Culture That Made Me: Matt Cooper on UCC, Lou Grant and Succession
Matt Cooper's latest book is Who Really Owns Ireland?.
Matt Cooper, 57, grew up on the Lee Road, Cork, and went to secondary school at the North Monastery and later University College Cork. In 1996, he was made editor of the Sunday Tribune newspaper, aged 30, becoming Ireland’s youngest editor of a national newspaper. In 2003, he began presenting the drivetime radio show The Last Word on Today FM. He makes documentaries and anchors TV shows. He’s authored several books, including Who Really Owns Ireland? which is published by Gill Books.
Growing up, I was a regular user of Cork’s city library in the Grand Parade. I went to primary school in St Joseph’s in the Mardyke which wasn’t far away. I remember a book by the veteran English football journalist Brian Glanville called Goalkeepers Are Different, which I took out many times. It was about a fictional goalkeeper playing for a fictional team against real teams like Leeds United and Liverpool. I was very taken by that as a child.
I loved the Lou Grant drama TV series, which was about a newspaper editor in LA. The excitement of chasing down the story and bringing important news to people's attention appealed to me. Maybe there was a bit of a teenage idealist in me; hopefully that still lives on. The important thing for a journalist – and a broadcaster – is to get the story, get it out there, and then let people make up their minds. His publisher, who was modelled on a Katharine Graham type, was played by Nancy Merchand, who went down to play Tony Soprano's mother in The Sopranos.
In UCC, I read a lot of fiction. I tried to read probably about three books a week. I did a commerce degree, but in my first year, we studied arts as a foundation for commerce. My English tutor was Theo Dorgan, who was a formative influence. We had great conversations about books. He pointed me in the direction of lots of writers.
I was given a gift of a Jennifer Egan book last Christmas. I've read three of her novels since, including The Candy House and Manhattan Beach, which was a big hit of hers a few years ago. It’s set in the 1940s in New York. It would be out of the, say, Dennis Lehane School of crime novels. It's terrific. She’s a wonderful writer, who writes imaginative, modern fiction. She’s my go-to writer at the moment.
I like writing biographies; Walter Isaacson is very much a template. Steve Jobs’ biography is masterful, as is his recent Elon Musk biography. His writing style is very accessible. He enjoys extraordinary access. Access can make a book, giving it credibility. Also, he's not unkind – he's quite critical of Elon Musk, but not in an unkind way. He puts the facts out there for readers to make up their own minds. That's something that I'm always very conscious of – that I'm not trying to tell the reader what to think.
I love reading sports books. I love the sportswriter Jeff Benedict. Although my main sports would be rugby, soccer, Gaelic games, I have a passing interest in American football. His book about the New England Patriots, called The Dynasty, is the story of Robert Kraft, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. It’s brilliant.
I loved The Big Short movie, which is based on the Michael Lewis book. I've watched it a few times. I interviewed the director, Adam McKay, when it was launched in Ireland. It took complex material and made it into a great story.
A lesser known movie about the crash in 2008 is Margin Call. It’s terrific. It’s got an all-Star cast – Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore. It's fiction, set in a trading room where they're going bust. It’s really good.
I've watched every episode of Succession three times. I've had covid a few times. Lying on the sofa, feeling miserable, the way I've managed to enjoy myself was by watching Succession. The sharpness of the writing, the drama, the comedy. Also there are individuals in it who are familiar to me from people I've dealt with over the years – the very wealthy in business. In Succession, they may be international figures, but I can identify some Irish people in some of the characters.
The Larry Sanders Show, which was based on the set of a fictional chat show, was ground-breaking. The cynicism of it, the one-upmanship, everyone trying to get themselves into position to be better off. It was not enormously dissimilar in some respects to Succession in the humour of it, and the cynicism of people trying to enhance their own careers at the expense of everybody else.
Years before I did my first sports TV broadcast, Bill O’Herlihy encouraged me to go towards it. I always admired the way Bill applied journalistic instincts to questioning the panel. He didn't make it about himself. He very much saw his role as the link man. His job was to draw the best out of the panelists. It wasn't to be a commentator himself. That was always the approach I took in doing TV sport broadcasting. He set the template for how it should be done.
I love David Mamet’s stage play, Glengarry Glen Ross. I saw it with my wife in 2012 in a Broadway production with Al Pacino, David Harbour, and Richard Schiff of The West Wing; Richard got us tickets in the middle of the fifth row, within spitting distance from the stage. I love the writing in the play, the energy of it, the salesmanship, the one-upmanship. I’m interested in the alpha-male syndrome.
I really enjoyed Gabriel Byrne’s one-man show in the Gaiety Theatre, Walking With Ghosts, based on his memoir. He did a terrific job, an extraordinary performance. It was very emotional the way he delivered it all, telling great stories. I brought my eldest daughter with me. It was the opening night in Dublin. She was maybe 22 or 23 at the time. She was possibly the youngest person in the audience. It was a lot of people from their fifties upwards, including President Michael D Higgins. My daughter really got caught up in it. The stories transcended age.
I’ve just finished reading the autobiography of the lead singer and bass player of Rush, Geddy Lee. It’s terrific on the experience of his parents in concentration camps in the Holocaust. The music of Rush – I half-jokingly suggest – has almost been the soundtrack to my life. They played Ireland only once, in Dublin, in 2011. I met Geddy and guitarist Alex Lifeson when they were over. That would be the music I would always listen to. The whole catalogue of Rush albums were playing on Spotify while I was reading the book.
