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Aerial fiddlers on the roof

Family Fortunes: For the first few minutes we could get BBC and ITV and Channel 4

If you got somebody up on the chimney and they held the aerial with their hands, they became a sort of aerial themselves

Robert Barrett
Thu Mar 30 2017 - 06:00

Joe said to “point her for Wales”. Those were his exact words. He flung his arm out towards Lugnaquilla. We all turned our heads. “Wales is that way,” he said, unconvincingly. I remember him saying that, and I remember that his name was Joe, and he was in an awful hurry to get away. He was literally running, which is dangerous, when you’re on the roof of a house. That day, all my family were on the roof; except the baby. She was no good at climbing.

It started off fairly well, the new aerial. For the first few minutes we could get BBC and ITV and Channel 4. Then it went snowy and we had to pretend we could see it for a while, until my mother said, “It’s not very good, is it?” That didn’t go down well. Daddy started to blow out his cheeks. “Don’t worry mammy,” we said, “Joe is going to call in to make sure it’s working.” The first night, we endured it until our eyes hurt and then my father said the saddest words in history, “Will we stick in the rabbit’s ears and see if we can still get RTÉ?’ (or was it cat’s ears?).

Over the coming days, we discovered the secret. If you got somebody up on the chimney and they held the aerial with their hands, they became a sort of aerial themselves. We left the kitchen window open and shouted up at them, “Back a bit, left a bit, hold it there! Hold it right there!” As long as they held on, the reception was perfect. Saturday was football day, and my brother stayed up there for the afternoon, through rain and wind and hail. He stood on the chimney and clung onto the aerial, like the captain of a ship, steering it bravely through a storm. Thankfully, he didn’t like football. He liked westerns and you could get those on RTÉ anytime.

The Seventies turned into the Eighties and Joe still hadn’t called back. He was probably very busy. It wasn’t that we didn’t want BBC and ITV and Channel 4, we just got tired of climbing up on the roof. Then Paddy came. He had a van with writing on the side of it. “Do you want us to come up there with you?” we said. “Whah?” he said, screwing up his face.