar
on my left calf muscle that I got climbing through the
fence. In part, this is because it was a beautifully-crafted,
challenging, open-ended piece; but it also has to do with
who I am as a writer and the fact that this was the last
great epic narrative game I played as a child. All children
have this facility for creative, imaginative play. Mostly it
gets 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, however
intellectual I’m trying to be, however adult the
material, it’s the little girl in the playground who
takes over. I get lost in whatever story she’s playing.
All children
have this facility for creative,
im
aginative p
lay. Mostly it gets shed or withers away
under the inevitable
pressures of life.
58
59
Jo Baker – Novelist: Born 1973 in Lancashire and educated at Oxford and later at QUB, she published her first novel Offcomer in
2001. She has written for BBC Radio 4 and her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies. Artistic Director of the
Belfast Literary Festival from 2001–2003, she published a second novel, The Mermaid’s Child, in 2004.
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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55
54
Daragh Carville
© Jill Jennings
As a writer, as a dramatist, I owe everything to television.
Earlier generations grew up with radio, the family
gathered round the wireless, tuning the dial into the
scratchy sounds of the Home Service; or with movies,
back when even as small a place as Armagh had three or
four cinemas.
But my generation was the television generation.
Even now there’s something faintly shameful about
saying that. As children we have the idea drilled into us
that watching TV is a waste of time and that real life is
spent out of doors; and don’t get me wrong, much of my
childhood 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 all
that, my childhood is most vividly conjured back into
life – the real Proustian rush happens – when I hear, say,
the theme tune to White Horses, a 1968 Czechoslovakian
children’s programme dubbed into English and shown
on the BBC in the early 1970s.
The heroes of my childhood included people who were,
unknown to me, long dead. The BBC used to fill out the
schedule with old Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton
movies, or, our particular favourite, the obscure crosseyed silent comedian Ben Turpin. For the BBC no doubt
these were just cheap fillers, but for me they were
magical. Then there were the adventure serials from the
1930s, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Or a choice of
Tarzans – Johnny Weismuller in black and white, Ron
Ely in colour (though that may – God forbid – have
been on ITV).
I was born in 1969 and grew up in Armagh.
By my time Armagh had only one
Ie
cinema left, the Ritz on Market
nd
ed
has
Street, and even that didn’t last
eve up
long. And if access to the
ryt bec
cinema was limited,
hi om
access to the theatre
n
These were the stories that first fired my imagination.
From before I could even read, these were the stories that
made me fall in love with storytelling. They were stories
that were carried from the living room to the
playground, and on from there, folded away and packed
in the memory. It was because of these stories that
I became a writer.
Th
at
yw
r
la
do
ap
to
ng
i
g
wi
t
th
igh
t
ion
vis
ele
an
.
Daragh Carville – Playwright and Screenwriter: From Armagh, Daragh Carville was born in 1969 and educated at the University
of 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 2003
and has recently produced the screenplay for his first feature-film, Middletown.
was non-existent. That I ended up becoming
a playwright and screenwriter, then, has everything to do
with television. And television was extraordinary then,
children’s television especially, a strange cultural
ecosystem of its own, where White Horses could rub
shoulders with an old Abbott and Costello movie,
or a homegrown cartoon like Mr Benn could run
alongside the French-dubbed-into-English swashbuckler
The Flashing Blade.
