Flashbacks to Bibi and Larry in their wonderful prime
IT seemed to drop out of the sky onto my TV screen, this flashback to another world. There I was, minding my own business after Claire Byrne Live, and suddenly there’s this programme paying tribute to Larry Gogan.
A programme made in 1988. Presented by Bibi Baskin. Yes, there was Larry, spruced up and looking in his prime — indeed everybody, including the guests and everyone in the studio audience, was spruced up and looking in their prime.
But before we get to that, a few words about Bibi Baskin.
I quote from The Book of Poor Ould Fellas, the indispensable guide:
“Bibi was The Special One. She went in for the glitz and the glamour, like the rest of them, but she somehow managed to do this while presenting programmes that poor ould fellas could watch, programmes with country people in them, singing and telling stories about long ago…
“She even went in for that Irish-speaking without giving you a pain in the head… they had come to regard Bibi Baskin with a grudging respect… And what happened next? Was Bibi given the job of presenting The Late Late Show?
“Did she become Ireland’s highest-paid broadcaster by dint of her unique appeal to viewers across the demographic spectrum, an appeal so broad it even encompassed the poor ould fellas? Well no, that’s not what happened next…
“What happened next was that Bibi Baskin gave up broadcasting altogether, withdrew from public life, and went to India, where she opened a hotel.”
Truly, anything that is agreeable in some way to the poor ould fellas is not long for this world. But whatever other reasons there might have been for the strange career graph of Bibi Baskin, on this night with Larry she was in her pomp, and remarkable things could be seen — why, there’s Terry Wogan speaking from London, using the word “compere”, as TV personalities in this country were sometimes called.
And there’s Rory Gallagher too, with his own tribute, also recorded abroad, in which he asks Bibi and Larry to “save a glass of Champagne for me when I get home”. It was almost unbearably wonderful.
And then Bibi looked to the camera, to introduce a band in the studio, like this: “We bring you now an incredibly popular
Irish band who are spreading out all over the world, so much so that when we wanted to invite them onto the Bibi show, we had to track them down in Yugoslavia. They’re called…” Can you guess? Without looking at the next line, can you name that band which was spreading out all over the world?
Allies. That was the name of the band — Allies.
But then Bibi had also tracked down a band called Something Happens, who are still with us, “an up-and-coming band there singing a rather nice number, I thought, called Forget Georgia”. Ah, it was too good. The ‘house band’ for the night was of course led by Paddy Cole, who said something to me once, the wisdom of which I have come to appreciate: I had interviewed him for this paper, and a few years later when I ran into him again in a make-up-room in RTE, he remembered that we had “worked” together.
I suppose my first instinct was that it hadn’t felt like work to me, but then I realised where Paddy was coming from, how men such as himself had fought heroically to have showbusiness regarded as work, in a land which might have wrongly scorned them as mere idlers.
Yes, I had worked with Paddy Cole, and he had worked with me, and when Bibi turned to the other disc-jockeys for their salutes to Larry, I realised I had worked with a few of them too. There was Gerry Ryan, and Mark Cagney, and Mike Moloney, ludicrously young. And there was Tony Fenton, even younger, and Ian Dempsey and on and on... there was Brush Shiels and Maxi.
Was it all a dream?