Many years ago a friend and I were chatting as we waited for the ferry back from Inis Meáin, when the poet Rita Ann Higgins marched over and without a word of introduction told me "You have such a fabulous voice - you should charge people to do phone sex!"
The time to start doing that hasn’t come, not yet anyway, but I have done bits and pieces of radio over the years, including a stint on Jazz fm (“Dublin’s only black music radio station”) about twenty years ago.
RTE broadcast tower, New Year’s Day, 2020
My father and I have very similar-sounding voices, and have often been mistaken for each other on the phone. When I was very small, he hosted a Sunday show on RTE radio, and while he was on air the rest of the family would drive past RTE on our way to visit my grandparents. I can remember craning my neck to see the top of the radio tower, as I figured that’s where he’d need to be broadcasting from. He went on to have a very distinguished career as a journalist, politician and professor of journalism and was Ireland’s first Press Ombudsman. Here’s a clip of him in 1965, at the very beginning of his career.
Click image for clip
I’ve been following in his footsteps recently, as I’ve been on the radio a couple of times this week - the first was an interview about shooting Mary Robinson’s election poster, which was broadcast on The History Show. Then I did a voiceover for my friend Amanda Feery’s Swimming Studies show on Dublin Digital Radio.
The last one was my first essay for Sunday Miscellany, called “Shoeboxes”.
"But of course, what really tipped me over the edge were the love letters. Letters signed with love, lots of love, with all my love...."
This one was different - a very personal account of going through old shoeboxes full of keepsakes and letters. I was quite nervous as it was broadcast but it seems to have gone down well, so I may even do another one sometime. In the meantime, you can hear two of my father’s Sunday Miscellany contributions here:
I told nobody I was coming by John Horgan