If the truth be told, I had always liked and admired Alan, a Yorkshire man, as well, and we joined forces that day and became fast friends. With Alan’s gear and Dessie’s expertise we actually did set up Mallow’s first ever local television service. It was also the first in the country I believe. Then the famous Chris Carey of Dublin’s Radio Nova fame found out about it because I told him how to do it during a visit to Radio Nova, and he went into shock when he saw how easy it was. Within weeks Radio Nova had a test signal going out from Three Rock Mountain covering all of Dublin and it caused consternation in political circles. The Minister for Communications then made a statement in the Dail, our Parliament, saying that whatever about pirate radio being allowed, he would not allow pirate television. Almost immediately Nova’s gear was seized, but strangely enough not ours, which only made us braver.
We called our station Channel 3, and our test card was made by having a camera pointing at the side of a video tape box. The box had the three colours red, green, and blue painted on the side of it and it looked nice. In those great days of pirate broadcasting, as I said before, you could do whatever your imagination brought forth.
Alan then had the genius of an idea to record the BBC in Cork City and re-transmit it an hour later in Mallow. Soon the whole town began to buy aerials and watch our channel. We then put my theory into practice and had a camera pointing at a chair where our ‘continuity announcer’ sat. Our announcer was Margot, Alan’s wife, and she gave out the latest information about the night’s viewing and any local news she could muster up. She looked brilliant and spoke with a naturally polished voice and attractive accent. She came across as totally professional in every way except for one rather important flaw. No one could hear a single word she said, because Alan had constant problems with the sound. This was due to the fact that, while Alan did have broadcast quality cameras, he had cheap microphones which were barely above the useless category. Margot got a lot of ribbing from friends and viewers over the days, but she forgave us the first few nights. Alan said it was ‘teething problems’ and he gave me a smirk when we were reviewing the broadcasts later. The problems continued though, with the odd word or full sentence being heard now and again. After a few weeks of good and bad sound, Margot called me in as the so-called sound expert from the radio. She told both Alan and me that it better be right ‘tonight’ or that was it for her, and she was out of it.
I was wanting to go over the whole system personally, but Alan would have none of it, assuring me over and over that all was ok, “Johnny boy, tis all perfect I tell you. I tested it meself earlier, so you can relax boy. She will be heard perfectly tonight”. He seemed really sure, so I was about to leave when Margot arrived all done up and ready to broadcast to the town. She asked me to stay on, as she didn’t trust Alan’s assurances.
We agreed that I would stand off camera and nod to her, letting her know that she was being heard. For me to hear her, I had to rely on Alan giving me the nod, as he had concocted some system for him to hear her while he was working the camera. Still he assured us both that all would be perfect, as he had ‘personally tested it’. Margot’s retort was, “And that’s why I’m worried Alan”.
The broadcast began with Margot speaking to camera, but also looking at me and expecting the nod. I was looking at Alan waiting for his nod, but he began fidgeting and ducking down behind a large television monitor. I saw him feverishly twiddling the volume control, and when I looked directly at him he had this hilarious look on his face as he began to shake his head from side to side. Margot could see none of this as he was using the monitor as a shield. I knew then that once again there was no sound and Margot was moving her lips with nothing coming out to her viewers’ ears. She continued to speak as a professional would, but she was developing a look of concern. I could not look her in the face any more either because by then Alan had completely submerged himself under the desktop and I saw him holding his hand across his mouth to prevent his laughter from being heard by Margot. So in solidarity with him, and out of sheer embarrassment, I too began to slowly sink down behind my monitor and almost exploded laughing myself. Then with both of us gone and Margot left alone, she realized the game was up. We were peeping up from below the table top and saw Margot jump up and throw her papers away and shout, “Allan”. Then she stormed out of the studio slamming the door so hard that I think she might have broken it. We collapsed on the floor in total stitches. I could not stop laughing because Alan had the face of a schoolboy in big, big trouble, and he reminded me so much of how my old friend Joe Hurley looked in a scrape. After we finally stopped laughing Alan said to me, “Johnny boy, she’s fairly pissed at me tonight. Is there any chance I can stay at your place mate?” More peals of laughter followed, and while I knew Margot was always a gracious hostess, often filling me with tea and cakes, that night I felt that it was safer to avoid the house, so I left. I think my good friend and ‘sound expert’ may have slept in his mobile home that night. It was one of the funniest incidents that had ever happened to me in my life, and to this day, whenever I meet Alan, it’s as if it was just yesterday we made that broadcast, and I can still see him in panic, then holding his hand to his face in laughter.
