How the Broadcast Ban gave a new voice to Gerry Adams

My picture is three inches away, so there’s no point pretending that I remember the Troubles. In 1994, when the IRA ceasefire was announced, I was still on a tricycle. The trouble is, we weren’t taught it at school, either. Much too hot a topic. Not Bloody Sunday, not Bobby Sands, nor any of the past, from the Tudor plantations to the Easter Rising, that made sense of it. I came across all of these bits of history haphazardly, and was embarrassed to think I could have proceeded through life without them.

So I’m very much in favour of programmes like Being Gerry Adams (Radio 4, Tuesday), which brought to life the sheer strangeness of the time. After the 1988 Broadcasting Ban made it illegal to air the sound of any Sinn Féiner’s voice, “to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity,” as Mrs Thatcher put it, the BBC needed actors to read Adams’s words, and this was their story. 

It started bafflingly, with hateful tinkly music, and a man called Conor Grimes being told: “Don’t stray too far from the house, because I’m going to be phoning you.” Grimes, like every struggling actor in this vignette of late-Eighties Belfast life, had struck lucky: the BBC jobs paid £50 – “I can’t deny it. It was lovely cash,” said one – but came at short notice. The actors forked out £60 for answering machines, only to be outdone by Grimes, who pulled out a pager. “Next thing, ‘Beep!’ And I had to go, like Superman.”

The man paging him was Denis Murray, the BBC’s Ireland Correspondent. In the moral maze of whether the BBC should have interviewed terrorists, Murray was presumably too involved to present the programme, so it fell to the Belfast journalist Stephen Nolan. Halfway through, we heard Adams himself – a transgressive thrill after all of the clips of “Mr Adams’ voice is replaced by an actor” – who said, “Yes, it was a bit bizarre. Occasionally I would hear my voice in a Scottish accent.” The BBC wanted censorship to sound like censorship, and on no account were the actors to lip-sync, or even sound like Adams. As Grimes put it, “The dictum kept coming in: ‘Don’t be Sir Anthony Hopkins here.’” 

There was a charming pragmatism to the actors, who said they were doing it for the money, but were obviously brave – Republican newspapers listed them as “legitimate targets” – and quietly proud, too. When the ceasefire came in 1994, each tried to claim it was he who had announced it to the world.

Apart from its botched opening, Being Gerry Adams could have covered more – how the Broadcasting Ban made it harder for the BBC to oppose censorship abroad, for instance – and many listeners will have found its historical preamble too basic. But the generation that grew up in peace have to find out what “The Troubles” meant somehow, and if it’s not going to be at school, it might have to be by the radio instead.

I, Object (Radio 4, Tuesday) goes with a British Museum exhibition of artefacts that embody protest, and in the enjoyable first episode, the curator, Ian Hislop, was apologetic – first, for blowing a raspberry on-air (“I know, it’s a bit childish and a bit irritating. But then, that is the point of dissent”); second, because “when you hear me, you know they couldn’t afford Neil MacGregor.” 

In fact, I preferred it to MacGregor’s recent Living with the Gods, which felt painfully general, trying to reconstruct the mentality of a typical worshipper in lost times and places. Instead, Hislop found objects that bucked against “the typical”: a genteel teapot with “45” in gilt under the spout, which was coded support of the agitator John Wilkes; Seychelles banknotes that spelt out the word “SEX” in palm trees, “really blatantly next to the portrait of the monarch”. 

Hislop’s findings were remarkable, his generalisations sensible and his enjoyment infectious. I, Object slipped down like an oyster.

I hadn’t realised how much I liked “Hollywoodisation” until I heard Peter Benchley’s 1974 thriller Jaws as the Book at Bedtime (Radio 4, last week), stripped of all of the things I love about Steven Spielberg’s film: police chief Brody’s sweet family, the shanty-singing fisherman Quint, the gory shark explosion.

In the original novel, I was crestfallen to find, Brody’s wife is a cheat, Quint says things like “This is a premium job”, and I’m not even sure they killed the shark. To make things worse, the reader Henry Goodman made Brody sound tranquillised and everyone else sound like Marge Simpson. So yes, it was a horror story, but not in the way I’d expected.

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