A Great Feast of Light
Growing Up Irish in the Television Age
“There was no sex in Ireland before television.”
—Irish MP Oliver J. Flanagan, in the early 1960s
The Globe and Mail’s celebrated critic John Doyle was born in the small Irish town of Nenagh in 1957; his father purchased the family’s first television set in 1962. By day, John was schooled by the Christian brothers in the valour of Irish rebel heroes and the saintliness of Catholic martyrs. But in the evenings, television conveyed more subversive messages: American westerns suggested to a bookish young John a model of manhood that had nothing to do with the rigid boundaries of small-town Ireland; and The Late Late Show, Ireland’s homegrown talk-show-cum-variety-program, brought sex into Irish living rooms, eliciting howls of protest from priests and…