Pop Goes show could have got it so wrong, but its take on past hits right note

BBCNI’s nostalgic TV jukebox covers our troubled times with a rare sensitivity, writes Gail Walker

Two years ago, when the series was first launched, I had reservations about the whole concept of BBC NI’s Pop Goes Northern Ireland. After all, its RTE counterpart Reeling In The Years and various BBC ‘I Love 1973 etc’ episodes, could at least pepper the annual trail of months with quirky tales, heart-warming vignettes, amazing rescues and celebrity weddings, in among the hard news items.

You couldn’t hold out much hope of that for Boom Goes Northern Ireland.

The prospect of, say, every single year from 1968 until 1998 and beyond filled with grim slayings on one hand and everything from The New Seekers to The Spice Girls and Boyzone, via the Rollers, U2, Whitney and Madge, on the other, was too much to contemplate.

How could that not be crass, disrespectful, tasteless, selective, nasty and embarrassing? Well, rather easily, as it has turned out.

It’s been one of the silent hits of local broadcasting, managing to navigate with some aplomb all the obstacles above — and a few more I maybe hadn’t even imagined in detail.

A few days ago, for example, there was a Facebook post about the programme by Ann Travers.

Gulp, you might think. This is where it all goes wrong.

Ann is one of the several formidable campaigners for justice on behalf of the victims of the Troubles, happily very visible and strong-willed, which is useful because she is also the subject of some of the most astonishingly vitriolic and hateful abuse on social media and in real life.

It’ll be the 1984 episode, then. The one devoted to the year in which the IRA murdered her sister Mary and tried to murder her magistrate father Tom and her mother Joan outside St Brigid’s Church on Derryvolgie Avenue in south Belfast as they emerged from Mass. There, in a neat little package of unspeakable grief, you have the whole catastrophe courted by the Pop Goes enterprise. But you’d be wrong. As indeed I was.

It happens that Ann, as always of course, spoke with grace and good sense when she saw last week the first airing of the episode devoted to that year which was horrendous to many, sadly, but also, very particularly, to her. The harrowing footage showed the scene following the murder, then cut to lovely Ann and her stoical mum walking into church, where Bishop Daly had strong words for the killers and their supporters.

“Thank you to all on Pop Goes Northern Ireland for such an amazing series,” wrote Ann. “In this clip not only am I reminded of how young and devastated I was but also my lovely brothers and Mum,” she added. “My Grandad and my aunts are also in this clip. How did we all survive it?”

I think that’s as good a review as the programme, or as the series as a whole, will ever get.

Her final question was, of course, about how her family managed to endure and outlast the unimaginable.

However, it is a question with a wider resonance. How did any of us survive it? Indeed, did we actually survive it at all? That is, did we manage to get out of it in fact as lightly damaged as we like to think we did?

Ann Travers’s remarks drew me back to that 1984 edition. Watching it and a few others from the series on iPlayer was certainly a disturbing experience.

One of the things you get from that now is how incredibly old the footage is! How long ago it all was! As the years roll backwards, the images move from a strangely bleached-out colour to a grainy and indistinct black-and-white — soon, everything is like fairly bad CCTV footage and feels more like 1950s Alabama or 1930s northern England.

This is definitely the stuff of History and its younger brother, Age.

Look at the strange fashions! We know Belfast had its punks and New Wave, metalheads and Ska fans, but it also had Slade, The Sweet and Spandau Ballet — and far more of them!

The cars — Ford Cortinas, Vauxhall Cavaliers, Austin Metros. The fashions (rah-rah skirts and catsuits anybody?). Men seemed to be inordinately fond of parka jackets. And, of course, the buildings (or rather the lack of certain ones). Look, there’s Royal Avenue before CastleCourt. There’s Crumlin Road Gaol. There’s the Old Bandstand in Cornmarket.

Then there were the half-forgotten Secretaries of State: Humphrey Atkins, Jim Prior, Tom King, Peter Brooke… minor characters from a story so long ago.

Perhaps most poignant were the shops: Christie’s Wallpaper Shop, the Spinning Mill, Golden Discs, Caroline Music, Chalet D’or…

I even found myself feeling a pang of nostalgia for the security gates and getting your bags searched… well, not really.

So much has changed. Literally, decades have passed. In the case of that 1984 episode, 34 years.

That’s a long time. Just over a third of a century. I was still at school then, hadn’t even done O-levels. Children just born then may have marriages and divorces behind them today.

We who lived through it watch those flickering images and remind ourselves that it was all so long ago. It’s like watching Gerry And The Pacemakers on YouTube or an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour.

It’s all Past Time shops, vintage clothing, Seventies and Eighties themed parties with the costumes hired out down town somewhere.

Except, Mary Travers wasn’t murdered 34 years ago. It was yesterday. For many among us, those savage attacks happen each and every day, without ceasing and all in full 21st century colour. That can be how grief works its way through a life, becoming more contemporary every moment.

What Pop Goes Northern Ireland ‘got’ — and had the courage to act upon — was that it’s not just the terrible events that can trigger surprisingly vivid memories, collapsing time itself, but that even the seemingly trivial and transient and harmless and innocent can bring back the wry and the poignant. We are back in the moment, engulfed again by the horror of it all, astonished that we made it through at all.

The past is always with us. There is an artistry about how to handle it with respect and sensitivity, but also with a lightness of touch which isn’t overwhelming.

The Belfast poet John Campbell has a piece called simply ‘Ned Keenan’:

Whenever I lift an orange, Ned Keenan comes to mind. He could judge their sweetness, Just by stripping off the rind. ‘A sour one won’t peel easy,’ He told me with a smile,

In the days he bossed the orange boats,

And we helped him stack the pile. An explosion in McGurk’s Bar Left him and others dead. Whenever I peel an orange, I always think of Ned.

Memory, in its strange meanderings and associations, cannot be stopped. Guess what? It turns out, as Pop Goes Northern Ireland demonstrates, that’s not something to shy away from.