Another Thing

It’s no exaggeration to say that being involved with Radio Foyle had a profound effect on the rest of my career.  As a direct result of working/playing there, some doors opened immediately and others further down the line.  One early joy was being asked to write for ‘Radio Times’.  I’m not sure that the tale of how this came about can be conveyed as well on paper as in speech, but I’ll try it anyway.  

My first series for Foyle focused on my own full-time job and was most originally called ‘Teacher, Teacher.’  Just before the first programme was due to be aired, I had a call from a very posh-sounding gentleman in London called Chaaahles – Charles to you.  He told me that ‘Radio Times’ had commissioned Sean McMahon to write an article on my upcoming series and could I please contact him.  ‘Can’t I write it myself?’ I asked.  No, I couldn’t he said because I was too close to the material and they wanted a more objective viewpoint.  But was I interested in writing for them?  Yes, indeed I was.

And indeed Chaaahles took me at my word.  A few days later, his plummy voice came down the line again.  Was I still interested?  I was.  Did I know anything about peegs and hawses and kys?  Sorry? Peegs and hawses and kys.  Pardon?  After excuses about a bad line etc. I finally cracked it.  Pigs and horses and cows.  No, I didn’t know a lot about farm animals.  Apparently that was fine and I was charged with writing 1,000 words about a future outside broadcast from Enniskillen Agricultural Show.

I clapped my hands with delight at this fresh opportunity.  Dismay and consternation soon followed.  I’d rushed out to buy an armful of farming magazines, but neither ‘The Progressive Farmer’ nor ‘The Small Stock Journal’ nor ‘Grassmen’ nor ‘Practical Pigs’ was throwing up any inspiration.  How to get a handle on this?  How to make it interesting?  Anita was as much use as a chocolate fireguard.  She wouldn’t even deign to think about the subject.  Farming, muck, ugh.  She shuddered and not a hair moved.  In the end, I based it on fair days in Cushendall.

My mate Chaahles loved it and more commissions followed.

What was it about those times?  There was such optimism and trust abroad.  Russell McKay offered me a job without ever meeting me (possibly because he’d never met me), Ian Kennedy gave me, and so many others, the wings to fly on air and here too was the bold Chaahles, who didn’t know me from a hole in the ground – hardly spoke the same language - assuming I could write just ‘cos I said so.  And there was me, making so many forays out of my comfort zone.  Probably because I didn’t have the wit to do otherwise.

Those were definitely the days, my friends, and Derry was the place to spend them in.

Lovely as the village and people were, everybody in my birthplace, Cushendall, knew the other’s business and I felt constrained.  Then we went to Belfast, where few knew or cared and I felt isolated.  And then came Derry with the best of both worlds.  A city with the heart of a village, a place to participate when the mood took you or withdraw when it didn’t.

I felt free and empowered in Derry.  I did a prodigious amount of work there and (I don’t know what it is about brushes) but I was frequently as daft as one too.  Nowhere else would I have dyed my hair green for Paddy’s Day, nowhere else would I have spent a day with the bin-men and nowhere else would my late and bearded husband have reveled in dressing up as the Sugar Plum Fairy.   But that’s another story…………………………………..

This is About a lot More Than Football

Michael O’Donnell, editor of A Game of Two Halves: The Terry Harkin Story, says Derry City's revival wasn’t just about the rebirth of a soccer club - it was about a lost city finding its voice again.

It was 1985. Ulster said no.

The Irish League, the League of Ireland and UEFA said yes.

In our part of the world it is impossible to keep politics out of anything and football is no exception. There were political reasons for Derry City’s expulsion from the Irish League in 1972 and that murky world needed to be navigated if the club was to again take its rightful place at the top table.

The story of how this happened is brilliantly covered in Kevin Harkin’s biography of his father Terry, ‘A Game Of Two Halves’. The inside story of how a casual chat over a cup of tea saw Terry float the idea of Derry entering the League of Ireland.

Terry, Tony O’Doherty, Eamon McLaughlin and Eddie Mahon, made it happen.

It is remarkable that within 18 months their dream became a reality. Even more so to realise that five years from that chat between Terry and Eddie, Derry City completed the first, and to date, only, clean sweep of League of Ireland trophies, 1989’s unique Treble.

But football is merely a subplot to the story.

This is about a city finding its voice. A city tormented by years of crippling unemployment, under investment, gerrymandered elections. Seeing our streets on the television was a daily event, the pictures festooned by the familiar voiceover words “shooting,” “bombing,” “killing,” “murder,” “condemnation.”

The narrative was changing.

I was eight years old when Derry left the Irish League. I was 22 when on September 8 1985, Home Farm wrote its name into our history as our first League of Ireland opponents. And, decent types that they are, they obliged us by losing 3-1.

What happened next I never saw coming. The way the city was consumed by football. We had our own heroes, our own players to sing about. Even our own songs.

This has never been better explained than by one of our own, the late Ryan McBride when he said “Young boys grow up dreaming to move across the water to Man United or Celtic, but my dream was to play for Derry City and to captain them.”

He did play for and captain Derry. And with such distinction they named a stadium after him.

This is what the club brought but not just to the sporting arena.

Hope. Ambition. The realisation that good things don’t just happen to other people in other places, peaked over the horizon.

People now had something positive to hang on to, a sense of purpose, togetherness, a shared aspiration. Even those who had no interest in football, found themselves in the middle of it. Nothing brings out the sandwich making expertise in Derry women than a good wake or an away match.

