TV Review: Keep It a Secret rides the waves of Irish surfing history

"...what struck me were the voices of early Irish surfing - the polished accents on the early adopters in Tramore suggests that you needed a bit of money to catch a wave..."

Surfer Martin Lloyd, a trailblazer in the sport in Ireland

So now we know what the upper-middle classes got up to in 1960s Ireland. Surfing.

Keep It A Secret (RTÉ One and RTÉ Player) pitches the story of surfing in Ireland as a crazy ride, with the inevitable spit as the pioneers of the sport fell out over whether they should promote it worldwide, or keep the waves around the coast to ourselves.

But what struck me were the voices of early Irish surfing. The polished accents on the man who started it all (Kevin Cavey) and the early adopters in Tramore suggests that you needed a bit of money to catch a wave.

That wasn’t the only reason to envy them. Vivienne Evans is the sole female voice in the early part of the show, drawn in to surfing at an early age by her father. She describes running out of the freezing water up towards the cars with the other surfers, where they’d stand on hot water bottles and pass around the bottle of whiskey. She then told us she had developed a taste for it by the age of 13.

Keep It A Secret has an intoxicating feel of the Wild West on fibreglass boards, cowboys on waves, breaking free of button-down 1960s Ireland.

And then came the split, the same split in every sport in Ireland, the one between the blazers and the tearaways who wanted to express themselves. 

The blazers here were the group around Kevin Cavey who treated it like a business, something that should be organised.

Enter The Belfast Crew, as they are called in the caption. These guys were the renegades who surfed along the north causeway coast in places like Portrush.

They were definitely cooler than the posh southerners. Three of them were music producers, manufacturing their own bespoke amp and recording a young guy called Van Morrison. 

Unlike the southerners, who imported boards, the northern crew made their own. A guy called Alan surfed through early winter without a wetsuit. They also made their own wetsuits.

The best bit was Davy Govan describing how he lost his front teeth surfing 6ft waves in the dark. It was a reminder this could be dangerous, but addictive too, and these men weren’t in any hurry to grow up.

Surfing’s civil war didn’t stop Ireland from hosting the 1972 European surfing championships.

People turned up from all over Europe. The only thing missing in Lahinch was decent waves, and the competitors were heading home disappointed when last-minute waves rolled in at Spanish Point up the coast, establishing Ireland as a world-class surfing destination.

That’s a Hollywood ending. It would make a great Irish movie – it has pints, scenery, posh people, whiskey, a civil war, and unpredictable weather.

Keep it A Secret is a great story, well told. Give it a watch.