Charlie Bird - Loud and Clear review: Powerful portrait of a beloved broadcaster
Charlie Bird - Loud and Clear: Charlie Bird is supported by family members at Croagh Patrick.
“But will it be my voice? Will I hear myself?”
The question is passionate, earnestly blunt. And all the more poignant because – asking it – Charlie Bird’s voice is already slurred and slowed by the motor neurone disease he had just recently been diagnosed with.
Charlie Bird: Loud and Clear began shooting in the days immediately following the veteran journalist’s devastating diagnosis last October.
It is a rich, multi-layered documentary: a look-back at key events in the last four decades of Irish history from whose frontlines the much-loved broadcaster reported; a love story in which he openly expresses his upset for his wife Claire – “I want to put my arms around her, try to protect her and make sure whatever life she travels in the future will be ok”.
It is a story of meeting illness head-on, and becoming a phoenix, as Bird sets himself the challenge of climbing Croagh Patrick and raising funds for others travelling difficult roads.
But above all, it is a tribute to a voice. The voice we heard in our homes across the years, telling us about powerful, pivotal historical moments: the Stardust tragedy, IRA ceasefires, the NIB scandal, election of our first woman president Mary Robinson, the Marriage Equality Referendum – we heard the news in Charlie Bird’s voice.
Claire tells us frankly her role is to keep them both afloat in this dark place life has tumbled them into. It is she who sets in motion the quest for a digitised voice for Charlie, for when disease robs him of his speech.
Charlie doesn’t want a computerised, robotic voice. He wants a voice with “a little bit of communication, humanity, emotion”. It is a moment of pure joy when they eventually receive the remarkable piece of technology – a voice-banking avatar app – and hear Charlie’s actual voice, harvested from the vast archive of recordings he himself generated over 40 years.
Here is a voice saving a voice, and there’s a powerful resonance when Charlie says later in the documentary: “I believe in good karma.”
In this phase of his life and in this documentary, Charlie is using his voice to tell his own most personal story. And he’s showing how to speak true: his love for Claire, his regret that his mother “never put her arms around me and said ‘well done’”, his sense of loss (“at some stage you’ll all be here but I’ll be gone”).
The documentary has many moments of humour and sheer tenderness. What’s powerful and compelling is Charlie’s voice, which he uses to be vulnerable, raw, real. He allows his voice be the ultimate a voice can be, do what it was born to do: be an open expression of humanity.
- Charlie Bird: Loud and Clear is now available on the RTÉ Player