60
ds
cre
enw
rite
r
61
62
11137 BBC LIVING AIR final
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Page 59
Image Index
p7
Sam McAughtry
1. Sam Hanna Bell,
BBC NI producer
2. Gloria Hunniford,
presenter
p8
A.T.Q. Stewart
3. Tommy Handley
in It’s That Man Again
(ITMA), 1944
4. The German identity
papers of William Joyce
(‘Lord Haw-Haw’)
5. Alvar Liddell, the BBC
Home Service newsreader
and announcer, 1956
p 11 John Morrow
6. Frank O’Connor (right)
with John Boyd, producer
of The Arts In Ulster,1966
7. The Brains Tr ust team
including, bottom left,
C.E.M. Joad, 1943
p 12 Christina Reid
8. Jimmy Clitheroe,
‘The Clitheroe Kid’, 1960
9. Peter Brough and
Archie Andrews, 1955
10. Joseph Tomelty,
creator of The McCooeys
p 15 Michael Longley
11. Dick Bar ton,
Special Agent, 1949
12. Toytown: ‘Mr Growser
Moves’, 1957
13. The Goons: Spike
Milligan, Peter Sellers and
Harry Secombe, 1955
p 16 Jonathan Bardon
14. David Hammond,BBC
NI producer and presenter
15. Douglas Carson, BBC
NI Schools producer, with
a young Rathlin islander
16. James Hawthorne,
producer, at Lowwood
Primary School for
Today and Yesterday, 1966
p 19 Seamus Heaney
17. Trial television weather
chart, 1936
18. BBC Broadcasts to
Schools, 1953
p 20 Bernard MacLaverty
19. James Young (right),
‘Derek the window cleaner’
in The McCooeys, with
a real-life window cleaner
20. R adiophonic Wo rkshop:
programming a voltagecontrolled Electronic
Music Synthesiser, 1974
21. Grandstand:
a cameraman films the
football results, 1981
p 23 Sam McBratney
22. John Boyd, Senior
Talks Producer NI, talks
to St. John Ervine on his
80th birthday, 1963
23. A family of radio
listeners in 1951
p 24 Marianne Elliott
24. Maigret: Rupert Davies
as Inspector Maigret, 1961
25.Tommy Trinder, host of
Trinder Box, with guest Phil
Silvers (Sergeant Bilko),
1959
26. Captain Terence
O’Neill appearing on the
BBC TV programme
Inquiry, 1968
p 27 Frank Ormsby
27. Jack Loudan, author of
Mrs Lally’s Lodgers
28. Peter O’Sullevan, BBC
horse-racing commentator
and correspondent, 1956
p 40 Paul Muldoon
44. Kenneth Horne and
Betty Marsden, Beyond Our
Ken, 1960
45. John D.Stewart,
broadcaster
p 28 Graham Reid
29. A Matter of Choice
for Billy, 1983
30. The Big Donke y:
a tense moment with
principal actors Tom
Bell and Joseph Tomelty,
1963
p 43 David Park
46. Play For Today:
Bernard Hill and Alison
Steadman in Our Flesh
and Blood, 1977
47. Play for Today:
Helen Mirren in
Blue Remembered Hills, 1978
p 31 Ciaran Carson
31.Tuning a wireless set,
1934
32. George Cowling
with television weather
chart, 1954
p 44 Anne Devlin
48. The Three Musketeers:
Brian Blessed as Porthos, 1966
49. Great Expectations:
Joan Hickson as
Miss Havisham, 1981
p 32 Annie McCartney
The R a i l w a y C h i l d ren:
33.T
Jenny Agutter as Bobbie and
Frederick Treves as Father,
1968
34. The Silver Sword, 1970
35. Fluff Picks One: Alan
‘Fluff’ Freeman in the
recording studio, 1988
p 47 Glenn Patterson
50. Scene Around Six:
presenter Barry Cowan
51. BBC1 Ident Logo
52. BBC Television Centre
after explosion of car bomb
by controlled detonation,
2001
p 35 Martin Lynch
36. Norman Stockton,
news journalist and
presenter
37. The Billy Cotton Band
Show: from the Cotton’s
Capers series, 1963
38. Walter Love, presenter
p 48 Colin Bateman
53. Match of the Day:
presenter Jimmy Hill, 1973
54. Z Cars: James Ellis,
Frank Windsor and
Brian Blessed, 1978
55. Jackanor y:
‘The Dribblesome Teapots’,
read by Kenneth Williams,
1978
p 36 Medbh McGuckian
39. That Was the Week That
Was: David Frost, 1963
40. Johnny Morris as ‘The
Hot Chestnut Man’, 1962
41. Dr Who:
William Hartnell as the
Doctor, 1963
p 39 Malachi O’Doherty
42. Mrs Dale’s Diary
cast, 1955
43. Richard Baker reading
the BBC TV News, 1954
informing...educating...entertaining...connecting...
p 51 Sinead Morrissey
56. Alan Bennett, 1966
57. John McGahern,
novelist
p 52 Jo Baker
58. Broadcasts to schools:
teachers’ booklets
59. Horizon: ‘Mars 1 –
Life on Mars’, 2001
p 55 Daragh Carville
60. Hollywood sign in the
Hollywood Hills, 2002
61. Thorn 2000 colour
television, 1968
62. A selection of remote
controls, 2005
Acknowledgements
Project Manager/Editor:
Biographical/Picture Research:
Producer:
Design:
Anne Tannahill
Francis Jones
Mark Adair
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, Conor
Morrissey, 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.