'In the beginning was the voice. Before he conducted the nation's affairs on the Late Late, before he monopolised the nation's housewives on morning radio, long long before his "final answer?" revival, Gay Byrne was a voice, pure and simple, inflected only with the burning ambition to be the best voice in broadcasting.
Colm Keane's Radio Days documentary on Gaybo (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday) told the story of this fulfilled ambition, via an interview with the great voice himself and some surprising archive material going back to the 1950s. There was the voice, anonymous and unheralded, introducing a bewildering variety of sponsored programmes (Gay was double-jobbing in an ad agency handling such programmes for some of this time) and doing "continuity" on Radio ╔ireann - all the time dreaming of emulating his beloved Eamonn Andrews.
In those days he would do it, it seemed, with his mastery of his vocal instrument rather than with the content of his words. As a boy, he won his first prize doing an Irish-language recitation, despite being - as listeners will recall and as he said himself in the interview - no Gaelgeoir himself. His reward in those strange 1940s was a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as gaeilge, still sitting unopened on a shelf somewhere in his Howth redoubt.
These youthful, archived voices always seem reedier and less resonant than what we expect on radio nowadays, and Gay's was certainly in the Irish tenor register, without the mellowing of his later years. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight (hindsound?) it seems easy to hear that there was actually little pure, nothing simple, and precious little anonymous about its owner. Whether introducing a pop-music show for teens or commenting from Ireland's Eye on a parachute jump (and ad-libbing to the crew), there's an unconcealable smoothness and smartness about Gay Byrne 1959, as about Gay Byrne 2001. Word missing??
Gaybo, unendowed with false modesty, still grouses about the executive who, more than four decades ago, decided Gay was "too good" to read the news on Radio ╔ireann, but actually you could see the point. His voice was actually too engaging, too suggestive of the wit lurking behind it, for the "pure" information-conveying task of newsreading. His attempt to become a soccer commentator was shot down when he displayed his thoroughgoing ignorance of the game.
One of the most amazing things about this small, perfectly formed documentary was just how amazing it was. The story of Gay Byrne, Broadcaster, should be the most familiar tale in Irish media; its details, you would have thought, should have been recited ad infinitum at the time of Gay's semi-retirement. Some were, of course, and the two programmes that made him legendary (the Late Late on TV and the Gay Byrne Show on radio) have been well discussed. In fact, the evolution of these programmes fits rather messily into Gay's broader curriculum vitae.
Nowadays, we'd call him a workaholic, and his employment schedule of the early 1960s makes even Joe Duffy's most peripatetic period of the 1990s look like an afternoon nap. Byrne would work a full week at Granada television in Manchester, do a bit of small-aircraft piloting of a Friday evening, then head back to Dublin where he would pack a handful of radio shows plus the then-Saturday Late Late into his weekend. And in those days, the Late Late conceit whereby the audience wouldn't know the identity of guests until they appeared extended to the presenter too, who didn't know who he was interviewing until the interview was about to begin: Gay, who by that hour on a Saturday night should have been dead on his feet, instead had to be remarkably quick on his toes.
This, anyway, never seemed to be a problem to Gaybo. To hear him tell it, he pioneered the use of the telephone as a tool for radio in Ireland, against the objections of techies and suits who worried that you never knew what someone might say; for Gay, that seemed to be exactly the attraction. According to him, the practice actually started during RT╔'s all-night radio show in July 1969, as the world waited for Armstrong and Aldrin to step out of their landing module and on to the surface of the moon. The station, it seems, filled the waiting time by taking calls from listeners who yapped about the long-neglected household tasks they were doing to pass the hours!
As recently as the early 1970s, RT╔ Radio didn't generally broadcast all day, let alone all night. It must seem extraordinary now, at a time when advertisers gobble up mid-morning slots, but when the Gay Byrne Show dΘbuted in 1972, it was replacing . . . nothing. Before its arrival, the station actually went off the air from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., then did so again in the afternoon. The programme was a pioneer in more ways than one.
Keane selected some terrific clips to illustrate its style and its importance. One amusing one featured a Sadie Hawkins Day marriage proposal live on air, in which the prospective groom was caught unawares by a telephone call from Gay and his wannabe bride. "Is that Gay Byrne? Jayzus Christ!"
"No," Gay replied coolly. "Just Gay Byrne."
As well as being a typically immodest ad-lib, this clip segued well into a subject that Gay clearly enjoyed discussing: while women loved him, men typically despised him, with more than a hint of jealousy. Gay said he sympathised: "If I'd come home to Kathleen Watkins" - yes, in that strange but rather agreeable habit he still uses her surname - "and she started telling me about what Bunny Carr had said that day, I think I'd be rather annoyed too."
Gay's close connection with women and the issues that particularly concerned them was often far from trivial. Keane's documentary chose as exemplary the reaction to the death of schoolgirl Ann Lovett and her newborn baby in a Co Longford grotto. The letters that poured into the Gay Byrne Show should fill a book, one researcher suggested at the time. According to Gay, he had a better idea (according to Gay, he generally did): they would devote three programmes to just reading the letters. The shows constituted several of Irish radio's finest hours.
In discussing the programme's role in this extraordinary period, Radio Days implicitly made the illogical leap typical in popular treatments of late 20th-century Ireland: since the personal was political, it seems that the political was exclusively personal. Obviously that was far from the case, and though Radio Days ignored this aspect, Gay Byrne on his radio show was remarkably wont to comment on political issues beyond the personal/sexual agenda. He may have kept us guessing a bit about his party-political allegiances (rumour had it that his own Blueshirt tendencies had got a greenwash from Kathleen), but there was no doubt about, say, his hard line on crime or his pro-free-market bias; he seemed to admire Margaret Thatcher almost as much as Meryl Streep.
And on the issue that convulsed Ireland as much as any other, he was instrumental in crystallising a consensus in the State (albeit sometimes a forced consensus) that regarded the IRA with nothing but revulsion. How often did we hear his litany of abuse directed at republicans? Did this mentality, and the outright repression of pro-IRA views, contribute to the ending of the Troubles, or did it help to prolong them?
Like Eamon Dunphy today (another silver-haired and surprisingly effeminate real Dub who does, however, know a bit about soccer), Gaybo was and is inclined to think of himself as a robust outsider, who found himself inside but without being moulded to the contours of the institution. He speaks of RT╔ without a hint of warmth. Nonetheless, he was a loyal servant to the system and the State and, despite his unique talents and the workings of that voice, never did much to shake them up. Smooth and smart, in the end he looks a bit like the natty, honey-toned usher who showed us the way into the strange new Ireland.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie