Ryan on the radio Ð a light that burned out too soon

Date Published: {J}

Gerry Ryan was a one-off, a pure genius on radio, a man who poured his heart and soul into three hours’ of live radio five days of the week. He switched from the heaviest of economic discussions into the most flippant of observations and back into counselling mode as the father of the nation.

He was no angel and enjoyed the high life, but he knew he was just the captain of the team and whatever nuggets fell Gerry’s way also benefitted his production team which was just part of the reason they stayed so loyal to him for so long.

The beauty of Gerry Ryan was that there was no radio persona; he was honest to the point of obsession and that’s why the public saw him as more of a friend than a presenter.

I was lucky enough to know Gerry reasonably well over the years, and I was a guest on his programme numerous times over the years. Those radio days always made it a morning to look forward to because this was a chat with a pal, not the radio version of an inquisition.

He didn’t feign interest in you or what you were talking about and he didn’t read his questions off a script; he hoped the item would move in a direction that nobody had even thought of, and he loved when the show moved left field.

For years, the Gerry Ryan Show was intrinsically linked with the annual Trócaire fast and part of that involved a trip for a week to some part of the world to see the work of this marvellous agency at first hand.

But Gerry didn’t want worthy thoughts from abroad, so he ran a competition to send a listener – someone who knew almost nothing about Africa or Trócaire – to report back in their own words on what they saw.

At the time I worked with The Star and we were tied in to the event as well, contributing both to the paper and the radio show. And those daily phone calls back to the programme might have started with serious observations but always went down back alleys as Gerry wanted to know what life was really like, was there any craic, who had we met.

By taking it away from the worthy but dull, he held his audience and boosted the coffers for Trócaire at same time.

When he thought the listeners idea was going stale, he wanted someone else who would be taken out of their comfort zone and into a different place. Choosing Tony Fenton turned out to be an inspired choice and it breathed new life into an old idea.

The smallest things fascinated him as much as world events; once, he discovered that I was one of the few people in Dublin who lived close enough to work that I could see the office from my house.

So he suggested that I experience traffic like I lived in Lucan, asking me to drive out there and report in by mobile on what a shock to the system this sort of bumper to bumper progress to work might seem like.

We talked of genocide in Rwanda, what sort of drugs Stanley Kubrick was on to make 2001 A Space Odyssey, how to go about buying ladies underwear (for ladies obviously), and if men had the remotest a clue what women actually thought. I even remember an outside broadcast from some woman’s house on the northside of Dublin where the local women got very excited when Tom from Omagh – one of the contestants in the first Big Brother – showed up.

From the sublime to the ridiculous in the blink of an eye.

Gerry’s strengths were many; his ability to move from world issues to the banal, his residual knowledge on so many fronts, his sense of fun, his openness and honesty, the absence of a radio persona – but most of all his ability to make the listeners feel like they were the only one he was talking to…and that he really knew them.

He will be missed by those who loved originality, because you can’t learn what Gerry Ryan had out of a book. But he will be missed most of all by the ordinary people of Ireland who have lost a friend and an ally, a voice for those who couldn’t get an audience for themselves.

He was too young to go but he will not be forgotten; a true genius and a gent who never tried to be anything other than himself.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.