B138: Memories

3/9/2024

When I was doing my recent blog on moving to Hill View 50 years ago, it got me thinking of the things that have changed for children in that time. Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, one of the biggest things is the amount of time that we spent outdoors playing. Hopscotch, betchels, tip (tag/ chasing), red rover, taws (marbles), elastics, skipping, juggling two-balls or three-balls against a wall and playing with a tennis ball in nylon stockings tied to your ankle and jumped over…. or hit side to side against a wall under and over your leg! No wonder we were all so skinny.

Television
To be fair, one of the reasons I played outdoors was that, for most of my childhood, I lived in a one-station television zone in Ireland. We only had RTE 1 ….. in black and white! I envied those in Dublin and others on the east coast that could get the UK stations by aerial.

Add to that, our televisions were rented in the old days and picture quality was dodgy. Many people used rabbit ear aerials though we had one that Mickey erected outside on the side of the shed. We had a Sobell tele as our first rented one then a Pye before we bought a Murphy. It was the 80s before we bought a colour Ferguson.

I came across some old RTE listings from the 1970s below and a few things strike you. Firstly, in the early days of RTE television, radio still took precedence over the tele. TV transmission during the week began at 6.00pm with The Angelus; namely the sound of bells marking the recitation of the daily Catholic prayer. This is still retained in Ireland – albeit with a more secular attitude – hence why RTÉ’s early evening news bulletin remains known as the Six-One. At weekends, it opened at 5:35pm. Transmission ended at about 11:20pm, the test picture came up….and the country went to bed. 😂

RTE Test Picture

On RTE television, entertainment for all ages was sourced from Ireland and other countries, mainly the US. Most evenings started with a cartoon for children e.g. Bugs Bunny, Quick Draw McGraw, Top Cat. We liked comedy shows. Laural and Hardy, I dream of Jeannie (with young Larry Hagman from Dallas) and I Love Lucy were favourites of mine. Most weekend nights there would be two films….one around 8pm and one after the News at 9:45pm.

The News was a big thing and it was on at 6pm ish, 7:55 pm An Nuacht (in Irish), 9:30 pm (with the weather forecast) and 11:35 before TV closed down for the day. I can still hear the dulcet tones of Maurice O’Doherty, Charles Mitchell and Don Cockburn our newscasters for many years. People would rush home so as not to miss The News!! As children we knew we had to stay quiet!

Sobell Ad 1963

We were encouraged at school, from about the age of 8 or 9 to watch The News. Often it would be discussed in class the following day in Current Affairs and we sometimes had to write essays on a recent news topic. This way we learned about the world’s peoples and cultures, geography and politics. We trusted the newsreaders to give us the facts from people on the ground, they never gave their own opinions, we never heard of fake news as a concept back then. I remember being shocked, when I first visited the States in the 1980s, that News was entertainment there and “the world and his mother” pitched in on news programmes with their own take on things. I was brought up to gather information from different sources and then to form my own opinion … not be told it by someone else!

RTE Listing for Thursday 29 Aug 1968

There was nearly always a music programme on at the weekends….in one of the listings I found from August 1969, our own Maxi, Dick and Twink were singing. Who would have thought Twink would still be a household name in Ireland after all these years!

There would usually be a sports programme e.g. greyhound racing, boxing, GAA, soccer, rugby, horse racing, swimming. We love our sports in Ireland and even though it was hard to sometimes tell the teams apart on a black and white tele, somehow, we managed 😂. I remember a great interview done by Cathal O’Shannon with Mohammad Ali before Ali boxed in Croke Park in the summer of 1972. We loved Ali in our house …. he was so quick witted.

RTE Listing for Saturday 30 Aug 1969

There were also some great home-spun nature and animal programmes. Let’s Visit The Zoo and Amuigh Faoin Spéir (Outside Under The Sky) taught us about animals, endangered species, nature and habitats ever before climate change became a thing.

To be fair, in looking back, we were pretty well-served by the broadcaster. They did their best to have something for everyone every night on one channel! And a lot of it was educational. No mean feat.

Radio
Having just one radio station meant that RTE had to balance news/speech programmes and music against each other; a situation which would be remedied when the music station RTE Radio 2 – now RTÉ 2FM – was introduced on 31st May 1979.

Before 1979, Radio 1 covered all music - pop, country and western, opera, orchestral, jazz and blues, brass bands. People would write in requests and later, when people got house phones, phone-ins were popular. It must have been a scheduler’s nightmare to ensure it was all covered, but even in the small sample I found you can see they did their best.

RTE Listing for Sunday 31 Aug 1969

One of the truly Irish radio shows for me was Take The Floor with Din Joe at 8:30 pm….a radio programme with people live dancing! Nowadays that seems a bit comical but actually it was a great idea and very popular! It was introduced by Din Joe (Denis Fitzgibbon) from Achill and featured an hour of Irish dance music with the bands, singers, dancers and instrumentalists, all in the traditional style. It probably owed a great deal of its success to the popularity of its compere, Din Joe, himself. The series was produced following the results of the first Listener Research Survey, which showed an exceptional popularity of dance music on the radio in urban as much as rural areas. Programming for dance music, which had been limited to 15 or 30 minutes, was greatly expanded and the flagship of this new policy was Take the Floor. I’m sure we weren’t the only household to have mammies and daddies joining in and dancing around the kitchen!

If you look at the weekday Radio listings, most were sponsored programmes. Birds (of the custard fame), Jacobs (biscuits), McDonnells (soups etc.), Odlums (flour) were household names. Borne of necessity to fund programming and the upkeep of the Athlone radio transmitter in 1927, sponsorship of non-news programmes on Radio Éireann is clearly evident from the listings attached in both the morning and afternoon. Sponsorship within this context came to an end only in January 1981.

Fictional works are scattered throughout the day’s radio schedule – ranging from in-house adaptations of existing books, original stories, and the serial The Kennedys of Castleross. I also remember Tolka Row.

There were a number of “agony aunt” type programmes that were very popular where people wrote in with their problems. Some of the issues were really serious (e.g. domestic abuse) and some were frivolous and entertaining. Dear Frankie was a favourite with the late Frankie Byrne and her distinctive deep voice. We used to joke “Dear Frankie, my husband has got a new wooden leg, should I break it off??” 😂

So hopefully the above has brought back some happy memories of childhood games and TV/ radio programmes for you. My theme of the blog this week is Memory as performed by the one and only Barbra Streisand. Enjoy! 😂