The actor Gabriel Byrne’s 2020 memoir Walking With Ghosts is almost unputdownable. Having finally done so I googled the list of awards he has garnered – and there at the very top it said, “Jacobs Awards”. The words prompted a sudden memory: I could recall the citation that accompanied that presentation. Besides praising his acting, it went on “ ... and for giving a new charisma to sheep farmers everywhere”. I know that because I wrote it.
By now a whole generation of Irish Times readers is no doubt asking, “What’s a Jacobs Award?”. This requires a detailed answer but, in short, they were sponsored by a biscuit bakery. Long preceding the IFTA Awards, they began in 1962 shortly after the birth of RTÉ Television and ended in 1993 shortly before the death of Frankie Byrne.
The more mature reader will remember Frankie as the smokey-voiced presenter of the sponsored radio programme Woman’s Page, in which she doled out advice to the lovelorn and sundry others who sent their letters to “Dear Frankie” seeking her no-nonsense words of wisdom. But besides being a radio presenter, she was a successful public relations practitioner and the driving force that once made the Jacobs Awards a part of Irish life.
In the beginning the annual presentation ceremony took place in Jacobs biscuit factory in Bishop Street, Dublin, but as the invitation list got longer, they moved to hotel function rooms in Dublin – and occasionally beyond.
One event (memorable for all the wrong reasons) was held in Waterford. This involved a whole special train full of prominent guests including politicians, journalists, supermarket supremos and seemingly half the staff of RTÉ heading out of Dublin one Saturday afternoon – but grinding to a halt just beyond Hazelhatch, Co Kildare. The engine had broken down. After a long wait in a siding, the bonhomie was sagging by the time a new engine finally arrived. It got the passengers to the venue with hardly time to change and freshen up for their dinner. The headline in the following Monday’s Evening Press was “Too Many Chiefs And Not Enough Engines”.
The awards each year were decided by a jury made up of the television reviewers from the country’s morning and evening newspapers – a body of men and women whose personnel changed over the years. I joined their ranks for a spell when I worked for the Sunday Press. We would meet three or four times a year in the boardroom of Jacobs factory, which was by then in Tallaght. Each juror would bring a shortlist of potential contenders and Frankie Byrne would chair the meetings and keep note of all our prognostications.
Sometimes there were sharp differences among the jurors, and our chairperson had to restore order. She also sometimes had to chivvy us along as one or two of the more seasoned columnists were given to journalistic reminiscences that were frequently more interesting than the task at hand. The real horse-trading happened at the final meeting. The atmosphere could become quite fraught as every juror wanted his or her favourite to make the cut.
With that job finally accomplished, we would mop up the bloodshed and adjourn to the executive diningroom for lunch, often presided over by the then company chairman Gordon Lambert. At this table, too, we would meet the radio critics who had been working in a separate room. These gents and ladies were a varied and cultured lot compared with us television hacks.
There were no fisticuffs among the television jurors in 1979, the year Gabriel Byrne got his Jacobs Award for his role in Bracken, a rural drama serial that aspired to be more than a soap opera. He had appeared in the final episode of the long-running RTÉ series The Riordans as the young sheep farmer Pat Barry whose arrival causes quite a flurry of interest in the female population of sleepy Leestown – and now his character was central to this new creation by the same writer, Wesley Burrowes. Bracken was a hit, largely thanks to his performance. He became a national heart-throb overnight.
[ Wesley Burrowes, father of Irish television drama who proudly defended the ‘soap’Opens in new window ]
The drama serial also introduced two other characters to Ireland’s television viewers – Dinny Byrne and his son Miley. Space prevents explaining who they were: you’ll just have to ask AI.
