Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(50)

I’m not sure exactly when, but there was an uptick in the scale of the operation at some point in the early nineties, when my father began making improvements to the system. It had long bothered him that in order to tape a film, he’d have to be watching it, so he got a second tape recorder connected to the TV in the kitchen, which could be programmed to record there while he watched something else in the living room. Soon we had a further two machines in the garage, meaning we could, in theory, record four things at once, although I think three may have been the maximum we ever did. It should be borne in mind that we only had seven to nine channels, the four (and later five) British ones, plus three (and later four) Irish ones that existed at this time.

‘If we had satellite TV,’ my dad once said, ‘we could be doing a lot more,’ perhaps missing the point that if we did have the multiple channel options of satellite TV the need for an entire room of our house to be set aside for a videotaped content archive might be slightly reduced. Of course, having films at our fingertips via Sky Movies or Netflix or iPlayer would never have been as satisfying as going into the garage and thumbing through the binder, and finding that one thing you wanted to watch, or something you’d never heard of that would go on to be a favourite. As I got older, there was also the possibility of finding slightly more illicit thrills by looking for those films that promised intrigue, violence, or even the faint possibility of what my father considered sexiness. In theory, this was made easier by my dad’s method of assigning ratings to the films, meaning surely an X would promise something to quicken the pulse. Unfortunately, my father’s grasp of what constituted pornography appears to have been confused, as I discovered when I watched Warren Beatty’s epic three-hour historical drama 0031 REDS, waiting for it to turn into the beach-side sex romp its X rating implied.


And Netflix can’t compete with the incredible joy of finding, within those videos, that tantalising glimpse into a forgotten world which comes from the ad breaks, news segments and interstitial moments that were caught alongside the films. Around the late eighties and early nineties, Northern Irish television was broadly indistinguishable from its Soviet counterpart, and each evening’s programming was ‘presented’ by an announcer, or more commonly a pair of announcers, who sat on couches and addressed the viewer with details of the next programme. There are few experiences headier than watching UTV’s Julian Simmons gamely introducing 0421A DIE HARD after having just recapped Coronation Street in his ear-melting Belfast twang.

There’s something bracing about the nostalgia produced by old news segments and ads, something ephemeral and throwaway, caught and held in suspension. As if pulling the camera back from whatever movie we were hoping to watch and training it on our own unwashed world. The place we were trying to escape, full of mullets and double denim and burning cars, punctured only by the desultory glamour of the glitzier advertisements of the time – camels pouring foaming pints of bright yellow Harp lager, beaming ladies in tight jeans driving Renault Clios, a puzzling number of people all declaring their desire for Chicken Tonight.

Back then, adverts were often just place cards displayed for thirty seconds with an excitable voice overlaid. ‘Discover Fashion,’ it might say, breathily, as an ethereal chorus repeated ‘fashion… fashion… fashion’ into the background, like a group of sexy, couture-mad Northern Irish angels retreating backwards into a mist of giant hair and shoulder pads. This was only ever very slightly undercut by the legend underneath declaring said outlet store had now re-opened, following a closure due to bomb damage. I have never been to the Spinning Wheel pub in Castletownroche, Co. Cork, nor the town itself, but I will never forget that it was open for business and spent no small part of its marketing budget on letting me and everyone else in Ireland know all about it.

At certain points, looking through this binder now as a grown man, there comes a melancholy sense of fossilised effort, something heart-breaking about the project. I get a faint pluck at the eyelid when I imagine Daddy alone in our garage, filling out the run time (140mins), tape make (SCOTCH) and classification (U) of desultory 1987 TV movie 0262 ASSAULT AND MATRIMONY. Not least since he evidently forgot he had this classic nailed down and recorded it again when it was repeated as 0275 ASSAULT & MATRIMONY. It was sometimes quite evident he wasn’t sure what he was recording and was either doing it for our benefit or just to add another film to the stock. Nowhere is this clearer than my favourite bit of writing in the entire collection, where he lists the John Hughes romantic comedy She’s Having a Baby, with masterful stuffiness, as 0418 SHE IS HAVING A BABY.

It’s easier to make fun of it as a hare-brained way of dodging video rental fees, or the massive, nerdy compulsion of someone who loved AV technology and databases. I see within it a kernel of my own preferred way of organising grief; pushing unknowables out of my mind by cramming in enough verifiable data that I’m kept occupied. Maybe the archive was my dad’s way of making sense out of chaos, to create a system, however arbitrary, that could approximate all the ordered specificity our world must have lacked at that time.

I spent a large part of my childhood and adolescence wondering if my father and I had much in common at all. And I think our love of archiving is the biggest thing, a bulwark against the terror of losing. Everything in its one right, good and true place, safe from harm.

By the time I was in my early teens, my siblings and I had taken the work of the archive over from my dad, who didn’t feel the need to tape everything any more. It was up to us to record those things we needed to be saved. I’d like to be able to tell you that the last entry I compiled was 0644 DEER HUNTER, a taut, moving classic that deals with loss, death and fragile masculinity. But it was an unmemorable 1983 drama, 0645A LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, THE, and it wasn’t even filmed properly. The footage stutters before we’re catapulted to the film’s end, with forty minutes unaccounted for. After the credits, we’re greeted by UTV’s continuity announcers, Mike and Linda, once more looking out to us from their beige couches.