Culture That Made Me: Anton Savage of Newstalk selects his touchstones
Anton Savage presents a daily show on Newstalk and is also a Children’s Health Foundation Route 66 ambassador.
Anton Savage, 48, grew up on Dublin’s northside. Early in his radio career, he presented programmes on RTÉ and Today FM. He has hosted TV shows on Ireland AM and TV3, including .
In 2021, he joined Newstalk. Earlier this year, he stepped aside from his directorship role at the Communications Clinic — co-founded by his mother Terry Prone, and late father Tom Savage — to focus on presenting Newstalk’s breakfast show, weekdays 7am to 9am.
He’s also a Children’s Health Foundation Route 66 ambassador.
In terms of spinning gold out of rough thread, it's hard to beat Joe Duffy. I remember once Joe opened the show by saying, “Margaret, you're dead.” You can't turn off if someone opens with a line like that.
It turned out the footballer Stephen Ireland used his grandmother’s “death” [to avoid playing an international match]. Joe got the grandmother on the line. He managed to get 20 minutes out of her, asking her how she felt about being dead. It was priceless. He was empathetic, insightful, and incisive.
He had a great nose for when to leave open space and let people fill it themselves.
Seán O'Casey is by a mile our best playwright. As a boy, I was brought to see David Kelly — your man who played the builder in — played Joxer. He was fabulous. It’s a fabulous piece of work, not least the final scene when Juno’s left to pick up all the pieces of the fecklessness and self-indulgence of “the Captain”.
is the greatest piece of television ever. You had a guy whose day job is stuntman. There is no better job than being a stuntman. My big regret in life is that I didn't pursue my childhood dream to be a stuntman. And then his hobby is bounty hunting. How cool is that?
The film I have the biggest emotional response to is . I know it’s schlocky, it’s sentimental. It isn't high art. You can see the artifice. You know the emotional strings it’s pulling — the doctor that sacrifices his dream to save the little girl; the blind faith in something bigger than oneself; the relationship between Kevin Costner's character and his father. Not only do I cry when I watch it, I struggle to explain the plot to somebody without crying.
I read John Steinbeck's when I was probably 10. I remember being inconsolable at the end of it. I was sobbing. As I recall it, the plot is about two travelling labourers. One of whom — and I'm not sure this is the way Steinbeck would have described it — has learning difficulties. Another is a friend-cum-minder. The end of it hinges on a death.
John D MacDonald — the guy who wrote — wrote this brilliant series of novels about Travis McGee, a salvage consultant, a man who finds lost people, stolen possessions, kidnapped victims. He lives on a sailboat in the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He takes his retirement in chunks — whenever he earned any money, he retired. As the money began to run out, he took another job, another adventure.
is written by Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor who specialised in public health medicine. The book’s subtitle is . He goes through assumptions you possibly make about things like population growth, poverty, education, health, proving all your assumptions wrong over the course of the book. It's a well-researched, evidenced-based analysis of how the world works. You couldn’t read it and not have your views modified.
The Night & Day Festival in Roscommon’s Lough Key Forest Park is very family-friendly, with a nice vibe the whole weekend. One memorable act was Hothouse Flowers. They were in a circus tent. There were thousands of people at the festival, but maybe 700 in the tent, but they played like it was Wembley. They ripped the roof off the place. I’ve never seen Fiachna Ó Braonáin or Liam Ó Maonlaí whip up a crowd like it. They were roaring on Fiachna doing a tin whistle solo. It was great.
is by Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at universities in Copenhagen and Oxford. He’s a consultant on capital works projects, how they build tunnels, bridges and so on. The book debunks myths. We have this sense in Ireland that we’re uniquely crappy at building big stuff. We're not. Everybody makes a Hames of it.
He goes through successes and abject failures. He breaks down what causes things to go wrong, the common factors, what makes things go right. For instance, he looks at the Sydney Opera House. It was delivered 10 years late, 14 times over budget. Such a disaster the architect who designed it never saw it; he was so depressed by the entire crisis. Yet it has become the defining symbol of Australia.
My view is that a broadcaster like, say, Dick Cavett — who was a contemporary of Johnny Carson’s — could be an intellectual and think big thoughts and philosophise. But that’s not hard. Being funny is hard. Making somebody else funny — that’s hard. Johnny Carson five days a week made other people funny. To order. Very few people can do that. The other interesting thing about Carson — having read his biography — is that he was an objectionable human being. His only redeeming feature was what he could do on TV.
I’ll never forget the performance of Niall Tóibín in Brendan Behan’s , a production directed by Joe Dowling around 35 years ago. Niall Tóibín played the role of the Older Brendan Behan. He was brilliant — so funny, such great timing and pathos. I can still see him standing in the wings with a hand jammed in the pockets, the white shirt and the belly hanging out. I’ll never forget it.
Pitcairn Island is the island where the Mutiny on the Bounty mutineers lived. They took some Tahitian women, a couple of Tahitian men, burned the Bounty to the waterline so nobody could find them. They lived on Pitcairn, a rock in the middle of nowhere, knowing the Admiralty had charted it wrongly, so they'd never find the island. Successive generations stayed there for 200 years until there was a sex abuse scandal on Pitcairn that began to break.
Technically, it's a British island. The Pitcairn Trials podcast — the best podcast I’ve listened to — begins with some lad in a police station in Kent being called into his boss who says, “Have you ever heard of Pitcairn Island? Pack a bag, you're going there [to investigate a case].”
Pilot Peter Hörnfeldt was a pilot with Ryanair. He has a YouTube channel called Mentour Pilot. He started doing videos detailing analysis of accident reports, analysing air crashes, re-creating them with computer graphics and a full video production suite, doing detailed technical analysis of what you can learn from accidents, what it says about human behaviour, how we respond to pressure. It’s an interesting microcosm of the way social media on YouTube is working and the kind of effect it has.
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