Indian summer: Bibi Baskin’s long journey home ‘I was a Daddy’s girl, I was six when we went walking after school, by 6pm he was dead from a heart attack’
Bibi Baskin was the first woman to host her own chat show in Ireland, but she turned her back on TV fame. She tells Donal Lynch about her odyssey in India and how grief shaped her independence
LIKE the first glint of summer warmth, Bibi nostalgia is in the air. The day before we meet at the Montenotte Hotel in Cork, RTE re-screens an episode of her chat show from 1988 where she interviews the late Larry Gogan. The woman herself didn’t watch the programme but she monitored the reaction. “People said you looked great... then. The implication, and they may not even be conscious of it, is that you look like s**t now.”
In truth she still looks wonderful and, in the years since she was a weekly presence on television, something else has happened: her voice has matured into something as deep, rich and fruity as a Christmas cake. “Nobody really mentioned it before, but now everywhere I go, every little event, the voice comes up,” she tells me. “Someone said that my voice was like vocal Viagra. I thought that was super.”
The Larry Gogan clip seemed also to pose a question: why had we not seen more of Bibi over the years? She was the first Irish woman with her own chat show on RTE and seemed destined to become a long-term mainstay on our screens. Writing about her in the Sunday Independent, TV critic Declan Lynch opined: “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…”
But there was also the image of Bibi as a reluctant broadcaster. She had thrown away TV stardom, the thinking went, to emigrate to India, where she ran a hotel and embraced philosophy. These days she goes around the country, giving motivational talks, and time and again her singular odyssey comes up.
“I talk about all the changes I brought into my own life,” she explains. “The RTE television, the BBC radio, becoming a hotelier in India. If it’s an older crowd I’ll talk longer about RTE. If it’s younger I’ll say, ‘and you know, girls, there used to be all these gorgeous young men back in the day’. And then a couple of years would go by and there would be another lot of gorgeous young men — who this time would say, ‘me mammy loves your show’. And then I’d say to them, ‘girls can you tell me where this is going?’. A few more years went by and the gorgeous young men would say ‘my granny loves you’.” She mock-sighs. “So I hung my cap up after that.”
In her background are the clues to her special mix of old and new Ireland and the independence that later led her to forsake her broadcasting career. She was a rarity even then — an Irish-speaking Protestant in rural Ireland — and her childhood was marred by tragedy.
“I grew up in Donegal throughout the 1950s,” she says. “It was quite bleak and removed. There were no railways or cities and it was the forgotten county. There was one thing that happened to me, which contoured my life, then and still.
“I was very much a Daddy’s girl and when I was six he took me for a walk after school at about 4pm. It was a rainy November day. And at about 6pm he was dead from a heart attack. That made my mother a widow at 38 with three girls. She had to carve out a new life for herself. We were Church of Ireland, and so very few in number. I had few classmates and developed this independence, which meant in turn that 40 years later I could sail off to a developing country, do a startup and change career.”
That self-reliance stood to her when she moved to Dublin. She looks back on herself as “sophisticated and so naive” but early on she got a foothold in Dublin’s media world, editing the Irish language newspaper, Anois. As a result of this she was herself interviewed several times in the media and thought she could do a good job broadcasting herself.
“And so I sent off a letter,” she purrs, “in black for sophistication purposes, like Henry Ford. Hand-written too, of course, saying, ‘I wonder if you would have a small job in radio for a female voice because I think my voice is not the worst part of me’. And they needed someone for ‘what it says in the papers’, and that was how it started.”
She was then given her own show on RTE and with it the household-name recognition. She says she loved broadcasting because it was about the mystery of the voice. Someone once advised her to stick to radio “because you can still scratch yourself on the air” but her star was in the ascent at Montrose. She presented a drive-time radio programme called Evening Extra before being given her own prime-time chat show, which was simply called Bibi.
Her mother must have been proud of that achievement? “I don’t know if my mother was proud. We never spoke about it. It wasn’t necessary to speak about it. My sisters were delighted for me, and one of them in particular was delighted for herself — I daren’t say any more.”
Despite her relative rarity as a female presenter, she says she never experienced sexism at RTE. “I never felt the slightest bit of it. I never compared myself to Gay Byrne, for instance. There was a discussion about gender imbalance recently but it honestly never occurred to me to wonder what he earned. At that stage in life — I was in my thirties — all you are concerned about is paying your mortgage and a couple of weeks in the Canaries.”
The presenting work meant that she lost some of her privacy. That wasn’t pleasant, she explains, “but it also wasn’t the reason I gave it all up”. Rather she had a restlessness which was exacerbated by the stasis of life at RTE.
“There was no one moment I can pinpoint,” she recalls. “I just realised that after eight years in RTE, the same routine all the time would become a bit much. I used to drive in, hang a right and park. Do the same thing the next time. I just couldn’t keep going. I knew in my heart I can’t stay in the same job for 40 years or stay in the same place.”
