The Trib (46 page)

If
Coronation Street
were to last fifty more years, you could pick three or four of the current crop – Rosie Webster, Gary Windass, Tyrone Dobbs, Chesney Brown, for example – whom you could imagine in much older roles, succeeding the Barlows and Faircloughs and Turpins of today. That ability to regenerate is a phenomenal achievement for any show of any kind in any country.

My dream job would be to write scripts for
Coronation Street
, although I'm aware of at least one journalist from an English newspaper – a very good writer – who penned a few scenes for an article she was doing and had them assessed by one of the show's producers. He savaged them. Putting words into the mouths of such fabulous characters, making them feel real, bringing out their innate humour is a skill not as highly prized as it should be. The recent death of Jack Duckworth, in which he was danced into the afterlife by his dead wife Vera should have been mawkish, sentimental and unforgiveable. Instead, it was beautiful, perfectly pitched, the work of highly skilled actors and an equally accomplished writer. There wasn't a dry eye in my house.

Radio review

9 May 2010

I
n a week when an understandable pall hung over RTÉ radio, it was a relief to hear a discussion of the latest ash-plosion from Iceland end thus: ‘A suggestion from Tom Barrett, “Why not bomb the volcano, have one massive eruption, possibly bleeding off the problem?” read Pat Kenny from an incoming phone text on Wednesday. ‘I don't think anyone except yourself, Tom, so far has suggested that.'

In a normal week, Pat's friend and rival for listeners on 2FM might already have been looking for the texter's number so he could give Barrett's big idea the over-the-top treatment it deserved. It was not a normal week.

Gerry Ryan's funeral on Thursday was by turns moving and funny and theatrical, as befitted him, and while its live broadcasting by 2FM may or may not have been over-the-top, it was so in one respect. ‘There's nothing that would suggest excess, it's very simple,' said Mark Little to Colm Hayes, as they talked over a beautiful rendition of
Ag Críost An Síol
. Nothing excessive, perhaps, except for Mark Little and Colm Hayes providing a running commentary throughout. Yes, there was a need for some form of introduction to the proceedings but I'm not convinced that the seconds of reflection-friendly silence that occasionally occurred during the ceremony needed to be so comprehensively filled. But that's radio, and you don't go changing it. May he rest in peace.

Some things remain immutable, like Michael O'Leary's ability to get value for money. He might have spent a pretty penny on the 160 pedigree Aberdeen Angus cattle that populate his 200-acre Mullingar farm and stud, but a crew of six have the job of looking after them, as well as tending to ‘fifty or sixty National Hunt horses coming home for their holidays'. So, a smaller crew than you'd find on the average Ryanair flight but a bigger crew than you'd find on the average Ryanair customer service desk.

The Squire of Gigginstown was on the always excellent
Countrywide
(RTÉ 1) last Saturday, talking to reporter Brian Lally while at home on the range. The interview had actually been recorded two weeks previously, with presenter Damien O'Reilly revealing that O'Leary ‘kept his appointment to talk to us despite being in the middle of the worst aviation crisis in history'. And his secret to staying cool? ‘No matter what the problems are, a walk across the fields of Ireland looking at nice Angus cattle and horses, good and fast and slow ones, it clears your head, it's a great way of life,' he said. The horses are ‘just a money pit', though.

On BBC Radio 2, Monday saw Graham Norton step into the shoes of the Gerry Ryan-inspired Chris Evans for the week's breakfast slot. Subsequent mornings would hear him flirting with Julie Andrews and Rula Lenska, among other fabulous mystery guests, but his opening chat was with Debbie Reynolds, a genuine Hollywood star who's still hoofing it around the showbiz circuit at the age of seventy-eight, labelling many of her numerous exes ‘crooks' and meeting her even more numerous fans. ‘People say to me, “You look so good for your age, and up close, you're so lifelike,” ' she trilled, before rattling off staggering impressions of, among others, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand and, yes, Jimmy Stewart.

