His legacy shouldn’t be colonised by today’s cultural warriors
LAST week in the Seanad, I said that RTE should consider an unedited reshowing of the full series of Late Late Shows from the Gay Byrne years.
It would help prevent the colonisation of Byrne’s broadcasting legacy which has been going on for a long time and reached new heights of exaggeration last week. The man ‘‘who led us out of the darkness’’ was one comment on Ryan Tubridy’s show. He ‘‘gave us freedom of expression’’, said Sean O’Rourke. First prize surely goes to the contributor who claimed that he grew up in de Valera’s Ireland, but his children are growing up in Gay Byrne’s.
This is all to suggest that Ireland was a miserable place where there was no fun, joy or love, and no independent thought, before The Late Late Show. That Gay Byrne braved the dragons of the old authoritarian Ireland, led us out of the cave into the bright sunshine and taught us to think for ourselves.
This doesn’t do justice to what was good in the old Ireland or what is bad in the new. And it doesn’t reflect how Byrne did his work. When we see the iconic clips from The Late Late we are never shown, for example, that dramatic moment when Spike Milligan interrupted his recital of hilarious nonsense poems to tell an altogether different tale. Unto Us was about the termination of a pregnancy but told from the perspective of the unborn: “There was no Queen’s Counsel to take my brief/The cot I might have warmed stood in Harrod’s shop window.”
There was worse to come.
“My death was celebrated/with tickets to see Danny la Rue/ who was pretending to be a woman/Like my mother was.”
No clapping or booing. Just silence. Gay didn’t try to lessen the impact. He didn’t impose. He didn’t challenge Milligan (would anyone dare, perhaps?) He knew that, the less he said, the more interesting the conversation could get. He just said in a low voice, “That was a very powerful poem, Spike.” And Milligan responded, fiercely, “That got ’em. All those people who say they’re pro-choice. If their mothers were pro-choice, some of ’em wouldn’t bloody well be here.” It was gritty stuff.
The Late Late did not preach. It didn’t normally adopt the propagandists’ tactic of pitting the most unattractive defenders of the status quo against the most winning advocates of the coming change. Gay’s focus was to produce and present gripping TV and radio by letting Irish people speak to themselves. He shone a light into the dark corners and gave a voice to the victims of domestic violence and the people whose marriages had failed and the people who for whatever reason were at the receiving end of a sometimes judgmental society. It was a time when what was previously private, particularly in the domain of relationships and sexuality, was going public. This had a healing effect for some. It gave others an opening to mould a different Ireland that would turn out to have its own dark corners. When Gay covered the story of Ann Lovett in 1984, he helped a nation reflect on the tragedy of a teenage girl getting pregnant and dying alone in a churchyard. He read out the letters from people who were suffering misfortune or cruelty and whose problems many people didn’t want to discuss. What none of this proved, of course, was what other campaigners succeeded in making us think it proved — that the death of a pregnant teenager was an indictment of the kind of society that would want to protect unborn children and which had voted to do so a year earlier.
The revelation that all was not rosy in the Irish Catholic garden, and that some of the gardeners were incoherent if not hypocritical, helped the moral revolution. But the revolutionaries didn’t build a more compassionate Ireland.
We got a country where more children, not fewer, don’t have their father in their lives; where large numbers of young people are exposed to violence and other horrors online; where more young people than ever are doing drugs and some politicians and activists think our best hope is to test those drugs at pop concerts before they consume them; where more young people are committing suicide than before because they have no hope in their lives and nothing big to believe in; and where younger and younger people are consuming large amounts of cheap alcohol and storing up massive problems for themselves and for the health service in the future. These are some of the new dark corners. And the people who helped create them are slow to acknowledge their role.
This change came about after, and partly because, the Gay Byrne era revealed the vulnerabilities, inadequacies and hypocrisies of Irish culture. It is part of Ireland’s tragedy that our cultural weaknesses could be deployed in the push for a new, rampant individualism. There were too many shrill defenders of the traditional order and not enough reflective advocates of what was good in it. But where these did exist, Gay Byrne let them speak. In 1985, The Late Late brought on a priest and a nun to discuss a controversial book about lesbian convent experiences with its authors, two ex-nuns from America. Gay commented on the massive reaction (some polite, some obscene) to his radio show’s discussion of the book. The TV debate was respectful to everybody. What the priest said would challenge a conservative audience then and it would discomfit a liberal audience today. Some people were over-reacting, he said, because they were uncomfortable with aspects of their own sexuality. He did not seek to claim that homosexual activity was moral (the word ‘‘gay’’ was never mentioned) but he urged people to seek to understand, and not to condemn.
It seems to me that this kind of nuance would not be allowed today without being satirised or immediately condemned by the ever-present spokespersons for the new cultural elite. And this narrowing of public discourse is part of our tragedy now. Gay Byrne was ahead of his time in facilitating a broad national discussion. It is sad that he remains so.