Power of radio allows you see the world in your mind’s eye

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Back in the world before the internet, it was common practice for sports fans to keep in touch with events elsewhere by means of a transistor radio which they fixed to their ear for the duration of their own game.

Back then, even headphones were a future phenomenon – so the only way to manage this was to keep the volume low and the radio near, so that the sound didn’t upset those other spectators who preferred to just concentrate on the game at hand.

Nonetheless, there were many who yearned for the bigger picture – and therefore it was a regular feature to find half the crowd with a wireless up to their lughole.

And there’s a story from that era shows just how this can go awry.

Depending on your age, Philip Greene either needs no introduction – or you’ve never heard of him.

In a nutshell – and alongside the great Jimmy Magee – he was the voice of Irish soccer through the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and into the eighties.

Jimmy did the television commentaries, but every weekend Phil would be despatched to a footballing outpost, far from his beloved Glenmalure Park, home of Shamrock Rovers.

Occasionally Philip’s love for the Hoops got ahead of him, and he was known to hand back to studio with lines like: “Still 1-0 to us and ten minutes left to play.”

But the transistor radio story goes back to the early part of his career and a time when RTÉ Radio Sport featured just one live match on a Sunday, with the occasional input from studio to bring fans up to date with other scores.

This was also the golden era of the continuity announcer, a person who had just two jobs – to introduce the next programme and to plug to gaps if there was a break in transmission from the outside broadcast unit.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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