The man on the TV

Growing up on an isolated farm in rural Ireland in the 1980s, television was a big part of our family life. The TV was on when we ate breakfast, before we headed out to school and on when we got back from school. If I'm honest, the TV stayed on when were doing our homework. As a family, we sat around the TV and ate dinner on our laps, arguing over what we were watching as if we were in the audience. If you'd asked any Irish person at that time who the man on the TV was, you would have got the same answer. It was Gay Byrne, the presenter of The Late Late Show. The Late Late Show was a peculiarly Irish combination of light entertainment, celebrity interviews and pressing social issues of the day. It was a window onto the rest of the world for the Irish, and a window onto ourselves in a changing Ireland. As an academic who studies social movements, part of what motivates me are Irish activists I watched debate the need for social change on The Late Late Show. I remember ????? McCafferty, a fiery left-wing journalist, talk about bread and roses from the speech by Row Schneiderman, the great Jewish American Lesbian trade unionist. McCafferty's and Schneiderman's words still inspire me, that it is not enough to fight for the right to have bread and basic social conditions. You must fight for the right to smell roses, to dream and to aspire. As a queer teenager coming to understand the sexuality in 1980s Ireland, The Late Late Show was the first place where I saw glimpses of other Irish queer people. These glimpses were not dreams to aspire to. They were nightmares to run away from. Gay Byrne took the tolerant, liberal Catholic point of view of his time, but the queer Irish were more to be pitied than condemned for the awful lives they led. A lot of this concern to HIV AIDS, the pandemic of that moment, but I remember one discussion about a young man who had been murdered in a Dublin park because he was gay. I have no doubt fear of the same thing happening to me was part of what drove me to leave rural Ireland and immigrate. Before COVID happened, I've got into the habit of returning quite regularly to my parents’ farm to visit them. The rural island I visited is different from the one I left. Much of the social progress I heard activists debate on the Late Late Show has happened. My parents had also changed, especially my mother. The best way to describe that is that for her, Jeremy Kyle, who she watched daily, had replaced Gay Byrne as ‘the man on the TV’. From a woman who engaged with current affairs with an open heart, her worldview diminished to one obsessed with teenage pregnancies, addiction and dysfunctional families. I lost count of the number of times I sat in the kitchen with Mammy and she continued to talk to Jeremy Kyle on the TV as if she were in his audience. That used to stress me, and I admit I was happy when The Jeremy Kyle Show was cancelled. Living abroad, I didn't realise at the time that her obsession with Jeremy Kyle, her man on the TV, was one of the first signs of her dementia. That dementia has worsened during the COVID pandemic, a time when I cannot return home to see my parents. Because of this, and because I was afraid my mother would forget who I was, I had broadband installed in my parents’ home, and a television webcam so that they can talk to me through the TV. My father, a farmer in his 80s, has taken to the technology. He calls me every day to talk about the farm, the weather and his dinner, as if I was still a 16 year old schoolboy. He sometimes talks about COVID and the great wave of polio that hit Ireland in the 1940s-1950s. Daddy now cooks dinner instead of Mammy, but we still sit with it on our laps and chat like we did in the 1980s. My mother mostly sits and watches me on the television as if she was in an audience. Occasionally she calls me Jeremy instead of Joe. That is OK. I cannot be there. And I am grateful to be her man on the TV, a window into a world in which she is retreating, not joining.