She decided to move to London and sold her house and car and rented a room in the house of an elderly lady who was a friend of one of her sisters. She knew at some point she would have to work again.
“I read somewhere that Ryan Tubridy had taken a salary drop of €200,000 but I belonged to a much more modest time.”
In London the broadcasting work soon began to flow in; she freelanced for the BBC and did an afternoon show on ITV. But the change of scenery didn’t scratch her itch. “I realised that all I’d done was change geography so again I sold the house and car.”
At first she only intended to go to India for three weeks, “to clear my head”, but she felt she had nothing to come back to.
“So I extended by another three weeks and then I extended for another six months and soon a year had gone and I was living in India. Like a lot of people in media I thought ‘I’ ll write the book’. And then I thought, ‘I’ve no job, no income, so I’d better put a roof over my head’.” That was when the idea of opening a guest house occurred to her.
“A woman in the area I lived in used to take guests in, and I thought maybe I’ll do the same. So I did the place up to a high spec and I put in a swimming pool because I’d tried to learn swimming at 38 and I’d been ridiculed, so I wanted to give that another go. I took private lessons at five in the morning until I f **king well learned to swim, so I had to get a pool after that torture. I got in a wellness centre and a restaurant because I love food. And then the big boys from Delhi had to come down to classify it.”
To her amazement they said she was the owner of a 4-star heritage hotel of India.
As part of the legal requirements for owning a business in India she had to have an Indian person work with her. “It is a type of economic protectionism but he was also my saviour and very necessary,” she says. “Our target market was middle-class and Western people. And there were many of those.”
Her social life there was not hectic, she says. “Indian women don’t drink and they don’t go out to bars. I got to know people and went out to dinner a lot, that was it. I studied a lot and taught myself so much. I learned acceptance of what was in my life rather than fighting. It doesn’t mean you lie under it. There’s so much talk of fighting — I’m going to fight this cancer, I’m going to fight her in court — no, this Western world needs to be a bit gentler. We need acceptance, and that was an attitude I cultivated.” She immersed herself in learning and went to a Vedic astrologer, which she wrote about in a recent piece on Sunday Miscellany: “The Vedas are the holy books of Hinduism, and Hindus take astrology very seriously indeed. It is used as a reliable decision-making tool for significant aspects of life such as picking a life partner, choosing a career, moving house and so on. In fact today, you can study astrology in Indian universities, an idea which would probably bring out the raging sceptic in most of us in the Western world.”
She also became a devotee of Ayurveda — which relates to the prevention of disease — and ran an Ayurvedic centre in her hotel.
After 15 years in India she began to feel that her journey there had run its course. “The intrigue I’d experienced at the beginning had become familiar, and so when the intrigue was gone and you’re left with the other side of the coin,” she explains. “It’s mighty hot there and there’s no timekeeping, as such, and it’s also fair to say I was getting older and I wanted an easier life.” And so now she is living in Cork, near Crosshaven, in a country house with her cat, Aon Cluas (“because he only has one ear”). There is no Mr Bibi at the moment. “There is nothing on the romantic front and there hasn’t been for years and years. I know you swipe right on Tinder but that’s all I really know, I’ve never used it.”
She was back at her Indian hotel last Christmas but she is “in the process of selling it”. “My Indian business partner is running it. I’m not involved in the operations of it. Buddhists would call what I’m doing ‘right action’.”
She gives motivational talks up and down the country and has recently written a book, Bibi’s Wellness Wisdom, which she describes as “a kind of humble aide-memoire”. It’s a compilation of her favourite quotes which help to “reframe negative thoughts” and “reinforce optimism and joy”.
Occasionally she still gives interviews; after a recent outing on RTE, the Irish Times noted that she “still bosses the airwaves with irreverent energy”.
The lockdown, she says has quite suited her. “This degree of isolation actually comes to me naturally. It’s a situation that is so awful for many people but it’s given me an opportunity to study and learn more. To tell you the truth I’m having a lovely time.” But what about the haircut situation that we’re all dealing with? “I let my friend cut my hair and I put it on Facebook and it got a great reaction, just dreadful! I couldn’t find red hair dye anywhere in the supermarkets, it’s all in chemists. The reason I’m wearing a beret is to hide the grey!”
She remains a force of nature, but while many would love to see her host her own show on television again, she’s wary of nostalgia.
“I feel really happy in my life at the moment. I’m grateful for the things that happened to me but I’m happy in the present. I don’t look back.”
Bibi’s Wellness Wisdom is a collection of her inspirational quotes to guide us through the stormy days. Copies can be ordered from Michael Mulcahy at 021 500 30 50 or michael.mulcahy@no1.ie, for €15 + €4.95 P&P to Ireland. Also see www.bibibaskin.ie