Philip Nolan
My trip down memory lane was all reel, no jigs
Reeling In The Years RTÉ One, Sunday The Burren: Heart Of Stone
RTÉ One, Sunday
Keys To My Life
RTÉ One, Sunday Other Voices RTÉ One, Thursday
There was a time I would watch a series of Reeling in the Years and know all the music, but would have forgotten the events or maybe never even heard of them at all. When the new series returned on Sunday, it opened in 2010. Sadly, I remembered everything that happened, but hadn’t got a clue what the tunes were.
It was a reminder that we often get stuck in our musical tastes, harking back to the songs of our youth and seldom listening to anything new.
Stuck in history too, not least when seeing shots of thousands of people together. In the one place. Without masks. It was absolutely startling.
The first episode opened with the famous clip of a young man slipping on ice during the Big Freeze and it proved a metaphor for the entire decade – we began with our collective head held relatively high and ended up on our coccyx. We all know what the last image of the last show will be when we reach 2019, the appearance of a mysterious virus that was confirmed by the Chinese authorities on the very eve of 2020.
As it happened, 2010 wasn’t all that remarkable – we had Charlie Bird knocking on the door of Anglo-Irish bank boss David Drumm in the USA and the arrest and subsequent acquittal of Seán FitzPatrick of that bank. There was the Good Friday opening of pubs in Limerick before a Munster match, for the first time in the history of the State; ironically, while that law was rescinded, there were no pubs open to go to this year.
There was the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland that grounded all European flights (a sort of pandemic preview, really, that one!) and left me stranded in Munich, from where I ended up making my way home overland by train, car and ferry.
There was an unsuccessful heave against Enda Kenny as leader of
Fine Gael and Brian Cowen’s legendary interview from a Fianna Fáil think-in in Galway, after which half the country presumed he either was badly hungover or still drunk. November brought the ultimate
ignominy when, despite denials, the Troika arrived in Ireland and took control of our economy. The joy of Reeling In The Years is that it presents everything in soundbite form and seldom offers wider context, leaving the repercussions of an event that happens in one year to play out over subsequent episodes.
We might be more familiar with the recent past than with the events of the endlessly repeated earlier decades, but there’s still something wonderful about the shock of the familiar that had slipped our minds. It is little wonder it was voted our favourite programme and with nine more Sundays of it to look forward to, there’s only one place to be at 8.30 on Sunday nights.
Talking of the past, we always went to Leeds and Coventry for our summer holidays with the relations, so Ireland was a bit of a mystery to me until 1975, when my parents decided we would have a second holiday on the Atlantic coast. I loved Kerry, with its lush greenery, but I was knocked out by the harsh karst landscape of the Burren in Co. Clare; as a hormonal teenager, I look back and think it appealed to the nihilistic darkness inside me. Everything about it was thrilling – the deep furrows in the limestone, the lack of vertical relief in the form of trees, the tiny alpine plants thriving in the crevices, the sheer moodiness of it all when it touched the gunmetal sea.
Maybe that’s why I was mesmerised by The Burren: Heart Of Stone, brilliantly filmed and narrated by Brendan Gleeson. We met cattle sent to graze on the uplands in winter, in contravention of the usual seasonality of husbandry and cheeky cuckoos laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. There were fascinating turloughs, lakes that fill in the wet season before draining into a vast underground nethalf
work of caves (and no, you wouldn’t get me underground for a look in a fit). It was all incredibly beautiful to look at, a balm for the soul in television form and I look forward to tonight’s second part, even though previews suggest it will feature fairly hokey recreations of life there thousands of years ago.
Still way out west, the first episode of the new series of Keys To My Life started in Shantalla in Galway, the childhood home of singer Mary Coughlan and it proved to be a great deal more emotional than expected. She really has had a tough life, abused by her grandfather, beaten by her father, not exactly showered with love by her mother. Her first marriage ended, she began drinking and drug-taking very heavily and finally got her life on track in rehab, only for her second marriage to end when her husband had an affair with their Spanish nanny.
These things would flatten anyone, but there was triumph here too. Mary Coughlan is nothing if not a survivor and as her triumphant early lockdown gigs last year proved, livestreamed from her garden in Co. Wicklow, all her experience is channelled through her voice, adding power and authenticity that go far beyond the melody or the words.
Equally captivating were a band called Sun Collective, who opened this week’s offering from Other Voices. The lead singer had an amazing voice that, added to the ethereal quality of the music, made for an extraordinarily calm ten minutes or so.
It was a reminder to myself to start listening to more new music again. I certainly don’t want to be caught out when Reeling In The Years reaches the next decade.