>>REVIEW
A GREAT FEAST OF LIGHT: GROWING UP IRISH IN THE TELEVISION AGE
John Doyle
Doubleday Canada, 321 pp.
The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle makes a delightful contribution to Canadian journalism. He writes a daily television column for people who don’t watch TV or don’t care about it very much. On some days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single reference to a TV program in his column. Instead, he brings a free-floating imagination and carefully cultivated Irish persona to the job of writing about popular culture in Canada.
Doyle gives free rein to that patented Irish persona, and serves up a great feast of blarney and beguilement in A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age, a coming-of-age memoir that begins in 1961 when Doyle was four years old and ends in 1980 when he "escaped" (to use his word) to Canada. Irish television came of age during the same period.
Doyle began watching television regularly after May 1963, when his insurance salesman father installed a black-and-white in the living room of their small house in Nenagh, County Tipperary. From then on, Telefís Éireann became as much a part of Doyle’s life as Radio Éireann had been for his father’s generation.
Nenagh, with its country fairs and bicycles, was Doyle’s home until 1967, when his father was transferred to Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, a small town in the Republic near the border with Northern Ireland. Two years later, when young Doyle was 12, the family moved to Dublin, where he completed his elementary and secondary schooling and studied English, philosophy and history at University College Dublin.
Each of these places touched his life in a different way. In Nenagh, Doyle learned how to read and write and be a good Catholic. In Carrick, where the ghosts of 1840s famine victims still haunt the empty fields and lanes, he discovered that the Protestant shop clerks across the border looked down their noses with atavistic scorn at southern Irish Catholics. In Dublin, where lower-middle-class kids looked down their noses at all country folk, he discovered that not everyone adhered to the Catholic Church’s teachings on sex, contraceptives, divorce and personal freedoms. And all the while he had television to keep him connected to the wider world.
Doyle is charming and engaging when he writes about his early childhood experiences, although I have some difficulty buying his claim that he lived in a world where nine-year-old boys were TV-influenced savvy and their Christian Brother teachers were dumber than a sack of hammers. I have greater difficulty buying his suggestion that when he first watched such imported American programs as Bat Masterson, Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. he was already sophisticated enough to judge them as he would today, when he casts himself with upper-cased brio as a Television Critic.
The memoir, particularly when it deals with 1960s Irish television programming, doesn’t read like that of a person re-entering a childish world of innocence and wonder. Rather, it reads like that of an older, wiser and more cynical commentator re-imagining his youth within the context of what he has learned since he grew up and went away to Canada.
Yet, for all that, this book is a terrific read. Doyle is at his best when he dispenses with the book’s governing conceit that television somehow brought enlightenment to the Irish and gets on with the business of telling how three very different kinds of Irish communities helped shape his young life.
Brian Brennan grew up Irish in the pre-television age and escaped to Canada in 1966. |
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