Looking back, it seems odd that the church ran this thing on the side, not least since Father Balance genuinely appeared to have a flair for the business. He greeted the throngs of people who came to see Jurassic Park with an excitement that, while not being especially godly, was massively relatable. It even showcased the sort of buzzy attention to detail that seemed a bit more earnest than the mere cash grab I risk depicting here. In 1988, for example, he built up anticipation for 0352 INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE by playing the first two films (0477 and 0478 respectively – my father had a knack for recording these things out of order) as back-to-back features for a few weekends beforehand. While I was too young to have watched the Indiana Jones movies in the cinema, and 0458 LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO was hardly a tentpole of my cinematic education, it’s no exaggeration to say that 0587 JURASSIC PARK changed my life.
It’s hard to overstate just how massively influential that film was on me, and the extent to which it became the film I judged all others against. It was not long after this that I started carrying around my little cereal box dinosaur den. It was the first film that did that to me, and the first time I realised the films I liked didn’t really have the same effect on my dad. The biggest reaction he had to Jurassic Park was a hearty guffaw at the implication that Lex, Richard Attenborough’s precocious granddaughter, would be sufficiently tech literate to operate the park’s security system.
‘Ha! A UNIX system?’ he scoffed, out loud, in the cinema. ‘Good luck!’
It wasn’t that he didn’t like films. Far from it – he absorbed them just as cheerily as anyone, and can be moved to tears on occasion. But for my dad, the doing of the thing was more important than the thing done; some of the things he chose to record are testament to nothing more than completist zeal. Some are clearly of personal interest: 0269 ARCHBISHOP DALY’S INVESTITURE, which recorded our friend – and latterly distant cousin – Bishop Daly getting his big promotion, or 1989’s 0127A COUNTRY WESTERN MUSIC AWARDS. Neither would necessarily be present in other people’s archives but they do, at least, speak to my father’s tastes. The same can’t be said for seven POLICE ACADEMY films.
As well as a bewildering array of Northern Irish special-interest programmes, he also included some home video he’d shot himself, camcorder footage from holidays and christenings, weddings and other family events. One notable entry is 0097A DERRY FEIS, a collection of films he’d recorded of us singing and performing at the feis, or talent competition, at which we competed every year, and which would surely have tested the enthusiasm of even the most dutiful parent. The observant reader will by now have discerned that its designation of 0097A reveals this to be the second part of a double bill. You will be pleased to discover this collection of indifferently performed Irish-language ballads sung by children did not follow footage of some other social engagement, but came directly after 0097 MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, THE. Again, you’d have to be in a very specific mood.
He added supplementary details even for those home-shot videos. It was funny to see O’REILLY FAMILY or FR BRIAN DARCY listed as the stars of films, interrupting an otherwise unbroken run of Hollywood A-listers. Stirring, too, to see the note attached to 0211 CHRISTMAS IN DERRY 1989, confirming it was FILMED ON LOCATION IN MULLENNAN, DERRY. As a slightly tongue-in-cheek bit of dad humour this would be quite amusing, but since I know my father to have been entirely serious when he added these words, it’s funnier still.
I’m not sure exactly when, but there was an uptick in the scale of the operation at some point in the early nineties, when my father began making improvements to the system. It had long bothered him that in order to tape a film, he’d have to be watching it, so he got a second tape recorder connected to the TV in the kitchen, which could be programmed to record there while he watched something else in the living room. Soon we had a further two machines in the garage, meaning we could, in theory, record four things at once, although I think three may have been the maximum we ever did. It should be borne in mind that we only had seven to nine channels, the four (and later five) British ones, plus three (and later four) Irish ones that existed at this time.
‘If we had satellite TV,’ my dad once said, ‘we could be doing a lot more,’ perhaps missing the point that if we did have the multiple channel options of satellite TV the need for an entire room of our house to be set aside for a videotaped content archive might be slightly reduced. Of course, having films at our fingertips via Sky Movies or Netflix or iPlayer would never have been as satisfying as going into the garage and thumbing through the binder, and finding that one thing you wanted to watch, or something you’d never heard of that would go on to be a favourite. As I got older, there was also the possibility of finding slightly more illicit thrills by looking for those films that promised intrigue, violence, or even the faint possibility of what my father considered sexiness. In theory, this was made easier by my dad’s method of assigning ratings to the films, meaning surely an X would promise something to quicken the pulse. Unfortunately, my father’s grasp of what constituted pornography appears to have been confused, as I discovered when I watched Warren Beatty’s epic three-hour historical drama 0031 REDS, waiting for it to turn into the beach-side sex romp its X rating implied.
And Netflix can’t compete with the incredible joy of finding, within those videos, that tantalising glimpse into a forgotten world which comes from the ad breaks, news segments and interstitial moments that were caught alongside the films. Around the late eighties and early nineties, Northern Irish television was broadly indistinguishable from its Soviet counterpart, and each evening’s programming was ‘presented’ by an announcer, or more commonly a pair of announcers, who sat on couches and addressed the viewer with details of the next programme. There are few experiences headier than watching UTV’s Julian Simmons gamely introducing 0421A DIE HARD after having just recapped Coronation Street in his ear-melting Belfast twang.
There’s something bracing about the nostalgia produced by old news segments and ads, something ephemeral and throwaway, caught and held in suspension. As if pulling the camera back from whatever movie we were hoping to watch and training it on our own unwashed world. The place we were trying to escape, full of mullets and double denim and burning cars, punctured only by the desultory glamour of the glitzier advertisements of the time – camels pouring foaming pints of bright yellow Harp lager, beaming ladies in tight jeans driving Renault Clios, a puzzling number of people all declaring their desire for Chicken Tonight.
Back then, adverts were often just place cards displayed for thirty seconds with an excitable voice overlaid. ‘Discover Fashion,’ it might say, breathily, as an ethereal chorus repeated ‘fashion … fashion … fashion’ into the background, like a group of sexy, couture-mad Northern Irish angels retreating backwards into a mist of giant hair and shoulder pads. This was only ever very slightly undercut by the legend underneath declaring said outlet store had now re-opened, following a closure due to bomb damage. I have never been to the Spinning Wheel pub in Castlertownroche, Co. Cork, nor the town itself, but I will never forget that it was open for business and spent no small part of its marketing budget on letting me and everyone else in Ireland know all about it.