Charlie Bird picks his favourite music, TV shows and general inspirations
Charlie Bird is now a presenter on the Senior Times podcast.
The drama series Chernobyl is amazing. Today we're living in a pandemic so we can relate to how a nuclear power plant explosion in 1986 affected our thinking about the world. I was going to school when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in 1962. I remember in our school we were told how to get under the table if a nuclear bomb landed. This was in the national school in Dundrum in County Dublin. We were so scared. We were told the world was on the verge of Armageddon. One of the things from the Chernobyl series that stood out was the way they used sound and the scene where they were shooting the dogs as well. The series is a stand-out moment in television.
I loved Borgen. It brings you straight into a different world, a different culture. The internal politicking and the different politicians and how they behaved in the series was similar to what goes on in Irish politics. The spin doctor for the prime minister was brilliant. He reminded me of quite a few spin doctors I’ve come across over 30 or 40 years covering Leinster House – some fantastic characters who used to be spinning you yarns all the time. By the way, it's still going on today.
I’m reading the Dark Iceland series of books by Ragnar Johansson at the moment. I was in Iceland two or three years ago. I went there right before the heavy snow came in. I loved the place. It’s a volcanic country full of lava fields, active volcanos, glaciers and when you’re there, you don’t see too many people – the roads are empty. If somebody asked me what two places in the world would I like to go and see again they would be Iceland and New Zealand. I’d recommend Ragnar Johansson’s books to anybody. They’re crime fiction books, based around a female detective. The setting of them, in the cold and in the dark, is dramatic. He paints a brilliant pen picture of Iceland, drawing you into this mystic country up around the cold Arctic Circle.
I’m a kid of the ’60s. When I was growing up I used to love going to see Elvis Presley in the cinema. I’m still a big Elvis fan. They’ve rehashed some of his music, with Elvis singing, along with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a series of CDs. They’re really incredible, so, so beautiful. Myself and my wife actually played one of the songs – And The Grass Won’t Pay No Mind – at our marriage ceremony, as we were walking into the registry office.
I opened up Ulysses to read one time and I was just turned off it. Then somebody gave me the audiobook as a present a couple of years ago. It was the 1982 original drama production that RTÉ did over a 24-hour period. There's 32 CDs. What I did was listen to them in my car over the period of about three or four weeks. Every day I was driving to work or going someplace I played it in sequence and I got to understand all about Ulysses. With the actors reading it, really it jumps out of the CD player. It was a revelation. If anybody is struggling and would really like to understand Ulysses, go for the audiobook.
I love David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. It's the comfort of his voice that draws you in. He has empathy. He understands what he's talking about. The BBC, which put so much effort and work into his documentaries, has been the Rolls Royce of this type of work over the years and the man who has been the hallmark of that is David Attenborough. It's brilliantly he’s still going. He's still using his voice and campaigning on global warming and climate change. He's a commitment to helping the world.
Anybody who wants to understand America – its civil war, what happened to the country, how it evolved into what it is today, even the machinations of the last few months and how the constitution stuck firm in the end through everything – should read books about Abraham Lincoln. I’d really recommend Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington is one of the most powerful symbols of change in the world. To see that statue of him sitting on that chair is amazing.
Barack Obama's presidential memoir, A Promised Land, is a heavy read. It can be dull and boring and very technical as he goes into detail about trying to get the Obama healthcare bill through, but he’s a lovely writer. He uses simple language. There's a couple of pages describing himself and the family when they get Bo, their Portuguese water dog, from Ted Kennedy. They're playing out in the White House lawns. It’s a very down to earth moment. He talks about his first snog. Would the prime minister of Ireland, say Bertie Ahern, talk about his first snog? No way!
The BBC’s Orla Guerin was a thousand times better at her job than I’ve ever been. She’s a phenomenal foreign correspondent. People say: “You were in dangerous places, Charlie.” I was, but I didn’t put my life in peril in the way someone like Orla Guerin has. She gets to the knuckle of a story, right down to the nitty gritty of it. She brings you there, right into the story. She makes it real.
The key to good reporting is instinct – you know there's something there, you don’t fall asleep on the job, you keep digging. Big stories sometimes drop into your lap, but if you're doing a big investigation you have to work hard at it. You have to have a passion for the job you’re in, too. I stumbled into journalism. I failed every exam I ever took in my life. I never went to university, but I realised I wanted to be a journalist so I used my fingernails to claw my way into being a journalist. I worked morning, noon and night. I went for it, and I wasn’t put off by anyone.
