Broadcasting, banter and bromance

We’ll Leave It There So, By Bill O’Herlihy, with Ewan MacKenna, Paperweight, 205pp, €19.99

Sports presenters clearly look to classic 18th-century novels for inspiration when writing their memoirs. (Full disclosure: I have read only two biographies by sports presenters, and one was a fictional one.)

While Alan Partridge’s I, Partridge featured a Tristram Shandy-like account of his own birth, Bill O’Herlihy’s We’ll Leave It There So riffs on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Just as Pamela scribbled long first-person passages while rapacious aristocrats were supposedly kicking in the door, O’Herlihy nostalgically writes his life story while being interrupted by make-up application, producers talking in his ear, banter with Dunphy and Giles and incidental chats with Bryan Dobson in the corridor. The conceit is basically that O’Herlihy remembers his life while going through the motions of a live broadcast.

(If O’Herlihy were writing this book review he’d break off occasionally to give up-to-the-minute accounts of what he was doing, so I’ll do the same: Literary Editor Fintan O’Toole has just told me that my book review is due in 10 minutes and asked if I could please hurry up.)

The result is, though a bit stagy (like Pamela), also very effective and entertaining (like Pamela). It certainly spices up those obligatory early biographical details that only memoirists themselves really care about – in O’Herlihy’s case, his fine upstanding parents and tough Catholic schooling in Cork.

The prose is conversational. It’s easy to imagine it being spoken by O’Herlihy (or one of the Après Match guys, whose lampoonery he esteems), and I’m guessing it probably was spoken, then transcribed and structured by his clever cowriter, Ewan MacKenna.

(Fintan is now circling my desk, saying that I have just five minutes to finish my review. I wax lyrical about the ink in my blood and the sound of the printing press.)

In the process O’Herlihy comes across, unsurprisingly, as an affable, frank, “tribal Corkman” (he describes himself this way several times) as he outlines a career trajectory from ambitious early school-leaver (he defied his mother and skipped doing his Leaving Cert) to cub reporter at the Examiner, to RTÉ current-affairs reporter with 7 Days, the precursor to Today Tonight.

Parallel careers

His current-affairs career ultimately peaked, then imploded, with a groundbreaking 7 Days special about moneylending, in 1969. The investigation led to a hugely politicised tribunal on RTÉ’s journalistic practices that many now see as an opportunistic attempt by a disgruntled government to flex its muscles at an uncooperative RTÉ. At the time it put huge pressure on the station and on O’Herlihy.

(Fintan picks me up by the lapels and tells me I have one minute to complete my review “or else”. I describe the view out of the Irish Times fourth-floor window before casually analysing my colleagues’ sandwich preferences.)

Subsequently O’Herlihy developed two parallel careers, one as a sports presenter (an unexpected sideways step at the time) and the second as a PR guru, his “full-time job”. He set up his PR business in the 1970s and instantly regretted it. He says that he could relate to George Lee when the he left Fine Gael to run back to RTÉ.

Instead of quitting, however, O’Herlihy persevered, to become a PR man of note. Indeed he was one of “the National Handlers” (John Healy’s term) for the Fine Gael-Labour governments of the early 1980s. He doesn’t go into too much detail about this other than to say that he couldn’t curb Garret FitzGerald’s overuse of subclauses in speeches.

The wider activities of O’Herlihy’s successful communications business aren’t analysed in depth. At one point he rebuts allegations that he lobbied the government to lift sanctions on Iraq on behalf of a client, and he also delivers a few short sympathetic lines about a former employer, Michael Lowry.

I suspect that somewhere in O’Herlihy’s house there is an alternative, PR-themed biography, a black dossier that, like many such dossiers in leafier suburbs, will never see printer’s ink.

(I complete the review. Fintan cycles to the printer with my handwritten copy, muttering under his breath. I recall my teenage years in Co Kildare.)

O’Herlihy is much more personally revealing about his heart attack, his recent struggle with cancer, the deaths of his sisters and his strong religious faith. He’s also quite candid in the “present tense” studio sections about the creation of compelling television and his occasionally tumultuous relationship with his panellists.

The absurd/banal minutiae are entertaining (“Talk moves away from Brady’s sunburn,” he says of some ad-break banter), but he doesn’t shy away from issues they’ve had in the past, such as the time Eamon Dunphy’s book on Matt Busby got a bad review from Johnny Giles or the time Dunphy turned up with a few drinks too many. (Actually, many of the anecdotes revolve around Dunphy, to whom our narrator is nonetheless bromantically attached.)

Occasionally when reading I wondered what Ireland would be like had the easygoing O’Herlihy remained at the helm of state-of-the-nation current-affairs programmes (I’m no counterfactual historian, but I suspect Michael Lowry might be leading us) or where he’d be without panellist-savants like Dunphy and Giles.

On the other hand, his tense retelling of the Saipan incident suggests that he’s dealing with the real state-of-the-nation stuff anyway, and, as he notes himself, his job is really to make the panellists look good.

Ultimately, O’Herlihy’s memoir isn’t earth-shattering, but it’s likeable, candid and pretty entertaining. Like himself.

(The review is now being printed. The production staff hug and high-five one another. I muse vaguely about the future before saying my catchphrase.)