A Death In The Family

Back in the 1960s, our television was a tiny black and white Pilot. We got all the channels there were to get at that time, which, in the west of Ireland was simply RTE - in pre-Network 2 days. The television had to be regularly adjusted, as the picture frequently wobbled and then collapsed, a state referred to as "bonkers" in our family.

Up to the age of 11, I existed on a diet of The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, Lost in Space, Are You Being Served?, The New Avengers, Poldark, The Brothers, The Brady Bunch - and The Riordans. Sunday evenings, after tea, we tuned into Leestown.

Used to our television speaking to me in American or British accents, it was oddly thrilling to hear the familiar cadences in the voices of Mary and Tom, Minnie, Batty, Benjy and Maggie. Apart from The News, the only other time I heard these Irish accents was during the ads, most memorably the farming one that always played during The Riordans with its immortal line: "Ciba Geigey - It's a quare name, but it's great stuff." The Riordans was first aired on January 4th, 1965 and the last episode went out on May 28th, 1979. Our family never saw those last couple of years of the series. Two years earlier, the television had had a final, fatal wobble: the picture disappeared and the set went up in smoke while I was watching The Brady Bunch.

It was years before we got round to getting a replacement, and by then I'd moved away and chosen not to have a television of my own. The result is that my television viewing memories have become distilled into that period of 1970s programmes and, thinking of The Riordans now, it's like remembering neighbours who used to live in the same area and then moved away.

The Riordans was a family drama in other ways too. In real life, John Cowley, who played Tom Riordan, was married to Annie d'Alton, the scene-stealing Minnie Heffernan. Moira Deady (Mary Riordan) was married to Johnny Hoey (Francey Maher).

Wesley Burrowes, who is the script-writer primarily associated with the series, does not like hearing it described as a soap. "A soap was a bad serial," he insists. Tom Hickey, who played Benjy, agrees. "Soap doesn't describe The Riordans. Twenty years ago, Ireland was a different place. There were more people living in the country. And even in urban areas, there were a lot of second-generation rural families at that time. The Riordans made a real impact, partly because there was so little competition from other serials or channels."

If The Late Late Show was at its most influential in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps The Riordans could be described as having dramatised many of the social issues which were raised on the famous chat show. Most controversial among these were the decision by Maggie to go on the Pill after her marriage; the mixed marriage between Catholic Dr Howard and Protestant Claire Nesbitt from the Big House; the breakdown of Jude's marriage.

All these issues were the subject of various episodes, and the level of associated public discussion that they subsequently provoked is difficult to imagine taking place today. Miley is currently having an extra-marital affair in Glenroe, but it's pretty tame stuff in the context of a society now familiar with legalised divorce, the X and C cases, Bishop Casey's son, the Magdalen Laundries, Goldenbridge, sexually abusive priests, the Beef and McCracken tribunals.

Arriving home with three grainy videos of some of the last episodes of The Riordans, supplied by Wesley Burrowes, I was met at the door by my housemates, on their way out to the pub. When they heard what I had in my bag, they about turned and we spent the evening drinking tea, fascinated by time-travelling back to an Ireland that has since been redefined many times.

Watching, it came as a surprise to me to realise that The Riordans was set in the specific geographical location of Kilkenny. As a child, I had vaguely assumed they lived somewhere down the road. The odd and often awkward camera angles were reminders of how far technology has come since then: whole scenes being played around the kitchen table with views only of someone's back.

Mary Riordan, with her endless "ah-you'll-have-a-nice-cup-of-tea" seems like the original Mrs Doyle of Father Ted: each of them with tea and stock phrases as responses to their different problematic families. Tom Riordan, with his three piece suit, fob watch and trilby hat now looks unexpectedly exotic, more like a Chicago gangster than an Irish farmer.

