Ferghal’s dad had a poitín still, made from corrugated iron and covered in moss so you could only get at it from the one end. The cops didn’t bother with it since they had bigger things to worry about than Denis’s homebrew hooch, and the craggy hill that traced up from Termonbacca and out toward Creggan was uncharted land to them and their armoured cars. Ferghal’s dad was awful fond of talking about the still, its contents and the arcane processes of the trade, not to mention the near misses with vandals and smugglers, tussles with neighbours, or the odd bedraggled fox that might pad through the scrub toward the sweet-smelling, foul-smelling vats. No trip to Ferghal’s house was complete without Denis telling some tall tale about his rough and roguish secret life as a contrabandist. The great joy of Denis’s life was when someone gagged, uncontrollably, at the mucky liquid he’d scraped from the still that week. One sniff and it was promised you’d go blind, two and you could read people’s thoughts for a fortnight. A drop on your tongue and we reckoned you’d speak six words to the dead, then die. Denis was the sort of low-level eccentric who prevailed throughout my childhood, men who seemed completely normal until you had a conversation with them about planning permission or female newsreaders and found that their many and varied eccentricities would foam to the surface, fully realised.
For Percy’s dad, Pat, it was spoons. He collected spoons from every place he ever visited, and took to delegating the procurement of these blessed objects to anyone going anywhere, as if they were a tribute owed. Many a conversation was halted by Pat nudging his head in the direction of his spoon box and asking had you anything in your pocket for him.
Compared to such foibles and fancies, my dad’s own hobbies seemed slightly less niche. He had no interest in sport, save a passion for Formula One that alienated and intrigued me in equal measure. He loved cars and racing from a purely technical standpoint, and was subsumed by the drama of every tune, stop and corner. I tend to share the sentiment of Sean Lock when it comes to Formula One, in that I would get the same amount of enjoyment from turning on two washing machines at the same time and seeing which finished first. What makes Sean Lock’s gag even more applicable here is that my dad genuinely would, and I think at least once actually did, enjoy watching two washing machines go at once. We had two right beside each other in our utility room – the prison laundry – and routine testing of their abilities would have been par for the course.
When we were growing up, Daddy liked nothing more than lying, supine, on a grubby cloth he’d laid on the floor, muttering the names of screws to himself while he tried to ‘fix’ a machine he’d bought that same day. Our garage is still a mausoleum of bikes, mowers and machines of all types and stripes. My dad is not exactly a hoarder, but he does still maintain that the six old Superser heaters he has there will likely come in handy some time soon. Ditto the four or five propeller mowers, two or three ride-on tractor mowers, and a thousand other units of mechanical detritus that have sat in our cavernous garage for so long you could spend a lifetime there and never notice them.
This gadget graveyard was useful to us as kids, in the sense that it occasionally sucked Daddy into a time warp that gave us free rein for a few hours, especially on Saturdays, when he would otherwise be lining up chores for us. So when he was preoccupied, it was glorious. We’d watch him head out to the garage, intending to find, say, a pair of pliers, or a photograph of John Paul II, and audibly cheer as we watched him get waylaid mending a strimmer that hadn’t seen active use in twenty-two years. As we got older, we’d sometimes seed these distractions ourselves.
‘We don’t have a chainsaw, do we, Daddy?’ I’d ask innocently.
‘Why?’ he’d reply.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Well, Kev Nash said he didn’t believe that we had a chainsaw, not one that worked anyway.’
‘Did he now?’ This with indignation. ‘Well, would he be surprised to know that we actually have three?’
‘But working, I mean.’
‘They work fine,’ he’d retort, putting on his jacket and reaching for the garage door remote as my siblings and I prepared a mental schedule of which terrible action movies we’d be watching in the sitting room in eighteen seconds’ time.
This was only good, of course, as long as he didn’t pressgang you into service, which was a very real threat. That was the worst of all possible worlds, worse even than being given typical Saturday-morning Daddy jobs like fixing the gutters or hoeing the weeds. Those, at least, were drawn from our own dimension of time and space, chores with purpose and an end. Hoking around in the garage with Daddy, by contrast, was a senseless infinity of thankless tasks. It meant at least an hour of Daddy barking orders at you to hand him invisible, often impossible, objects, which he described solely in relation to their proximity to other impossible objects you were supposedly standing beside.