We continued without our ‘continuity announcer’, and the whole idea began to take off. Soon big business began to notice our venture and we met a group in Millstreet town who were prepared to heavily invest in the project, but wanted ‘live’ BBC for racing and matches. We concocted a plan to transmit the live BBC by microwave link from the top of Sliabh na mBan in Tipperary to the NCCR site outside Mallow, and then on to Kerry, where it would ultimately cross the Shannon and end up in Galway City. This idea was light years ahead of its time, but such was the vision and confidence of Alan Watson. It would have been an incredible engineering feat had we pulled it off. Then instead of Ireland having just the two television channels provided by RTE, rural Ireland would suddenly have had at least four more. We decided to run with the plan and had Italian transmission people building the equipment. After some kind of survey was done, the initial safe estimate suggested that we stood to make about three million on the venture: a million a man. I had almost become a millionaire at the young age of thirty six. When Alan phoned me with that great news I got cold feet, feeling that the government would never allow this to happen, especially because of its illegality. Unfortunately I was proven so tragically right. Within weeks, and with work ongoing on the gear in Italy, Alan’s studio was raided by the Department of Communications and his livelihood was confiscated. It was a tragic and terrible loss for him, and a very sad day for both of my good friends. Our whole dream quickly fell apart and the money evaporated. I believe Alan eventually did get his video equipment back, but Channel 3 was dead. Some years later another friend called Paul O’Sullivan and I did transmit the early satellite service called Super Channel into Mallow. It too folded from lack of support in the town, and after that I decided to never again put any kind of television service into the town, nor have I.
Just last week I met Alan by pure accident and he told me that the previous night he had been dreaming of Channel 3, and the fun we had in those wild days. By sheer coincidence I too had been dreaming the same dream on the same night, and we met a day later. There are no accidents in life, and it’s completely possible that Alan did get the same idea as me at the same time all those years ago, possibly because we are all connected in Consciousness. Even now as I write of Alan, Margot, and Dessie, I am smiling broadly and remembering the last night Channel 3 had its silent announcer.
Legal radio the fun ends.
We had hardly begun broadcasting as a legal entity when it dawned on us all that this was a very different kind of environment to the one we were used to in the pirate days. From the beginning I worried about our ability to continue in business at all. We had found an excellent CEO, Colm O’Connaill, who had put together a great broadcasting team, but we only transmitted to a small area i.e. North Cork, yet we had the costs of a very l
arge radio station. Our Board was equally concerned for our future, and then one day while driving along perusing the problem, the answer came to me. We were supposed to be a radio for the people, so why not get the listeners directly involved in keeping us alive. To do this I came up with the idea that we should start a small local lottery, and have collectors selling books of lottery tickets to the listeners. We would then do a draw every day and announce the numbers at regular times. This idea would later become known as ‘Radio Bingo’ and it still goes on today. Anyone having matching numbers would then get a real good cash prize, and the whole idea would get us both listeners and revenue. It was without a doubt one of my best ever ideas, and I remember the night I proposed it at a Board meeting in the Hibernian Hotel. It was not hard to convince our Board that we should give it a try, and it was agreed to put it in train. Then having come up with the idea I dropped out of the administration of it completely, and concentrated on doing my job which was engineering the station.
We were very fortunate in having a brilliant legal advisor on the Board who formulated the court application, which was later granted. Now we had hope at last. The money began to roll in, and so did the listeners. I was secretly delighted that my idea had worked because I had given up my own successful video repair business at home to become a full-time engineer with the station, so I had a vested interest in its success.
We were still small, but at least we had the potential to grow. Then, at a crucial time and by a total accident, we had a great stroke of good fortune fall in our lap. A major publicity coup would happen for us.
At that time our government was formed by a coalition between the larger Fianna Fail party and a smaller party known as the PD’s. It was a very rocky government indeed and the head of it was Mr Albert Reynolds, who was a business friend of Jack’s from their dancehall days. He had kindly agreed to be interviewed by us in a hotel near Kanturk, in County Cork. Mr Reynolds gave a very pleasant interview to our Head of News, John O’Connor and I engineered the recording. Then later in the night, John and I were sitting in the public bar having a drink and simultaneously Mr Reynolds was giving a private speech to his Fianna Fail faithful in a different part of the hotel. Unknown to him, his private speech had become a very public one as it was inadvertently piped into the hotel’s public address system, and as such it became available to everyone sitting in the bar. We had been given a copy of his speech and the loudspeaker carrying that speech was situated right above my head. As we sat having a drink, I realized quite quickly that Mr Reynolds’ speech was becoming excited and he departed from it almost immediately. As we listened in, I recorded it on John’s advice, never thinking that it would soon contain the political bombshell that it did. Mr Reynolds assured his faithful that the coalition with his partners the PD’s was, “Just a temporary little arrangement,” and our Head of News almost knocked over the table when he heard it. Within hours it was released into the newswires and the government almost fell as a result of it. Our recording became immediate national news. It launched us into the spotlight with the national media and immediately gave us a credibility we did not actually deserve at that time. The ‘temporary little arrangement’ is now so commonplace as to have its origins almost forgotten, and I only write it for the posterity it deserved because it helped make our radio station a huge success. On a personal level I felt really sorry for the problems it had caused for Mr Reynolds, who seemed to be a really nice man. He had been kind enough to give us a very valuable interview, and as far as I was concerned we had stabbed him in the back, but all seems to be fair in love, war, and politics. By comparison to what goes on in the media today, it was a very mild accident of good fortune for us, and Mr Reynolds was a tough businessman and a well seasoned politician. The government survived but only barely so, and we were launched at last. Now we had recognition, we had a cash flow that was the envy of everyone, and we had a CEO who wanted to take out his main competitor: 96fm in Cork City. In time he did just that, and also added another licence to our little group; the combined licence for West Cork and Cork City, probably the second most valuable one in the country.
