Sarah Sapper, Executive Producer and Managing Director of Cornelia Street Productions, explains how the team used a travel series to tell the story of Irish literature.
With arts programmes sadly few and far between on television these days, a literary travel series like ‘Sandi’s Ireland’ offered us a rare and exciting opportunity to explore an arts subject in a really accessible way. Sandi was great at treating serious writers and subjects with a lovely lightness of tone, and we kept a pretty brisk pace to the show, visiting a range of locations and giving people a taste of different authors. Being focused on place, we could also explore the most easily visualised aspect of a writer’s work, which, we hope, helped turn good writing into engaging telly for More4 viewers.
Creating a strong setting and a vivid fictional world is of course a vital part of great writing and nowhere more so than in Irish literature. From the streets of Joyce’s Dublin to the lakes and mountains of Yeats’ Sligo, Ireland’s great novels, poems and plays all seem to have this deep connection with the physical world of the country itself, its city streets and landscapes.
As we realised from the start of our research, that usually meant a specific local spot. Even when they spent their lives a long way from where they grew up, most of our subjects were repeatedly drawn back to a ‘home place’ in their work. Take C S Lewis for example. This lifelong Oxbridge academic always cited his Belfast childhood as the inspiration for his famous fantasy tales of Narnia, specifically the beautiful forests of the Mourne Mountains that loom over the famous shipyards and where the young Lewis used to play as a boy. All three of the great poets we feature – Yeats, Kavanagh and Heaney – return again and again to the rural worlds of their childhood and youth. The museum dedicated to Heaney in Bellaghy is called ‘HomePlace’ and this is a recurring theme in the show.
Dublin is a city of the imagination to many people around the world thanks to James Joyce and Ulysses. You could say the city is the book’s main character, let alone its setting. There can’t be a novel in history that has such a strong sense of a town, with an almost photographic detail in some of the description. Yet Joyce left Dublin when he was just 22 and spent his entire adult life in continental Europe, only ever returning for the odd short stay.
Joyce and his many successors capture not just the physical city but the characters that give it a distinct communal life too. To explore that, Sandi spoke to Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning novelist of ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’ and ‘The Commitments’, who set most of his early books in the working-class suburb of Dublin where he grew up and went on to teach. For him, Dublin is a city of yappers and his brilliant dialogue captures the craic of the city’s many pubs, where so many of his scenes are set. The people make the place, so we did, of course, interview Roddy in a pub.
As well as the sense of place, Irish literature is also deeply connected with the country’s history and its long struggle for independence. The great Marian Keyes, who knows a thing or two about storytelling, told Sandi that the reason the Irish were such great storytellers was indeed colonialism. The Irish language itself was suppressed for many years, and it gave verbal communication a precious quality. A grand tradition of oral storytelling as free entertainment then led to that love of the written word.
We wanted to place the writers we featured in a historical context, so we felt we needed to order some of our stories chronologically as much as geographically. In the first episode, we start in the eighteenth century with Jonathan Swift and his vicious satires of English colonial rule, most famously Gulliver’s Travels. We then discover Maria Edgeworth, a sadly forgotten female novelist of the nineteenth century who was bigger than Jane Austen and wrote trenchant novels about absentee Irish landlords. Finally we visit the world of the great poet and playwright WB Yeats, whose work was very much a cultural expression of that struggle for independence. We go to his beloved rural Sligo to chat about his poetry and then to the National Theatre he created in Dublin at the famous Abbey.
Instead of using Dublin as a starting point for a linear journey, we made it Sandi’s base, from where she would go out into the country and return. We hope viewers enjoy her exploration of that connection to place and setting in the poems, novels and plays of Ireland’s rich literary landscape.
Watch Sandi’s Ireland: A Literary Journey on Thursday 3rd September, 9 PM, on More4.
Jon Creamer
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