‘Pass me the goblin fork,’ he’d shout. ‘The goblin fork! The red one. With the ladle bells. The ladle bells. It’s over there, beside the cheese press – ach, for Jesus’ sake it’s right in front of you!’ He would then walk precisely to where you were standing and materialise a gigantic object that somehow bore all the unlikely characteristics he’d just mentioned, which had been sitting right in front of you this entire time, sandwiched between an inflatable pulpit, a bag of javelins and the Nepalese Handball Federation’s team bus. There were ham radios, pool tables and plough parts. I’m fairly sure at one point we had a large mechanical loom. Once I was instructed to find something behind ‘the ship’s engine’. This I did, even though my father has never fished nor sailed in his life.
Daddy is an avid technophile. Perhaps this is an inherited trait. During the fifties, his parents became the first people on the street to have a television, which caused a great stir at the time, and led to neighbours and family members constantly dropping in to catch whatever was on. In a more sombre, prestige version of this story, we’d picture people crowding round the flickering diode, nudging each other to get a look at the screen, grasping their faces in horror at discovering that JFK had been assassinated, or staring in reverence as man landed on the moon. In the more prosaic realities of rural Ireland, my father recalls only that, well into the seventies, my Great-Uncle Edward would be sure to make himself known around lunchtime on Saturdays so that he could tune into the wrestling and watch Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy beating eight shades of shite out of each other on World of Sport.
When my father became fascinated with genealogy, he deployed the same attention to detail; tracing the family tree as far back as any Irish person can – about 150 years, until the entire square-tentacled mass retreats back into a freckled full house of illiterate farmers, people who left no names and never troubled the government for documentation. There were some odd additions – our great-great-great-great-uncle Edward Maguire was, supposedly, the first chief of police of Chicago – but for the most part it was rustic sod-botherers, rank and file. I suppose the dream of genealogy is that you’ll dig deep enough in the rough and find some shiny gem of notoriety, some improbable link to fame, fortune or foreign royalty. The best my dad could manage was his discovery that Bishop Edward Daly, a man he’d already been friends with his entire life, was very slightly related to my grandmother, a woman so close with his own mother that she had babysat the infant bishop anyway. And all his family had also been farmers, most definitely reared on cabbage and praties and stiff-shirted Irish republicanism. It wouldn’t exactly have made a rip-roaring episode of Who Do You Think You Are? is what I’m saying. My father spent years at this, and basically ended up with the exact same information he would have got if he’d guessed the entire thing while very tired.
For other people this might seem like an underwhelming achievement, but for my father, who loves process above all things, the outcome was irrelevant. He loved every aspect of the search; the days in the library, the collecting of the information and its deployment in the desired datasets, the accumulation of the requisite stationery to perform each task, the architecture of the database he then used. Even the visual direction of the massive family tree itself, split among some twenty rolls of fax paper across the entire wall of his office off the garage, was a source of constant joy. But it is in that very garage office, where this family tree was displayed, that my father kept his greatest project. Not a battered wooden box of foreign spoons or a corrugated-iron hut of fatal whiskey, but fifteen to twenty small, towered cabinets containing nearly a thousand VHS tapes of films he’d recorded off the TV.
The Grand North Atlantic Home-Taped VHS Archive meant that even though we grew up in the countryside and didn’t have access to Xtravision or Blockbuster, we did have a fully catalogued library of 803 films and television programmes for us to use at any time. Starved of other stimuli and tired of reading my dad’s horticultural magazines, by the time I was about eight or nine I was working my way through the tape collection with the same zeal I did the bookshelves in our house, gaining a bewilderingly specific film education from an unlikely curator.
My father began the collection some time in the late eighties. The first film he taped was 0001 MY FAIR LADY, which his database helpfully informs us starred REX HARRISON and AUDREY HEPBURN. He had filed all the recordings in Lotus Approach, an early database program, which didn’t have lower-case functionality, making the readouts all the more punchy and impressive.
Most usefully of all, he printed them out into a binder that we could browse at our leisure, with the entire archive listed twice; first chronologically – for the casual browser, seeking inspiration – and then alphabetically, for the man on a mission. Daddy was so excited by its capacity for information he left nothing to chance when it came to categories he opted to include within its pages. The archive declared not just the catalogue number, title and stars of each film, but also supplementary details he obviously imagined we’d find important at the time. So it is that we now know that 0001 MY FAIR LADY was recorded off BBC 2 on an E180 tape, which he bought from BOOTS. My father would also add the film’s rating (U), run time (165 MIN) and, perhaps most pleasingly of all, the number of unused minutes on each tape (15). This last statistic allowed him to place multiple films on tapes of sufficient length, which was a boon for a man who might have thought he’d only be buying two or three specially designated towers of videotape storage, as opposed to the full room’s worth he would eventually amass. He has, for the record, always maintained that he never intended the collection to get so big, and it just kind of grew up around him without too much forward planning. I would find this easier to believe had he not gone to the trouble of indexing all his entries with four-digit numbers, showing at least some inkling that his collection might one day number in the thousands.
