PSYCHIATRIST IN THE CHAIR
THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY OF ANTHONY CLARE
BRENDAN KELLY AND MUIRIS HOUSTON
Merrion Press, 304pp, £19.99)
Dr Anthony Clare was, in his 1980s heyday, the most famous psychiatrist in the country. In his BBC radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s
Chair he conducted revealing and perceptive interviews with famous figures, in a lilting Irish voice that invited confidence without ever probing. The authors of his biography describe him as ‘unfailingly courteous and supportive with his guests, listening for the most part, rather than interrogating. He was also endlessly curious, often robust and, at times, remarkably and controversially persistent.’ One of his interviewees was Jimmy Savile about whom he later said there was ‘something chilling’.
Yet, as radio reviewing veteran Gillian Reynolds pointed out in the
Spectator: ‘Those who best remember Anthony Clare for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t know the half of him.’
Clare died suddenly in 2007 at the age of only 64. On the RTE website broadcaster Eileen Dunne called him a ‘dynamo, energetic, witty, charming and ultimately a voyager’. It wasn’t the whole story, however, and in a feature in the Times, his biographers told reporter Colin Coyle that Clare was a depressive, ‘dogged by the nagging sense that he could have done more, written more and achieved more in his life’. He also returned at the end of his life to Catholicism. ‘In spite of all of his rational thought and logical reasoning, Clare — like many others — found that his loss of faith left him with an emptiness that he struggled to fill.’