Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(48)
For other people this might seem like an underwhelming achievement, but for my father, who loves process above all things, the outcome was irrelevant. He loved every aspect of the search; the days in the library, the collecting of the information and its deployment in the desired datasets, the accumulation of the requisite stationery to perform each task, the architecture of the database he then used. Even the visual direction of the massive family tree itself, split among some twenty rolls of fax paper across the entire wall of his office off the garage, was a source of constant joy. But it is in that very garage office, where this family tree was displayed, that my father kept his greatest project. Not a battered wooden box of foreign spoons or a corrugated-iron hut of fatal whiskey, but fifteen to twenty small, towered cabinets containing nearly a thousand VHS tapes of films he’d recorded off the TV.
The Grand North Atlantic Home-Taped VHS Archive meant that even though we grew up in the countryside and didn’t have access to Xtravision or Blockbuster, we did have a fully catalogued library of 803 films and television programmes for us to use at any time. Starved of other stimuli and tired of reading my dad’s horticultural magazines, by the time I was about eight or nine I was working my way through the tape collection with the same zeal I did the bookshelves in our house, gaining a bewilderingly specific film education from an unlikely curator.
My father began the collection some time in the late eighties. The first film he taped was 0001 MY FAIR LADY, which his database helpfully informs us starred REX HARRISON and AUDREY HEPBURN. He had filed all the recordings in Lotus Approach, an early database program, which didn’t have lower-case functionality, making the readouts all the more punchy and impressive.
Most usefully of all, he printed them out into a binder that we could browse at our leisure, with the entire archive listed twice; first chronologically – for the casual browser, seeking inspiration – and then alphabetically, for the man on a mission. Daddy was so excited by its capacity for information he left nothing to chance when it came to categories he opted to include within its pages. The archive declared not just the catalogue number, title and stars of each film, but also supplementary details he obviously imagined we’d find important at the time. So it is that we now know that 0001 MY FAIR LADY was recorded off BBC 2 on an E180 tape, which he bought from BOOTS. My father would also add the film’s rating (U), run time (165 MIN) and, perhaps most pleasingly of all, the number of unused minutes on each tape (15). This last statistic allowed him to place multiple films on tapes of sufficient length, which was a boon for a man who might have thought he’d only be buying two or three specially designated towers of videotape storage, as opposed to the full room’s worth he would eventually amass. He has, for the record, always maintained that he never intended the collection to get so big, and it just kind of grew up around him without too much forward planning. I would find this easier to believe had he not gone to the trouble of indexing all his entries with four-digit numbers, showing at least some inkling that his collection might one day number in the thousands.
Putting multiple films on tapes wasn’t just a space saver, it also led to some truly memorable double bills, since a combination of curiosity and idleness would invariably mean we watched both films back to back. This had the effect of laying down incongruous associations between unconnected films, links I still can’t shake. I’m so used to 0053 BUGSY MALONE and 0053A THE MUPPET MOVIE being one coherent – and excellent – viewing experience, I connect them even when I see either in any other context. A pairing of such quality was rare, since quality was not something my dad was particularly interested in, but occasionally serendipity allowed two favourites to sit together for a singularly satisfying and uninterrupted viewing experience.
More memorable still are those bewildering pairings such as 0166 PRIDE & PREJUDICE and 0166A COMMANDO, or 0569 STRICTLY BALLROOM and 0569A HIGHLANDER. These required their audience to be either especially catholic in their tastes, or in a very specific mood. Some defied classification, and needed an especially strong will to enjoy together, like the single tape that contained the second half of the Charlton Heston classic 008 BEN HUR (CONT) before the entirety of 008A CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG. But none came close to the single, holy tape that held 0513 ROBO COP and 0513A A WOMAN’S HEART. Even the most gonzo cineaste would have been hard pressed to think of pairing Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 action satire with an RTÉ concert of Irish traditional music by Mary Black, Eleanor McEvoy and Maura O’Connell.
Sometimes my father’s approach gestured toward the territory of high art. One example is the tape holding both 0182 POLICE ACADEMY IV and 0182A POLICE ACADEMY II, in that order, a masterpiece of mis-billing that placed two terrible films from one series back to back in the wrong order, while omitting the film that separates them in chronology. And I probably watched that tape seven or eight times.
It would be understandable for someone to read all this and presume that Daddy was a cinephile of some description, the sort of guy who lived and breathed cinema in all its forms. This would be wrong. My father enjoys films, but he’s not much of a buff. He was, at best, an indifferent filmgoer and, so far as I can remember, accompanied me to the cinema only once. This was on a whole-family jaunt to see 0587 JURASSIC PARK in the Orchard Cinema housed within St Columb’s Hall. This was a grand venue owned by the parish and overseen by Father Huck Balance, the self-same priest who had blessed our caravan the year before.