Putting multiple films on tapes wasn’t just a space saver, it also led to some truly memorable double bills, since a combination of curiosity and idleness would invariably mean we watched both films back to back. This had the effect of laying down incongruous associations between unconnected films, links I still can’t shake. I’m so used to 0053 BUGSY MALONE and 0053A THE MUPPET MOVIE being one coherent – and excellent – viewing experience, I connect them even when I see either in any other context. A pairing of such quality was rare, since quality was not something my dad was particularly interested in, but occasionally serendipity allowed two favourites to sit together for a singularly satisfying and uninterrupted viewing experience.
More memorable still are those bewildering pairings such as 0166 PRIDE & PREJUDICE and 0166A COMMANDO, or 0569 STRICTLY BALLROOM and 0569A HIGHLANDER. These required their audience to be either especially catholic in their tastes, or in a very specific mood. Some defied classification, and needed an especially strong will to enjoy together, like the single tape that contained the second half of the Charlton Heston classic 008 BEN HUR (CONT) before the entirety of 008A CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG. But none came close to the single, holy tape that held 0513 ROBO COP and 0513A A WOMAN’S HEART. Even the most gonzo cineaste would have been hard pressed to think of pairing Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 action satire with an RTÉ concert of Irish traditional music by Mary Black, Eleanor McEvoy and Maura O’Connell.
Sometimes my father’s approach gestured toward the territory of high art. One example is the tape holding both 0182 POLICE ACADEMY IV and 0182A POLICE ACADEMY II, in that order, a masterpiece of mis-billing that placed two terrible films from one series back to back in the wrong order, while omitting the film that separates them in chronology. And I probably watched that tape seven or eight times.
It would be understandable for someone to read all this and presume that Daddy was a cinephile of some description, the sort of guy who lived and breathed cinema in all its forms. This would be wrong. My father enjoys films, but he’s not much of a buff. He was, at best, an indifferent filmgoer and, so far as I can remember, accompanied me to the cinema only once. This was on a whole-family jaunt to see 0587 JURASSIC PARK in the Orchard Cinema housed within St Columb’s Hall. This was a grand venue owned by the parish and overseen by Father Huck Balance, the self-same priest who had blessed our caravan the year before.
Here, shorn of his vestments and wearing a casual navy sweater with dog collar just visible underneath, Father Balance revealed the pleasingly venal, earthbound side of himself; he was one of those rare, one might say improbable, creatures within the Irish clergy, the parish priest with a second job – in this case, overseeing the running of the cinema and checking his punters to make sure no one was taking in sweets from outside. A Sunday morning spent declaiming from the pulpit with the stately gravitas of an aristocrat would be followed by an afternoon spent delighting at the matinee crowds, his eyes folding into dollar signs like an old-timey medicine show huckster. I think I might have seen him laughing into the till once. On this occasion in July 1993, he was practically jogging on the spot and rubbing his hands together with glee, since the crowd that day was massive.
‘Ah, how are you, Joe?’ he said to my dad upon our arrival, discreetly scanning each of us for the tell-tale bulge of contraband confectionery.
‘Come for the dinosaurs, stay for Goldblum’s best role yet,’ he added, picking up a passing infant and shaking him by the ankles until some Skittles fell out.
It was nice to see this bizarro-world version of Father Huck, ordinarily quite a stern and taciturn figure. When the cinema was doing well, it seemed to give him real joy, a joy we never really saw at Mass. It didn’t hurt that the parish owned the building and so he had no rent to pay on a prime location in the city centre. And even the most committed parishioner might consider the free-market implications of his having a captive audience of dedicated churchgoers. He promoted the latest releases in the parish bulletin handed out at Mass, which gave rise to some delightfully abrupt tonal shifts. On any given week, it might declare the death of a beloved member of the congregation, announce that the Vatican had just declared 1993 to be the Year of the Orphan, and end with ‘He’s got John Travolta’s smile, Kirstie Alley’s eyes and the voice of Bruce Willis, so run don’t walk to the city premiere of Look Who’s Talking Too (PG, 81 mins, NO outside consumables allowed).’