The appearance of gossipy Minnie, looking like a tiny bird of paradise in a bright-purple coat and orange scarf, was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter. Minnie, reports Wesley Burrowes affectionately, rarely learned all her lines. "She was used to years of touring in rep companies, with the old fit-up theatres. She used to improvise. Her code for signalling she needed prompting was to preface her lines with the words: `You know what I'm going to tell you Batty Brennan/ Mary dear/ Tom Riordan etc?' Then they'd reply: `You're going to tell me . . . whatever it was' and that way they'd feed her the lines without retaking the scene." Anne d'Alton played Minnie well into her seventies.

As for Maggie (Biddy WhiteLennon), well, what a babe! All that sulky pouting and sidelong glances. In 1979, she was sporting a soon-to-be-wildly-fashionable Princess of Wales haircut, long before any of us had ever heard of Diana Spencer. And she kissed Gabriel Byrne: the prospect of which, even 20 odd years later, would still send a frisson down the necks of many women. "How was I to know then that he would become so famous?" she quips.

Tom Hickey left the series in 1978, before the last year of filming. His character, Benjy, went off to become a lay missionary in Africa. "I wanted to be run over by a tractor and die in the farmyard," Hickey reports, "but they wouldn't kill me." Hickey left because his commitments to the theatre were becoming irreconcilable with the television schedule. It was his departure which led to the introduction of the character Pat Barry, played by Gabriel Byrne.

"We'd heard about this young man who was reported to have the most extraordinary effect on women," Wesley Burrowes recalls. "When we screen-tested him the cameraman couldn't take the camera off him: he radiated an aura. It was clear from the beginning he was going to be a big star." Byrne went on to play the same character in the 12 episodes of Bracken. By then Excalibur had been released, and Gabriel Byrne had left behind sheep farming forever.

It's all a long time ago now, but Dinny and Miley first appeared as two of the mourners at a funeral at the beginning of Bracken. In the course of the series, they sold their farm to Pat Barry and went off to buy that market-garden in Wicklow, in a village called Glenroe. So the different spin-off serials from The Riordans seem to mirror the ad-hoc manner in which people have always connected with each other in Ireland: turning up again in unexpected places.

So what has happened to the original residents of Leestown in the last 20-odd years?

Moira Deady played the part of Blackie's mother in Glenroe for some years, and has had various small film parts. Due to be released later this year is This Is My Father (Hummingbird), in which she plays a major part. Also starring will be Aidan Quinn and Colm Meaney.

Pamela Mant (Claire Nesbitt) was recently spotted on BBC2 in the popular American comedy series, Seinfeld. Tom Cowley will long be remembered for his part as an auctioneer in the film of The Field. Tony Doyle (Fr Sheehy) appears in Ballykissangel and was also in I Went Down. For several years now, Biddy White Lennon has eschewed acting for writing. She has been working as a freelance journalist for 15 years, contributing views and reviews on theatre and books to RTE, papers and magazines.

"I was a raw beginner when I started in The Riordans," says Tom Hickey. He draws the analogy of being in the long-running television series with that of being one of a core of actors associated with a particular theatre. "I learned so much there." Hickey has since appeared in The Great Hunger, The Gigli Concert and the controversial Mysogynist. Film roles include Ken Loach's Raining Stones, Fools of Fortune and most recently, The Butcher Boy.

The camera is still transfixed by Gabriel Byrne, most recently seen in The End of Violence and also the star of Miller's Crossing, Into The West and a stack of other Hollywood movies. Obviously well trained by Maggie Riordan, it was recently reported that he was dating Naomi Campbell.

In a recent article for Magill, Byrne writes of recounting to Gianni Versace the time himself, Tom Hickey and Chris O'Neill (Michael Riordan) were invited to a marquee in Longford for the "1978 Showbusiness Awards". Also nominated were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Al Pacino and Robert de Niro. They were absent. The Leestown men won.

Out of those hundreds of episodes screened, only a representative sample of a few dozen now remain in RTE's archives. It's difficult to comprehend a time when film was considered so expensive that it was reused, which is what happened to most of the tapes of The Riordans. Leestown is gone forever, to be revisited only in clips-from-the-archives-programmes and in our collective memories, drifting up from the past like images from old family photographs.