As we mark the one hundredth anniversary of radio broadcasting in Ireland, Maxi talks with John Creedon, one of Ireland’s best-loved broadcasters and authors, about all things radio.

 

John Creedon currently produces and presents The John Creedon Show on RTÉ Radio 1. We talk of his early beginnings in radio, Gerry Ryan and Terence, and the advice he would give to those trying to break into this great medium.

“The radio was king in our house,” says John. “We had an old radiogram in the kitchen. My father ran a wire from the back of the radiogram along the stairs to the third-floor landing, where my eight sisters slept.

“Up there on the window sill he had a church speaker, it was mahogany and was a box with fancy holes in it to let the sound get out. The battle cry in the house was ‘Hiren the radio’ or ‘Lower the radio’, so the radio was always on. It was a constant companion, like an uncle in the corner. I loved it; I was besotted by it.

“I remember the moment when I thought it would be wonderful to work in radio. I was ten and in the car with my dad. It was an old banger of a Merc, but it had a radio on the dash. At that stage, people were starting to attach a radio to the dash; this one had one on it.

“We had a shop and a news agency, and dad was off to the wholesalers. He was there for an hour or more. I was listening to Music on the Move, presented by Joe Linnane. I am sitting there thinking, wouldn’t it be great to get paid for playing records, chatting with the sports guy and having the craic. Man, oh man! I thought, wouldn’t that be amazing?

“I thought, you know, maybe I could do that someday. I was saying to myself, if you do your homework and get your Inter Cert and your Leaving Cert, someday you might be working on the radio, talking into the microphone and having the craic!

“With an old friend of mine, Henry Condon, who had a reel-to-reel and a vinyl 45 with BBC jingles on it, I used to make pretend radio programmes. Anyway, I called around to him one day, and he told me there was a pirate station after opening up around the corner. We went down and hung around, and one day someone didn’t show up and we got on air. So that was when I was seventeen.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own