Gaybo delivers the Gettysburg Address of radio handovers
Byrne’s Lyric FM show, which has been interrupted by his cancer diagnosis, is probably the one he has always wanted to do, writes Declan Lynch
IHAPPENED to be listening to Gay Byrne’s show on Lyric FM last Sunday when he handed over to the next presenter Evelyn Grant with a few lines about his possible cancer diagnosis which would require tests and “bangs and wallops”, and would prevent him doing the show this week.
Being unprepared for it, for his listeners the moment passed with little more ceremony than any other radio handover, that peculiar convention whereby presenter speaks to presenter until such time as it seems decent to stop speaking and to get on with their lives.
I heard it on the radio in the kitchen as I was passing through, nothing much on my mind but the football match I was about to watch on Sky Sports and, as it landed, for a few moments I couldn’t quite decide which part of the statement was the most significant for the speaker, because it consisted mainly of three parts to which he gave equal weight — the cancer bit, the line about what excellent health he had enjoyed throughout his life, and the part about being unavailable to present the show the following week. If you had asked me for an instant reaction, I’d probably have said that what Gaybo was really getting across here was his feeling of disappointment that he couldn’t do the show — maybe even that most ancient of showbiz concerns, the idea that someone else might come in and do it better.
There was an undercurrent too with the “bangs and wallops”, which sounded at first to me like the “bangs” you hear on Bonfire Night, a kind of a celebration of the fabulous machines they have in hospitals now, to sort you out.
So it was only when I had sat down to enjoy Middlesbrough v Chelsea that it struck me that I had just heard the ultimate handover — the Gettysburg Address of handovers in its brevity, precision and its striking of the right tone.
If you are Gaybo, after all, there are many ways you can convey this information, your challenge is knowing what not to do, what to leave out. And here Gaybo left out nearly everything that the rest of us would leave in, perhaps feeling that when the word started to spread, there should be at least one statement out there — the original — which wasn’t making a big deal of it.
It also seemed to be strangely in keeping with the spirit of his Lyric show, which I do not seek out — like I said, on Sundays I mostly seek out football — but which seems to find me anyway.
One afternoon last year I was driving on the N11, probably worrying about the loss of form which Liverpool would almost certainly have been suffering at that time, when Gaybo started to talk about Brian Friel, who had just died.
All week we’d been hearing Official Ireland mourning Friel as only they know how, by saying the same things over and over, mainly his line that “confusion is not an ignoble condition” (God, they love that one), and the device in Philadelphia, Here I Come! of Gar Public and Gar Private.
And Gaybo had much to say about that device too, except now I found that I was actually listening. That I was becoming absorbed by the way he recalled seeing this in the theatre for the first time, like he was back there again, bringing his audience back there with him.
It clarified for me a lukewarm compliment you’d hear about him, that he is “a good actor”. Now I realised the truth of it, that, like an actor, he is able to make these lines sound like a story that is coming to him at exactly the same time that it’s coming to the audience. And that by contrast a lot of other presenters are more like actors in rehearsal, reading the lines but not yet feeling them.
Many of his listeners have probably had a lot worse than lukewarm compliments to bestow on Gaybo over the years, and part of the strange attraction of his Lyric programme is that it causes listeners to revisit various opinions about him and about life in general which, rightly or wrongly — probably wrongly — they held a long time ago.
Men especially have always been able to nominate at least one thing about Gaybo that drove them mad, in my case it was the way he would play some magnificent record on his show and then barely acknowledge it or, worse, dismiss it as some kind of folly.
Now I realise that he loves music as much as anyone ever loved it — it’s just that it’s jazz that he loves, not rock ’n’ roll.
So it turns out his Lyric show is not this mellowness wafting from the radio afterlife, it sounds like the show he always wanted to do. Playing jazz records and putting us straight on a few matters.
Which is why he would have noted in his mordant way that perhaps the most important line of all in that handover was the most under-reported. Yes, he would be out for the following week, but — he added at the end — he would hopefully be back the week after that.
We hope so too, because he’s really getting the hang of that thing.