Looking back, it seems odd that the church ran this thing on the side, not least since Father Balance genuinely appeared to have a flair for the business. He greeted the throngs of people who came to see Jurassic Park with an excitement that, while not being especially godly, was massively relatable. It even showcased the sort of buzzy attention to detail that seemed a bit more earnest than the mere cash grab I risk depicting here. In 1988, for example, he built up anticipation for 0352 INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE by playing the first two films (0477 and 0478 respectively – my father had a knack for recording these things out of order) as back-to-back features for a few weekends beforehand. While I was too young to have watched the Indiana Jones movies in the cinema, and 0458 LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO was hardly a tentpole of my cinematic education, it’s no exaggeration to say that 0587 JURASSIC PARK changed my life.
It’s hard to overstate just how massively influential that film was on me, and the extent to which it became the film I judged all others against. It was not long after this that I started carrying around my little cereal box dinosaur den. It was the first film that did that to me, and the first time I realised the films I liked didn’t really have the same effect on my dad. The biggest reaction he had to Jurassic Park was a hearty guffaw at the implication that Lex, Richard Attenborough’s precocious granddaughter, would be sufficiently tech literate to operate the park’s security system.
‘Ha! A UNIX system?’ he scoffed, out loud, in the cinema. ‘Good luck!’
It wasn’t that he didn’t like films. Far from it – he absorbed them just as cheerily as anyone, and can be moved to tears on occasion. But for my dad, the doing of the thing was more important than the thing done; some of the things he chose to record are testament to nothing more than completist zeal. Some are clearly of personal interest: 0269 ARCHBISHOP DALY’S INVESTITURE, which recorded our friend – and latterly distant cousin – Bishop Daly getting his big promotion, or 1989’s 0127A COUNTRY WESTERN MUSIC AWARDS. Neither would necessarily be present in other people’s archives but they do, at least, speak to my father’s tastes. The same can’t be said for seven POLICE ACADEMY films.
As well as a bewildering array of Northern Irish special-interest programmes, he also included some home video he’d shot himself, camcorder footage from holidays and christenings, weddings and other family events. One notable entry is 0097A DERRY FEIS, a collection of films he’d recorded of us singing and performing at the feis, or talent competition, at which we competed every year, and which would surely have tested the enthusiasm of even the most dutiful parent. The observant reader will by now have discerned that its designation of 0097A reveals this to be the second part of a double bill. You will be pleased to discover this collection of indifferently performed Irish-language ballads sung by children did not follow footage of some other social engagement, but came directly after 0097 MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, THE. Again, you’d have to be in a very specific mood.
He added supplementary details even for those home-shot videos. It was funny to see O’REILLY FAMILY or FR BRIAN DARCY listed as the stars of films, interrupting an otherwise unbroken run of Hollywood A-listers. Stirring, too, to see the note attached to 0211 CHRISTMAS IN DERRY 1989, confirming it was FILMED ON LOCATION IN MULLENNAN, DERRY. As a slightly tongue-in-cheek bit of dad humour this would be quite amusing, but since I know my father to have been entirely serious when he added these words, it’s funnier still.
I’m not sure exactly when, but there was an uptick in the scale of the operation at some point in the early nineties, when my father began making improvements to the system. It had long bothered him that in order to tape a film, he’d have to be watching it, so he got a second tape recorder connected to the TV in the kitchen, which could be programmed to record there while he watched something else in the living room. Soon we had a further two machines in the garage, meaning we could, in theory, record four things at once, although I think three may have been the maximum we ever did. It should be borne in mind that we only had seven to nine channels, the four (and later five) British ones, plus three (and later four) Irish ones that existed at this time.
‘If we had satellite TV,’ my dad once said, ‘we could be doing a lot more,’ perhaps missing the point that if we did have the multiple channel options of satellite TV the need for an entire room of our house to be set aside for a videotaped content archive might be slightly reduced. Of course, having films at our fingertips via Sky Movies or Netflix or iPlayer would never have been as satisfying as going into the garage and thumbing through the binder, and finding that one thing you wanted to watch, or something you’d never heard of that would go on to be a favourite. As I got older, there was also the possibility of finding slightly more illicit thrills by looking for those films that promised intrigue, violence, or even the faint possibility of what my father considered sexiness. In theory, this was made easier by my dad’s method of assigning ratings to the films, meaning surely an X would promise something to quicken the pulse. Unfortunately, my father’s grasp of what constituted pornography appears to have been confused, as I discovered when I watched Warren Beatty’s epic three-hour historical drama 0031 REDS, waiting for it to turn into the beach-side sex romp its X rating implied.
