- The Observer
46 25.08.19 Comment & Analysis
Riddell’s view
Age shall not weary her wisdom... or her sharp tongue
Dorothy Byrne’s
MacTaggart lecture
told some timely home
truths about the media
Soulful laments for
the passing of a golden age of
broadcasting freedom, for a
time when news editors and
documentary-makers were kings,
are fairly standard at the Edinburgh
television festival. Back then, the
newsrooms were full of smoke
and dynamism. Decisions were
made on the hoof, with no recourse
to compliance rules nor balance
guidelines.
So Dorothy Byrne’s startling
MacTaggart lecture last week was
a true tonic. This accomplished
messenger from the past, a woman
who, unusually, still has a top job in
television, reminded us it was really
not such fun in those frontier days.
Yet she was very funny about it.
Self-styled as the fi rst “wee old
lady” at the MacTaggart lectern,
Byrne, who is actually only 66 and
runs Channel 4’s news and current
affairs programming, bewitched
her audience with memories of
the male-dominated agendas that
once held sway and of working
atmospheres she has previously
likened to a men’s lavatory.
While Byrne made other key
points about today’s climate of
political division and about handling
the distrust of “mass media”, her
best zingers were rooted in TV
history and came out with all the
pent-up force of an oil gusher. After
all, Byrne, who started her 40-year
career at Granada in Manchester,
has had to watch a succession of
men delivering the annual lecture,
with a few exceptions. Most of
these men were illustrious enough,
but others not so much, and one,according to Byrne, was downright
sordid, although he remains as yet
un named. Even her audience came
under fi re: “Tonight, there’ll be no
shortage of sexist bastards, possibly
among you in the audience.”
The real power behind Byrne’s
score-settling speech was its
account of how hard it has always
been to tell important stories. At
Granada, an early suggestion that
World in Action tackle the issue of
marital rape was initially dismissed
as the stuff of morning TV chitchat,
recalled this “methuselah” of telly.
Byrne would have to concede that
the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, atthe grand age of 88, is much closer
than her to methuselah status. But
O’Brien also knows how it feels to
have stories suppressed. Celebrated
in today’s New Review, O’Brien is
publishing a 19th novel, Girl. It is
set in Nigeria and tackles a story of
the abuse and terrorising of young
women that Channel 4 has also
chronicled.
But in 1960, O’Brien’s beloved
coming-of-age novel, her gentle
and sensitive tale The Country Girls
was banned in Ireland, as was Girl
With Green Eyes in 1962, and two
years later again, Girls in Their
Married Bliss. These fi ctional storiesof sexual yearning, misadventure
and female defi ance were regarded
as beyond the pale in Catholic
Ireland. What is more, in O’Brien’s
tiny hometown in County Clare,
her mother was warned that if
her errant daughter ever returned
she would be “kicked naked around
the town”.
This weekend, O’Brien said she
is not yet “throwing in the towel”
and still regards herself as capable
of real anger, “but I am not old
and bitter”.
Her Scottish junior, Dorothy
Byrne, another indomitable
phenomenon, although a
whippersnapper in comparison, is
also promising more. In Edinburgh,
she urged her fellow news and
documentary programme-makers,
both men and the women, to stand
up together to tell braver stories.
Although, Byrne wryly admitted,
it is harder to fi nd women among
her senior peers: “What happened to
them? Were they all murdered?”
History, we often hear, gets to be
told by the victors. Surely by now
these two arch-survivors can be
counted as winners? If so, perhaps
the rest of us have less to fear.Vanessa
Thorpe
To buy this print or others by Chris Riddell for £30, go to guardianarchive.theprintspace.co.uk or email [email protected]
Dorothy Byrne
addresses the
Edinburgh
International
television festival
last week.
Photograph by
Murdo MacLeod