Culture That Made Me: Síle Seoige picks her music, film, and literary touchstones
Síle Seoige begins a new series on TG4.
Síle Seoige, 46, grew up in Spiddal, Co Galway. In 1998, she began broadcasting aged 19, anchoring a film show on TG4 called . She started working with RTÉ in 2004, presenting programmes such as and . She has also presented on radio with Today FM and Newstalk. Her podcast is available on all podcast platforms, and she will host a three-part TG4 documentary series, , beginning 9.45pm, February 11.
Aged about 14, I loved on TV. Claire Danes played the lead character. I was at the age of the character she was playing. It was set in the United States somewhere. It was this girl who was your typical teenager. It was her, her friends and trying to navigate life at home. She had that typical teenage angst relationship with the parents, the mother in particular. Then she fell in with a crowd who were a bit outside the norm. She also had her first crush. I remember thinking, wow, this makes a lot of sense. I felt very seen.
is a brilliant documentary. Alex Honnold is a free solo climber. It's him taking on El Capitan, a mountain in California, without a rope. He'd been trying for years. It's edge-of-the-seat stuff. I felt sick watching it. Then the mad thing is, his mother took up climbing herself at 60. She climbed up El Capitan — I presume with ropes — and then she did it again at 70.
You can't go wrong with David Attenborough's wildlife documentaries. They’re so awe-inspiring, so beautiful. They're a lesson in humility. When you watch them, you realise how insignificant and yet how powerful we are in the sense that we have the capacity to do better and mind this planet that we're living on, that we're doing a pretty awful job of minding. I find them fantastic to watch, equally inspiring and terrifying!
A favourite film is Dead Poets Society. I watched that when I was 14. It broke me, but it also inspired me. It had that weird feeling. I couldn't put my finger on it. It was on TV and our priest in Spiddal — and I'm not religious — happened to be a very nice man. He got up on the pulpit and for his gospel that week he asked the congregation: “Did you watch Dead Poets Society?” It was coming up to the Leaving Cert. He was basically saying the film was a perfect example to parents that you have a duty to mind your kids and not put pressure on them. He was a lovely man anyway, but he went way up in my estimation then. I couldn’t believe this was happening in the church.
I saw Life is Beautiful when I was 18. It was funny and light — the sheer brilliance of it — yet devastating at the same time. It’s an amazing telling of a horrific time in our history, to reframe it that way — where a father, played by Roberto Benigni, is trying to distract his son by convincing him they're just playing a part and it's all a bit of craic, but knowing what was actually happening, where they were, that they were actually in a Nazi concentration camp. It broke me, but I loved it. The first bit was pure comedy and slapstick. Then it became this huge realisation that something major is happening here. It was unreal — that ability to lift my heart, but also to squeeze it.
I recently saw the adaptation of Katriona O’Sullivan’s memoir in Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Her book's amazing. They did it justice. Katrina tells a very hard-hitting, honest account of her own upbringing where her parents were heroin addicts. She grew up in severe neglect. It was just surviving, but then there were certain people that intersected her life at different stages, from teachers to people who saw something in her and showed her kindness, and she's gone on to be an amazing person and a psychologist. She's defeated the odds. So, it’s a phenomenal story anyway, but the performances were very strong. It was outstanding.
When I read as a teenager, I couldn't get enough of it — with how mental and passionate and tragic the love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine was, and how it spanned generations. Catherine grows up with privilege. There's a pivotal moment where she’s having a conversation. Heathcliff overhears it, but he only hears the part where she's speaking in a derogatory way about him. She's also saying this famous phrase, “I am Heathcliff”, like “we are one, I'm so in love with him, I can't be without him” blah, blah. But he never hears that. This hardens his heart. He becomes hard and cruel, but the love is always there. It's all very complicated. I was swept up in the drama of it.
There’s a lovely, comforting book called by William Martin. It's a book to dip in and out of. Taoism is about living in harmony with nature and the way things are, not to force or push anything, to go with the flow. That has been a huge part of my enjoying parenting, not trying to control, to just go with it. There's a lovely excerpt about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, to allow kids to appreciate the beauty and the simplicity of things — that's where they'll find peace and contentment.
I love Tommy Tiernan’s TV show, the fact he doesn't know the guests in advance. There's that freshness to it, where he's trying to connect with the guests when they come out: “Do I know this person?” If he doesn't, he's an open book and he's fully engaged, fully listening to that person, not relying on questions or notes. It's a brilliantly brave concept for a programme. He’s incredible at it. That's why it resonates with people. When he's on it and it works, the conversations are stunning.
The first gig I was at was REM. at Slane in ’95. Those memories are embedded in my mind and my heart forever. I went with pals. We got there early. Luka Bloom was on stage. The sun was splitting the stones. I'd never been in a space with that many people before — 80,000. It blew my mind. There was a crush during Oasis, one of the support acts. It was a bit mad. We were halfway through the crowd, and we got separated and didn't see each other again until we got the bus back to Galway, but it didn’t matter. REM were unreal. It was magic.
I saw Tina Turner in Dublin at the O2 in 2009. The production of it was outstanding. During 'Thunderdome', they had built a type set on stage. Just the energy of her. She was giving it socks during songs like 'Proud Mary', and the dancers beside her, young ones with the most amazing fit, healthy bodies, weren't a patch on her, and she was touching 70. You couldn't take your eyes off her. And when you know her backstory, what she went through and whatnot, she’s the true definition of a powerhouse.