And Netflix can’t compete with the incredible joy of finding, within those videos, that tantalising glimpse into a forgotten world which comes from the ad breaks, news segments and interstitial moments that were caught alongside the films. Around the late eighties and early nineties, Northern Irish television was broadly indistinguishable from its Soviet counterpart, and each evening’s programming was ‘presented’ by an announcer, or more commonly a pair of announcers, who sat on couches and addressed the viewer with details of the next programme. There are few experiences headier than watching UTV’s Julian Simmons gamely introducing 0421A DIE HARD after having just recapped Coronation Street in his ear-melting Belfast twang.
There’s something bracing about the nostalgia produced by old news segments and ads, something ephemeral and throwaway, caught and held in suspension. As if pulling the camera back from whatever movie we were hoping to watch and training it on our own unwashed world. The place we were trying to escape, full of mullets and double denim and burning cars, punctured only by the desultory glamour of the glitzier advertisements of the time – camels pouring foaming pints of bright yellow Harp lager, beaming ladies in tight jeans driving Renault Clios, a puzzling number of people all declaring their desire for Chicken Tonight.
Back then, adverts were often just place cards displayed for thirty seconds with an excitable voice overlaid. ‘Discover Fashion,’ it might say, breathily, as an ethereal chorus repeated ‘fashion… fashion… fashion’ into the background, like a group of sexy, couture-mad Northern Irish angels retreating backwards into a mist of giant hair and shoulder pads. This was only ever very slightly undercut by the legend underneath declaring said outlet store had now re-opened, following a closure due to bomb damage. I have never been to the Spinning Wheel pub in Castletownroche, Co. Cork, nor the town itself, but I will never forget that it was open for business and spent no small part of its marketing budget on letting me and everyone else in Ireland know all about it.
At certain points, looking through this binder now as a grown man, there comes a melancholy sense of fossilised effort, something heart-breaking about the project. I get a faint pluck at the eyelid when I imagine Daddy alone in our garage, filling out the run time (140mins), tape make (SCOTCH) and classification (U) of desultory 1987 TV movie 0262 ASSAULT AND MATRIMONY. Not least since he evidently forgot he had this classic nailed down and recorded it again when it was repeated as 0275 ASSAULT & MATRIMONY. It was sometimes quite evident he wasn’t sure what he was recording and was either doing it for our benefit or just to add another film to the stock. Nowhere is this clearer than my favourite bit of writing in the entire collection, where he lists the John Hughes romantic comedy She’s Having a Baby, with masterful stuffiness, as 0418 SHE IS HAVING A BABY.
It’s easier to make fun of it as a hare-brained way of dodging video rental fees, or the massive, nerdy compulsion of someone who loved AV technology and databases. I see within it a kernel of my own preferred way of organising grief; pushing unknowables out of my mind by cramming in enough verifiable data that I’m kept occupied. Maybe the archive was my dad’s way of making sense out of chaos, to create a system, however arbitrary, that could approximate all the ordered specificity our world must have lacked at that time.
I spent a large part of my childhood and adolescence wondering if my father and I had much in common at all. And I think our love of archiving is the biggest thing, a bulwark against the terror of losing. Everything in its one right, good and true place, safe from harm.
By the time I was in my early teens, my siblings and I had taken the work of the archive over from my dad, who didn’t feel the need to tape everything any more. It was up to us to record those things we needed to be saved. I’d like to be able to tell you that the last entry I compiled was 0644 DEER HUNTER, a taut, moving classic that deals with loss, death and fragile masculinity. But it was an unmemorable 1983 drama, 0645A LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, THE, and it wasn’t even filmed properly. The footage stutters before we’re catapulted to the film’s end, with forty minutes unaccounted for. After the credits, we’re greeted by UTV’s continuity announcers, Mike and Linda, once more looking out to us from their beige couches.
There they sit, telling us what else they have planned for broadcast tonight and for the rest of the weekend, as if we are guests in their oddly flat, uncomfortable home, which appears to be nothing more than two front-facing couches, a clock and an endless vault of TV programmes they’ve taken it upon themselves to choose for our nightly entertainment. You needn’t worry about us, though, Mike and Linda. We have a garage, a binder and the whole world in front of us.