Gerry Ryan, who has died at the age of 53, was a man who lived for the studio red light. He joined RTÉ 2fm at its launch in 1979, but soon outgrew the pop DJ tag to become one of Ireland’s most respected broadcasters. He often turned his own private life into material on a show that consistently tackled both the big and small issues. Irreverent and iconoclastic, Gerry was the bedrock of the 2fm schedule; and his morning show never moved from its time-slot during the 22 years he presented it.
Born in Dublin in 1956, he was brought up in the affluent suburb of Clontarf by his father Vinnie, who was a dentist, and his mother Maureen, who had a background in theatre. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin and seemed ready for a career in law but Gerry’s gift for the gab was to find a much more immediate and possibly more worthwhile outlet.
Gerry was working on Dublin pirate radio ARD and Big D when RTÉ launched the fledgling pop station RTÉ Radio 2 (now RTÉ 2fm) in 1979. He came on board immediately and won praise for his late-night show. This was a different kind of radio, a million kilohertz away from inane DJ babble and the tyranny of the play-list. The listeners were the real stars and their on-air contributions were Gerry’s lifeline. From the start, he showed real empathy and a keen interest in his listeners that would form the basis of his career.
He toured the country with fellow late-night DJs Dave Fanning and Mark Cagney; Gerry would later say they dressed and behaved like they were in a rock band, staying in “awful hotels” and staying out late in “dodgy nightclubs”. Memorably, the trio were featured on the cover of Hot Press magazine as ‘The Led Zeppelin of Irish radio’.
However, it was Gerry’s appearance in a running item on the Gay Byrne Show which introduced him to a much wider audience. Producer Philip Kampf had come up with an idea which predated I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here by two decades and sent a team including Gerry into the wilds of the west for a survival week.
One morning live on air, Gerry claimed to have killed a lamb with a rock and eaten it to survive. It turned out be a wind up, but it earned Gerry the nickname of ‘Lambo’ and a prized place on 2fm’s 9 to 12 morning slot. From the start, The G Ryan Show was populist and loud-mouthed and very much in the style of the new breed of zoo radio that had swept America.
Gerry, a born talker, a humorist and gleeful troublemaker, preached to the masses while also giving them access to the airways. Most movingly, assault victim Lavinia Kerwick of Kilkenny rang him live on air in 1993 to tell her story. It stunned the nation and established Gerry’s show as something far more than mere entertainment.
A move into television was inevitable but not always successful. He presented Non Stop Pop, a music show from Dublin’s Cathedral Club in the mid-’80s and a move to more mainstream formats like Ryantown and Secrets were valiant efforts to give him TV shows that suited his gregarious nature as a showman. A late-night talk show, Gerry Ryan Tonight, presented a calmer Gerry, but perhaps TV did not suit him in the way that the immediacy of radio did. It was not the medium but the messenger with Gerry.
However, he acquitted himself well presenting the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994 with Cynthia Ní Mhurchú, broadcasting to the biggest audience of his career, and he got to exclaim the fateful words, “Ladies and gentleman . . . The Riverdance!”
He also proved an excellent stand-in for Pat Kenny on The Late Late Show in October 2008. It gave him a chance to show off his expansive and mischievous style to a huge audience, many of whom had tuned in to see if Gerry could cut it on the biggest show in town.
Gerry made no secret of the fact that he wanted a successful TV career, and he eventually found it with the hugely popular lifestyle series Operation Transformation, once again playing to his skills as a people person. He also landed some very big names on his interview show Ryan Confidential.
One on one, Gerry often referred to himself in the third person, a showbiz affectation that emphasised just how much he believed the legend. His autobiography was equally expansive but contained flashes of self deprecation. Recent upheavals in his private life saw the end of his 26-year marriage in 2008 to his college sweetheart Morah, with whom he had five children.
During a recent photo shoot with the RTÉ Guide he was, according to photographer John Cooney, “ebullient” and cracked jokes as he posed for pictures for an item on the radio show. Larger and louder than life, Gerry Ryan was a superb broadcaster who found a place in many people’s hearts, and that was what he had always set out to do.
The silence will be deafening.
Alan Corr
