Gay deployed great political skill in the turmoil of Montrose
Radio producer John Caden reflects on his years of working with the man he describes as ‘the best teacher possible’
‘He was kind and decent and always considerate’
GAY and I were leaving the radio canteen one morning after The Gay Byrne Show. We were talking the usual post-programme stuff: what had worked, what had been worthy but dull, what had been rubbish.
There was casual guff about managers and management and problems. It wasn’t serious business, but I knew that, at times, Gay had been through some tricky rows with what we called the ‘Third Floor’.
He had told me on occasions that he believed some of the brass hated him, even wanted rid of him. But Gay was a great survivor. In an industry where, down the years, some very talented people had been summarily axed, I had marvelled at how he had kept his shows for so long, and at the personal political skills he employed to cover his back.
As we walked, he took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a leaflet announcing a ‘Rosary Evening’ in a South County Dublin church. “Would you put that in the programme file for tomorrow?” he asked, mentioning that it had come from a very senior manager thought to be a top Knight of Columbanus. “You must be mad,” I said, displaying some of my own prejudice.
“John,” he replied, “you make the decisions on what goes into our programme on 365 days of the year. This 15 seconds is a small ask.”
As he walked off, I thought: nice one. In two short sentences he had solved the conundrum of unstoppable force meets immovable object, and left not a ripple in the air.
There was much that was unstoppable and immovable in the internal turmoil of RTE from the 1960s onwards, during the campaigns for contraception, divorce, abortion and homosexuality and personal rights.
Gay’s enduring legacy as a broadcaster is the manner in which he deployed those political skills during this time. The radical modernising of Ireland remained a peaceful revolution that employed neither Armalite nor IED. Largely because peaceful protesters had access to TV studios, the printed page, telephone access to radio programmes and ultimately the power of the citizen in the ballot box. It was a textbook lesson in modern democratic change.
It would be ridiculous to claim that Gay did all this on his own. There were many others in the media who played significant parts. Among them, Mary Kenny and Anne Harris in the Irish Press, and Mary Maher, Maeve Binchy and Nell McCafferty in The Irish Times. But Gay had the power of television and radio and a live mass audience.
While others had the message, he controlled the most powerful medium.
So: who was this guy and how did he get himself to the heart of the modernising of Irish society?
His childhood was of the early years of Irish independence, in ways that were both typical and untypical: his family was devoutly Catholic, his inner-city Dublin home modest but comfortable, his father in a secure labouring job with Guinness. But his father was an ex-British army soldier of World War I who had fought in the trenches of
Ypres; his uncle was killed in those same trenches. That was a story kept quiet in independent Ireland.
By his 20s, he was presenting on ITV in Manchester — even getting the first TV interview with The Beatles. By 1966 he was back in Dublin to a full-time job as producer and presenter of The Late Late, and married to another TV celebrity, Kathleen Watkins.
As he told Deirdre Purcell for his autobiography, Dublin then was a place “to be young, ambitious, and in a position of some power and influence”. Little did anybody realise just how much power and influence he would exercise.
Gay was much loved and respected by all who worked close to him.
I started as a researcher on The Late Late around 1975. I had come from an administration job and had little but a hard neck to recommend me for the job. I knew nothing about TV programmes or research, but I was determined to learn fast.
Gay was the best teacher possible. He gave me only three pieces of advice that stood by me throughout my years in RTE: 1. Good research is never wasted; 2. Good research delivers answers, not questions; 3. Good research is dropping a bad prospect before he or she gets on air.
When he got back from the UK, Gay recognised very quickly that controversy was box office. Big audiences brought big advertising, and restrained critics on the ‘Third Floor’.
Showbiz celebrities and colourful personalities were crucial to the mix, but there was also a huge appetite for the “issues” which came from the people whom Tommy Tiernan called “our tribe” on Tuesday’s commemorative Late Late. The Late Late Show became their national platform. They spoke openly of love, passion, sex, anger, nationality, belief, politics and sexual difference.
At the same time, the daily Gay Byrne Show on radio was the beginning of what we now call social media. The letters and phone calls were the Facebook, Twitter and Tinder of the time. Any citizen with a story and a telephone could take on government, church, bank or even the bully next door. The humblest person was afforded the same status as the loftiest figure in the land.
It was a forum to express national grief at moments like the Dublin/Monaghan bombing, the bombing in Enniskillen and the death of Ann Lovett.
People, particularly women working in the home, often told me that this could be the only adult conversation they would hear all week. But adult conversation was not to the liking of the previously all-powerful.
The weekly meetings of the RTE editorial board, chaired by the director general, waded through mountains of news cuttings and letters of complaint from ministers, TDs, councillors, bishops, priests and ‘influential’ Catholics.
The management’s displeasure was made very clear to the errant Gaybo, who by example, was setting adventurous parameters for younger presenters and producers, some of whom were inching towards making programmes dealing with the dreaded issues of abortion and homosexuality.
In fact, a Late Late where a London broadcaster, Anna Raeburn, spoke of having had an abortion led to Gay being warned that he might lose his job if such was repeated.
In the midst of all this criticism and threat, Gay showed the grit and calm courage of which he was made. Never more so than when, at a time it had yet to be generally acceptable, he decided to wear a commemorative poppy to honour his father, and his family’s and so many other families’ sacrifices in World War I. As a committed Irishman himself, he was proud to assert the shared patriotism of the diverse traditions that make up our nation.
As today is Remembrance Sunday, a day that also commemorates the many good Irishmen, from North and south, who died in that terrible war, it is right that we should salute Gay’s generous tribute.
It was my pleasure to work with Gay for many years, first as a researcher on The Late Late, and then as producer of The Gay Byrne Show . At a personal level I found him kind and decent and always considerate. There was something of the Franciscan in him. He did his job well, lived his life modestly, looked after his family and, Gospel-like, went about doing good.
Professionally, he was the finest broadcaster with whom I have ever worked. He was not just a talent. He was a star.