Following Derry in those days was to take a Master’s Degree in Irish geography, with fans able to proclaim with commendable confidence, how long it would take to get to EMFA, Newcastlewest, or Cobh if you left at 10.30 on Saturday morning, with allowances made for traffic entering Ardee, (it could bottleneck sometimes but they did have lovely floral arrangements to admire), and bathroom breaks.

It was during those moments that Derry’s greatest export, its people, became a living breathing advertisement for the city.

Thousand would descend on these towns and villages, drink their bars dry, fill their hotels and bring an unexpected financial boon. Footballs fans’ reputations at this time was poor, hosts were initially wary, however it took but a short time to see the truth, families travelled together to watch their team and have a good time.

There was never any trouble, it was, if you will, like games at Brandywell without the need for the local constabulary, policed by consent. No-one stepped out of line.

It’s a sobering thought that it is now 37 years since Derry joined the League of Ireland.

Our city, geographically, politically, culturally, and economically, can be viewed as an outpost by outsiders.

We disagree.

This is the place that produced two Nobel Laureates, chart topping singers and songwriters, award winning actors, and many, many internationally sports people.

The talent seeps through the barriers put in front of us.

We never stop.

We never give in and we never give up.

The success of Derry City is a huge manifestation of that attitude. Our football club was taken away from us and robbed generations of players of the opportunity to play the game ay senior level, and who knows, follow their predecessors Jobby Crossan, Fay Coyle, and Terry Harkin, and their successors James McClean, Shane Duffy and Paddy McCourt across the water and into the international game.

The motto of Barcelona “Mes que un club,” More Than A Club, travels well. It sits comfortably with Derry City.

As Felix Healy said after he scored the winner in the 1989 FAI Cup Final to secure the Treble.

“This particular day was more than about football. It was about a community. It was about a community that was wronged and forgotten about. It was this community saying ‘look at us now.’”

He’s right.

Look at us now.

Just look at us now.

Another Story - How Not to Offend a Tullyally Farmer

A brutal reality check for Anne this week, as her new radio boss gently explains that she's got the perfect voice for newsprint... 

Anita started, continued and ended her broadcasting career in a totally professional and competent way.  It was a joy to listen to her mellifluous delivery, command of language and distinctive, amusing take on life.  I, on the other hand, crashed disastrously onto the airwaves and Foyle’s listeners must have heaved a collective sigh of relief when Libby came back to assume proper control of her programme.  Those two weeks of holiday cover were the longest of my life.

Poor Maureen Gallagher was tasked with keeping me in line.  My stint on the afternoon magazine slot was my first as a presenter and Maureen’s first as a producer of other than her own material.  However bad I was, everything would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for Maureen and her expertise.  Most of the programme was live and, in the midst of chaos, we did have some laughs.  Like the time we covered an agricultural show and a goat attempted to eat my clipboard. Or the interview I managed to do with a sex-change model (man to woman) without once mentioning ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’.  For some reason I reckoned those words would give the vapours to Brandywell housewives and find disfavour with Tullyally farmers.

Some items were pre-recorded and I clearly remember one morning  interviewing a jeweller from Hatton Garden.  We were going to insert the clip in the afternoon by the way the phone-call was live.  I kept making mistakes and referring to morning.  About the third time I did this, I got so frustrated at myself I blurted out, ‘Oh shit!’  Maureen calmly came in with, ‘Cut out the crap, Anne.’  How apt.

The one thing Maureen couldn’t control was my lazy, drawly speech.  In what amounted to a debrief  after Libby’s triumphal return, Ian Kennedy said, ‘Anne, you’re great on the radio -  if it weren’t for your voice.’  Woe was me.  I went from Foyle straight to Anita’s where I exhausted her supply of tissues and wine.  And sympathy no doubt.

So, the end of my broadcasting career?  Not at all.  Ian seemed to like my ideas and interviewing style, so I moved to producing recorded pieces where I could largely edit out my own voice or keep trying out the links until I got a bit of life and speed into them.  God bless Mr. Kennedy.

Some months into contributing to Foyle, Anita and I walked into reception to a wondrous sight.  We’d been allocated our very own pigeon holes!  Proof positive that we had our feet under the table.  Those of you who have only met Anita fleetingly will find it hard to imagine this largely composed and unflappable public figure jumping up and down like a two year old and shrieking with delight.  I, of course, took it all in my stride. ☺☺

There was only one problem.  Most days we’d see everyone else’s pigeon holes bulging with interesting-looking communications, whereas ours only tended to house the lonely – but welcome – payslips or periodic memos.  Enter John Friel, the perfect gentleman who was about to present his new classical music programme, in between headmastering a local school.  John must have heard me bemoaning my lack of mail because a couple of days later I was ecstatic to see a respectable duo of proper letters in my box.  A wee white envelope and a long white one, both posted, one typed, one hand-written.  And both from John.   What a darlin’ man.

Anita never threw anything out.  Her capacious roof-space absorbed clothes, shoes, books, teaching notes, debating speeches, article drafts, theatre programmes – you name it, it went skywards.  She was even capable of getting sentimental over used biros.  I used to rib her mercilessly .  Then I unearthed my huge store of Derry memorabilia.  Pot, kettle…..she’d have the last laugh now.  I’ve even found newspaper clippings about a series I don’t recall doing.  But that’s another story……………………..