I Made My First Broadcast Around Seventy Years Ago, When The

I made my first broadcast around seventy years ago, show Gloria Hunniford asked for more stories like when the wireless reached the bedrock classes that. My broadcasting brand was set in concrete. through the hire-purchase system. In the early I suppose there wasn’t a lot of Protestant humour 1930s light and classical music was broadcast around at that time. weekly by the local BBC from the Ulster Museum and my mother and I would stop what we were Radio sets a stern test for writing. Every word must doing to listen to Mozart, Bizet, Verdi, or to switch work for a living. An apprenticeship on this off Wagner. medium helps enormously in the task of snipping the long nails off the work. Conversely, reaching ‘Do you hear them all coughing when the music radio writing standards means that, when set out on stops?’, I said to Mother. ‘If I were to go there and the page, the voice of the author is always there. cough, you could tell all the neighbours: “That’s my son coughing on the wireless”.’ She just rolled her In the last twenty-eight years I have covered most eyes as usual but I went the following week to the broadcasting fields – drama, documentaries, Museum anyway. When I got home I said to presenting, script writing, and religious Mother, ‘Did you hear me coughing?’ broadcasting. The patience of many a producer has been tried, and I well know it. Like many a writer I ‘I certainly did,’ she said, ‘but you only coughed the am in debt to the likes of Paul Muldoon, Sam once, in the first break.’ Hanna Bell, Paul Evans, Jim Sheridan, Bernagh Brims, John Boyd and many others. For regional ‘I know, I said, ‘that’s because, after that, they threw broadcasting to exist, local talent is vital. It says a me out.’ good deal for Radio Ulster that it hasn't just dipped into a pool that was there: it has nurtured and In October 1977, I took part in my first real live created artistic talent that, under the miasma of the broadcast. The occasion was the publication of my Troubles, might otherwise have never lightened first book, The Sinking of the Kenbane Head our day. (Blackstaff Press). 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 Image courtesy of Sam McAughtry I have been trying to work out when I heard my It was the age of ITMA and the variety shows and first radio broadcast and I think it must have been dance bands – Ambrose and his orchestra, Billy about the time of the Franco incident. My father Cotton – and crooners singing ‘Smoke gets in your came home from work one evening and said that eyes’ and ‘When they begin the beguine’. And of Franco had been on the tram. I was puzzled by this. course there was radio drama. My father said it I could not understand how the Spanish general, would never work, because the disembodied voice with four columns advancing on Madrid and a fifth could not capture the magic of the theatre. Within column in the city itself, had time to go gallivanting weeks he was listening with the zeal of the on one of our old Belfast red trams. converted. Television still lay in the future. All the Later it was explained to me. My father had accents were received English, and there was very nicknamed a neighbour who looked like the man in little regional input. the news. I can’t say that radio much influenced my early I certainly remember hearing the radio in my desire to write, but it did occur to my adolescent grandparents’ home when one of my aunts, who mind that the BBC might be a market for budding had a fine soprano voice, gave a song recital from authors. I prepared a script about the ancient Celtic the local station. Our own radio set arrived in 1939, monastery at Nendrum and sent it to Ormeau and changed life for ever. My clearest memories are Avenue. It was politely returned. I made a vow of the wartime broadcasts. Listening to the chimes never to have anything more to do with either the of Big Ben and the nine o’clock news was a daily BBC or Irish history. I would become a creative ritual, and newsreaders Bruce Belfrage and Alvar artist, a poet or a novelist. How the gods must have Liddell became almost like members of the family. laughed! I was destined to find my career in Irish At 10 pm you could, if you wanted, tune in to history, and to make many broadcasts from Hamburg and hear the Nazi version of the news, Ormeau Avenue. But it has left me with a curious read by the traitor William Joyce. He had an sensation that somehow I have not yet finished my affected upper-class accent and always began with school homework. I still want to be a writer when I the words ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling’. Very grow up. cleverly, the government never jammed the station, and ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ became a figure of fun, a morale-booster instead of the opposite. Image courtesy of A.T.Q. Stewart My uncle James guided my infant right hand to the that our own church in May Street had been a cat’s whisker, the half of a headphone clutched to hotbed of sedition, with muskets secreted in the my left ear . And suddenly, shockingly, a fat lady roof space! All this my father, an Orangeman, sang (screeched, rather: Dame Nellie Melba, the reluctantly verified. toast of Wogga Wogga, I learnt later). As one who, against the odds, aspired to be a writer, And thus began for me a lifelong, haphazard I owe a debt to BBC radio, and not only because it tutorial provided by radio, Hollywood and, later, provided an outlet for my early work at a fraught television – plus books, of course. ‘Elementary’ time when outlets were few. It also brought me the schooling in those days meant just that: a litany of voice of the great Frank O’Connor, reading and English monarchs, geography the red patches on an discussing his work. It was a revelation. For all his atlas (but we were early readers, thanks largely fame, O’Connor considered himself to be in the to comics). line of the hearthside seanchai´, telling his tale to the ‘rapt faces in the firelight’. The ‘literary’ writer who Uncle James gave us an accumulator (wet battery) lost sight of those faces, he said, did so at his peril. set and on it we followed the progress of the Second World War, laughed at ITMA and listened to The The faces in the glow of today’s electronic hearth Brains Trust. I recall vividly hearing Professor Joad are generally rapt – and if not, the remote is to mention General Wolfe at Quebec and the ‘French hand. Critics may carp, but that other presence in and Indian’ wars in America. Indians! . the living-room has become a great comfort and Cowboys?. thinks I, and with the help of my companion, not least for the often solitary folk of library ticket was soon up to my neck in the mire of my vintage. personalities, politics and mayhem that was the eighteenth century – a mire in which, sixty-odd George Bernard Shaw once railed against ‘flannelled years on, I still wallow happily. fools to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom’. Age and the box have brought this fool a weekly It was from a footnote in a condensed history of microcosm of all the intrigue, greed and vanity of revolutionary France that I first heard about the the eighteenth century: Premiership football. 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Then, in a radio For that I am eternally grateful. programme written by Sam Hanna Bell, I discovered that the rebels were Presbyterians and Image courtesy of John Morrow I’d like to thank the BBC for helping me to survive And that’s what I still love about the radio, whether the longest day of the week in my childhood. On I’m listening to it or writing for it. The visual Sundays, I swear to God, I might have died young images that words and sound conjure in the mind’s of boredom in Belfast, if it hadn't been for the eye know no bounds. In the imagination of every wireless. Everything else about Sunday was dire. listener, it can be ‘whatever you think yourself’. Sunday School in Sunday-Best-Clothes; Best Behaviour; No Rowdy Playing in the The first drama I ever heard and saw in my mind’s street. And no point in going to the local eye was BBC Northern Ireland’s The McCooeys. It playground, even if you were allowed out, because was a family favourite. Every character in it was just the swings and roundabouts were padlocked on the like somebody we knew. Bella McCoubrey from the Lord’s Day by order of Belfast Corporation. Stoney Mountain was as real to me as the big woman from the country who lived up our street. Sunday afternoon was given over to the tedious task In those pre-TV days, the wireless was the magic of helping my mother to clean her collection of box.

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