VB: What were you trying to do with The Riordans? WB: The brief was to encourage the adoption of proper agricultural methods and, against that background, I was free to develop characters and all I was doing was trying to write good drama that would be character based, not issue-based or story-based even. People will tell you that the stories in The Riordans were a bit slow-moving, but the characters were good. We had a great cast. John Crowley [who played the role of Tom Riordan] was the main man. We deliberately set out to cast the thing from the people who had been in the "fit-ups" which were then coming to a close - you know the strolling players of Irish theatre. So that the country people of Ireland knew all these people from in parish halls from the previous 10 years, people like Frank O'Donovan and Annie Dalton, who played the roles of Batty, the farm labourer and Minnie, the little local back-biting gossip.
They were great people to work with because they knew the business so well, although they had never seen a microphone or a camera before, you know. They knew all that was needed to be known about Irish audiences. So my job was made that much easier.
VB: What kind of Ireland did the series portray? WB: I wanted to portray rural Ireland as it then was. So I went down to live in Kells, in Co Kilkenny, just south of Kilkenny on the Callan Road. Paddy Jennings, who was Head of Agriculture in RTE at the time, took me on this great pub crawl all around Kilkenny to find a proper place that was exactly right for me. We found a little gate lodge of a Church of Ireland rectory which was half way between the village and the creamery, so that all the farmers would drop in on the way past in the mornings and I would go down to the pub at night and chat to them again. I wound up, if not an expert in agriculture, at least an expert on how they spoke and how they thought and so on.
VB: What were the issues that concerned them at the time? WB: Well, the fading power of the church was a big thing. When I came into it there was an old, doddering sort of a parish priest and I got rid of him very quickly and brought in Father Sheehy, who was played by the late Tony Doyle. This was a young, progressive man. But if we were to do the sort of things that are happening today in Glenroe - where a priest has left the priesthood and the last episode of the programme showed him being married - that would never have been forgivable in the case of Father Sheehy, even though he was very advanced in his thinking for the time. There was actually one famous programme where he advised Biddy, I think it was, about contraception and told her that if her conscience was informed it was OK. I took all this from various priests of my acquaintance but I got into terrible trouble with it, you know.
VB: What trouble? WB: Well, just from letters and people saying I would be damned for all eternity and everything. There were letters to the papers and all that. But it worked very well, it got our audiences up and a year later, I would say that no one would have faulted that sort of advice from a priest.
VB: Do you recall why RTE ended The Riordans? WB: For exactly the same reasons - almost the same words that we got from Cathal Goan [the current RTE director of television] recently. Muiris MacConghail [then head of television] said that we had reached the end of our natural life. When a new guy comes in as Controller of Programmes, he wants his signature on whatever goes out - and I think that was the real reason.
VB: Was there any politics at all in the Riordans? WB: No. We had Tom Riordan stand for the local county council once and we got warnings from above that we would have to stop this or tone it down because we were making the independent candidate for the councils look far more sensible than any of the party candidates.
VB: Were you disappointed when The Riordans ended? WB: No. I was very relieved. I had to pretend I was disappointed and I wrote all the usual articles of regret, but they were mostly sympathy for the actors rather than myself, because I wanted to move on. When The Riordans ended I wrote two or three plays very quickly, before being invited to do the next one - the Bracken series - by the then head of drama, Louis Lentin. I thought it was funny that they had told me that rural drama was dead. Then, it was almost for fun, I said well look, The Riordans had been a very up-todate, modern operation, with your stateof-the-art creamery and so on and milking parlour, I said, why don't we do one on this age-old system of hill sheep farming, running sheep on the hills, inherited rights and so on. They jumped at it straight away. Gabriel Byrne had been such a success in the last year of The Riordans, we thought that this would grab an audience. So, towards the end of The Riordans, I had his father dying in Wicklow and he was going back for the funeral. But there was a year gap before we actually started back.
VB: Then it moved into Glenroe. WB: Yes. Gabriel Byrne's neighbours in Glenroe were another couple of old sheep farmers, the father and son pair.
VB: Whose idea was the Glenroe series? WB: Well, at the end of that we came full circle again, away from the rural soap opera, we came right back to one. I think it was Louis who said, "Look, can we get a spin-off from this? We need another soap opera." I put up two or three suggestions. We had one character that was in the original Riordans, Joe Pilkington, who played Eamon the Traveller. I said, "supposing Eamon goes back on the road and we do a series of stuff from the various places he stops with his trailer around the country." I was always very keen on the whole Traveller thing. I'm sort of very ardent about the Traveller question.
VB: Why?
WB: I don't know. I think I learned all this in Kilkenny because I got very friendly with what was then the Itinerant Settlement Committee. That was the politically correct term in those days - itinerants. Bishop Peter Birch and Sister Stanislaus and so on, good people. Also I got to know a lot of Travellers.
VB: Anyway, you had the idea of developing the part played by Joe Pilkington? WB: Yes. So I put that in for him to go off with his wee wife on a trailer around Ireland but that wouldn't be a soap opera, that would be a thing like Heartbeat or something, where you have separate stories week by week depending on where he landed up. It would have cost a bit too, moving your locations all the time.
The other one was to take the Gabriel Byrne character and take him back to this new life. So, they took the Gabriel Byrne one and then from that naturally we got these two real winners in Dinny and Miley. Gabriel by that time was taken over by Hollywood. He got the part in Excalibur with John Boorman and he wasn't available to us any more. So we had him falling in love with the Squire's wife and the Squire's daughter in Bracken and making an offer to Dinny and Miley for their farm and their holdings and there was enough money for them to go over the hill and buy a place in Glenroe.