Donore Avenue on the big screen

Sir, – Frank McNally refers to the suitability of the houses on Donore Avenue for the filming of The Siege of Sidney Street (“Another sighting of the lesser-spotted Dublin fanlight horse”, An Irishman’s Diary, October 8th).

As a local kid who hung around the film crew at the time, my understanding of the suitability of the area was that the film was meant to depict 1912 London, and the houses in the East End in 1950, at the time of filming, all had TV aerials attached to their chimneys.

In Donore Avenue, however, TV had yet to reach us, thus our chimneys were, for the most part, free of TV aerials. Admittedly, Dublin was not entirely TV aerial-free, as a weak signal could be obtained from the North of Ireland BBC, and some posh people had early TV sets, which required huge aerials attached to their chimneys. – Yours, etc,

TONY CORCORAN,