Over the next ten years this fledgling radio station, which had begun in my kitchen becoming known as County Sound, and later 96FM and C103, would grow beyond all expectations. Over those years I was directly involved in many worthwhile schemes to help people through the power of the radio medium. The one I am most proud of happened as a result of a terrible famine in Somalia when millions of people were dying of hunger. I was asked if I could set up a system which would allow for a joint national radio appeal by all of Ireland’s local radios. Mick Mulcahy, one of our DJ’s, was the driving force. He and I were good friends, so having seen the terrible images on television and knowing Mick’s sincerity, I agreed. We got fantastic co-operation from the IRTC, particularly Michael O’Keeffe the CEO, and every one of the local radios got involved for that famous one-day appeal. The hub was a studio that my son Kyrl and I set up in a warehouse in Cork, and on that day I believe we raised over one million pounds nationally. I was presented later with a certificate of thanks by the little committee, and it means more to me than all of my technical certificates to date. To this day it gives me great pleasure to know that my work, in conjunction with that of the many, many others, helped save the lives of people I will never even meet. That radio appeal, which was started in a pub in Cobh by a group of ordinary people, showed me that each of us can make a difference in our world, especially when the motivation is sincere. On that morning, as I sat at the sound desk listening to a nurse describing how their work had saved the life of a little boy in a mud hut in Africa, for some unknown reason it brought tears to my eyes, but I hid them well. I knew for sure in that moment that Nannie was smiling at me and saying, “Sure I knew the senna would give you brains one day”.
My pen chance for practical joking would reach a peak during the early days of our new legal radio, but I was not the instigator just a pawn in the game. My birthday is the day before ‘Fools Day’ and it was traditional for radio people to try and fool the public on such a day, or at least way back in those days we tried to, before it became uncool. My radio friends and Etta had secretly combined my birthday party with a big Disco gig that we were holding in a hotel in Mallow, and the place was packed. The atmosphere was great and during the celebrations the Radio Talk Show host, a man by the name of Derry O’Callnan came up with the idea that we should try and convince our listeners that the Blackwater River was drying up. This river flows through Mallow, and most of the towns in our listening area are located along the river. It’s also a famous fishing river with anglers from all over the world trying their luck along its banks every year, so a dried up river would have dire consequences for our area. Derry convinced me that I should be his ‘reporter’ along the river due to my travels to mountains as part of my job, and in a moment of weakness I had agreed to be part of the broadcast. The gig and my party went on all night long and about four in the morning I fell into bed happy in the knowledge that I was supposed to be off all the next day, and I planned a late snooze. My phone rang about ten and it was Derry asking if I was ready to go ‘on air’ with a report. I woke from a deep sleep and could not even remember what day it was, let alone do a live link, so I told him to call me back in ten minutes when I could get my thoughts together. I switched on County Sound and heard him talk up the river disaster so convincingly that even I almost believed it myself. He had so called experts from America who knew all about climate change, a man from Arizona I believe, and also he had some local politicians in on the act. It became very real even before I added my bit. Then the phone rang. “And we go over now to John Cahill who as you all know is always out and about in our area, what’s the story John”. I got into my imaginative mode and said, “Well Derry, I am out and about, but what the listeners don’t know about me is that I studied weather patterns for years as a hobby, and specifically the critical factor of water shortages in Africa, and I am sad to say, and I
don’t want any panic, but the Blackwater is actually four feet lower than normal”. Derry questioned me more and I added more and I thought that would be the end of my part in the show, and so I got back under the blankets. The phone rang again with Derry on the line all excited. “John, John boy, you have to do another broadcast, you were brilliant, the phones have all lit up and people are now ringing in confirming your belief that the end is near for our river, you have just got to come back on again later”. I was flabbergasted, as I thought I only spoke to the people as if it the event was real, and now it seemed that my words were making magic happen, so I agreed. In the meantime, Derry took callers from all along the river and each one convinced him and the listening public that it was all true the river was indeed lower. Soon we would have only a dry riverbed and no fish. Then he added his ace card and brought on the local politicians, who each blamed the other for not draining it, or for building on it, and they had a field day slugging it out. All were in on the gag of course so it was great fun, and then the phone rang again.
Two Walls and a Roof Page 34
