New Year?
Look both ways like that ancient god, Janus.
Back to the best of radio and forward to the wealth of radio and podcasts out there – it’s a brave new world, rich in variety.
But I forever turn back to the wonder of radio producers like Cathy FitzGerald and Eleanor McDowall.
There have been many soulful radio moments with both of them.
Cathy is the caretaker of Strange & Charmed, a school for people who tell stories in sound and she tells the best stories.
KAPOW!!! was the tale of The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company … the New York chapter of 826 which works with around 40,000 students.
“I never did much creative writing … that spark of nonsense got snuffed out fairly early in favour of marks and exams,” whispers Cathy.
But she’s creatively writing in sound.
You feel like she’s talking exclusively to you.
She paints pictures with her words ... take Nico from 826, he was once a sports writer: “thinks of himself as a big kid with facial hair.”
I’ve meandered in the early morning around a hospice with Cathy, drinking in the stillness, watching the world through her eyes – all on the radio.
Eleanor McDowall is another exceptionally gifted radio producer who weaves spells with her sound stories.
Listen back to Lights Out: A Sense of Quietness. This was several women’s stories on abortion in the days before the Eighth was repealed in Ireland.
We hear from an anonymous woman who takes us with her on that journey to England for an abortion – she looks about in the queue, wondering is there anyone else like her.
And then, at the clinic, she sees them with their wheelie suitcases – there are six Irish women and the nurses ask them when their flights back are and order the surgery to ensure they get maximum recovery time.
“It was shocking to me... a random day and I was there with five other women, it was devastating,” says that woman.
That was then. The Republic of Ireland has since voted to overturn its abortion ban.
McDowall weaves together the stories of the anonymous woman, the journalist, the activist and the Rose of Tralee who takes a courageous stand.
The result is astonishing and exceptional radio which gets at the true import of that abortion ban for individual women in Ireland.
It’s out there on the internet and worth the listen.