On hearing of her bad luck with men, a listener recommended that Debbie seek O.I.L. – guys who are ‘old, ill and loaded'. So Debbie told Graham that he was ‘very cute', even in his unshaven state. ‘I am loaded ... not old or ill, though,' said Graham, too charming to mention any other impediment to their union. ‘You know, I'm Princess Leia's mother so that makes me a queen,' Debbie continued unabashed, before Graham pressed her on how relations are with her intermittently estranged daughter, Carrie Fisher. ‘In order for my daughter to talk to me, I have to lie down in the driveway so she doesn't run over me,' said Debbie. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

And finally, to
Arena
, RTÉ 1's self-proclaimed ‘arts and culture programme', where
Garage
director Mark O'Halloran was this week ably standing in for Sean Rocks.

He'd just signed off a lively interview with Cockney Rebel's Steve Harley on Wednesday when, unannounced except by herself, up popped fashion journalist Constance Harris, saying: ‘I'm going to talk to you today about Irish women's fear of their legs.' And so began a bizarre riff on Irish dancing, bike cycling, maternal genes and pink skin, with a passing mention of this season's new on-the-knee skirt and the fact that ‘Courteney Cox in
Cougar Town
is living in the things' (was this the arts-and-culture bit?).

‘The main thing is, girls,' Constance concluded, ‘get out of the shadow of the long skirt ... it's desperately ageing. It's not attractive – start flaunting a little bit more flesh.' One can only hope Tom Barrett was listening.

S
PORTS

Cork hurler, Donál Óg Cusack, has shown strength and courage with his revelations about his sexuality.

25 October 2009

A
ll men have secrets and here is Donal Óg Cusack's, so let it be known. He doesn't like Kilkenny, he's had it in for them since the 2002 National League final and he reckons they're the sport's equivalent of the Stepford Wives. To most hurling folk, therein lay the real meat of last week's autobiographical revelations. Oh, and he might own one or two more Liza Minnelli albums than the rest of us, but that had been the most public of unuttered public secrets beforehand. What difference does it make?

Listen, this is a man who screwed his courage to the sticking place, stormed the battlements, took on Frank Murphy and his minions in their own fortress and routed them. Twice. After ending the Cork County Board's decades-long undefeated run, coming out to the nation surely amounted to little more than a medium-sized piece of cáca milis.

Look at all the firsts he accounted for in the process. The first prominent hurler to come out publicly. The first GAA player to do so. The first Irish sportsman of note to do so. The first practising sportsman in the northern hemisphere since Justin Fashanu nineteen years ago to do so. It would have to be a Corkman, wouldn't it?

When the
Tribune
listed its 125 most influential people in GAA history last January we ranked Cusack as the fifty-seventh. Update it in five years' time and he'll be in the top twenty, perhaps the top ten. Even within the space of seven days he's already engineered a small change in the semantics surrounding sexuality. On Sunday, Aertel greeted his announcement with the headline, ‘Cusack admits he's gay.' By Tuesday it had been amended to the less pejorative ‘reveals he's gay'. A declaration of homosexuality does not equate to an ‘admission' of homosexuality.

For it to be Cusack who boldly went where none had gone before him is no surprise. ‘Moderation,' he declares in the book, ‘is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world, afraid to take a stand.' With him there are no half-measures. It is everything or nothing.

Had he fought on the Western Front nine decades ago he'd have been the first man over the top the moment the barrage stopped and the whistle shrilled. (And would have taken his company with him into the mouth of the enemy machine guns, many people in Cork will add sourly. But let that lie.)

That he is now a role model for young gay men is undeniable. That there couldn't be a more determined, more articulate, more grown-up role model is equally so. Not some dreary young drag queen. Not whatever amiable nobody emerged from that I-use-the-term-laughingly ‘talent contest' to sashay into a glittering new career with the
Xposé
girls. It was apt that Cusack revealed his sexuality the day after the world said goodbye Stephen Gately, a perfectly decent, sweet and inoffensive young man at whose funeral one of the offertory gifts was a bottle of moisturiser.