On the eve of his 70th birthday, the indefatigable Marty Whelan looks back – and forward – on a life and job that just keeps giving. Donal O'Donoghue meets him.
"Janey, that coach will not fit under the barrier!" Marty Whelan is in mid-show – talking of his imminent 70th birthday, his Marty in the Evening shows in September, his moustache – when he clocks a large bus negotiating an RTÉ traffic barrier.
Momentarily, the broadcaster’s thoughts are derailed, but we’re quickly back on track. Such is Marty’s stream-of-consciousness style: on radio, in person and here in the RTÉ canteen, where he has come directly from Marty in the Morning, a radio man dressed for TV.
His keyring, which sits on the table, sports an image of his granddaughter, Lily. "My wife Maria and I will be babysitting Lil tonight," he says, a big smile on his face. "She’s only two, but we read her stories and tell her silly rhymes and the rest."
I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have this man as your grandad?
"Turning 70 is not a big deal because I feel great and my mum lived to the grand old age of 95," he says of his birthday on June 7. "You see, I’m as happy as the day is long. And that’s due in no small part to loving what I do."
How will he mark the day? "I just want to celebrate with family: the seven of us (his wife Maria, his daughter Jessica, her husband and baby Lily; son Thomas and his partner)." Any chance his old pal Michael Bublé might stop by to serenade him as he did for his 65th? He laughs.
If anyone would like to play Marty his favourite tune, the song remains the same as it ever was: Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman. "Every time I hear it, it makes me feel good," he says of the classic. "It’s 1969, and I’m 13 again."
I imagine Marty as a 13-year-old with a moustache. When was the last time he was without his trademark facial décor? "Oh, decades ago," he says. "I’d look bizarre without it and wouldn’t do it, even on holidays. It’s part and parcel of who I am."
As is his bountiful hair, a transplant from years back. Is he planning any other cosmetic subtractions or additions?
"Oh no, I’m not a good man for the needles. Getting the hair done was a big thing, but I’m glad I did it. My dad lost his hair in his 20s, and there was feeling it might come to me too. I'm now so glad I did it. It’s very hard to know if it would have impacted on my television career, but what I can say is that I felt better for doing it. It gave me a big confidence boost. And of course, Maria was very happy to run her hands through my new hair! But am I going to do anything else cosmetically speaking? No, I won’t."
Marty in the Morning, broadcast from the old radio building in RTÉ, is one of the few shows that hasn’t relocated to a modern block at the other end of the Montrose campus. The innards of the building are now gap-toothed with absences, a place of empty spaces where old ghosts meet.
Once upon a time, it buzzed with household names like Gerry Ryan, Gay Byrne and Marian Finucane: all long gone. Marty Whelan was 23 when he first joined RTÉ in 1979 as part of the shiny new Radio 2 (now 2FM).
"There were six of us," he says of a motley crew of DJs, many coming from pirate radio, among them Dave Fanning, Vincent Hanley and the late G Ryan. "Every morning that I now come into Lyric, I pass the Larry Gogan suite (another of the original sextet), bringing back all those memories. It’s been a long trip since, and there were bumps along the way."
Ah, yes, the bumps. The first was, you could say, of his own making when he left RTÉ in 1989 to join Century Radio, Ireland’s first national commercial radio station. It was a big gamble, and Whelan knew
it.
Within two years, Century was gone, and Marty, with two young children, was on the dole. He kept the wolf from the door with a series of TV ads for Daz washing powder, but RTÉ was a closed shop.
"There were some who said, ‘Over my dead body are you coming back in here’," he says. He did get back in, radio for a while, but mostly TV. More bumps came. Open House, which he co-hosted with Mary Kennedy, was axed, and he was on holidays when the plug was pulled on 2FM’s Marty in the Morning.
"Well, I can’t ski, but I was on holidays in the ski resort, and that was brutal," he says. "It’s been a road with many twists and turns, but here we still are, youthful and virile and all the rest."
Since 2010, he’s been at the wheel of Marty in the Morning, having joined Lyric FM the previous year. Following a suggestion from a radio boss that he tailor the show to his personality, Marty did just that. Now what you get is an eclectic picnic of tunes, from Mozart to Bowie and all stations in-between.
The quiz segment, ‘Musically Speaking’, dusts off TV and lm themes, dad jokes pepper the morning ("I used to be addicted to soap. But I’m clean now"), and there’s breezy banter with the traffic reporters. News bulletins are on the half hour, but not a whisper of sports coverage.
And the whole shebang is conducted by Marty, apparently saying whatever pops into his head. "I got a request in today’s show from a woman who was 104, I kid you not, and another one from a 10-year-old girl", he says. "I’m not sure what that means, but it’s some demographic.
"They employed me to lower the tone," he quips of joining Lyric, a man who cannot resist a joke just as he’s determined to always look on the bright side of life.
The narrative of his 2015 memoir, That’s Life, is threaded through his favourite music tracks (‘A Life Through Songs’ was the subtitle, with Sinatra, Bowie, McCartney and Springsteen all taking a bow between the covers). We read of "an only but not lonely" child who grew up in the northside of the Dublin suburb of Killester.
His parents, Lily and Seán, worked in the rag-trade (Cassidy’s and Clery’s), which, he says, explains his penchant for a well-cut suit. "Because I was an only child, I talked a lot with my mum and dad," he says. "My parents were my friends." He married his childhood sweetheart, Maria, in 1985 and their children, Jessica and Thomas, now in their 30s, live not far from them in Dublin.
"I’d like to write another book," he says. "There’s always more to say. And I have a few ideas."
I bet.
Does he see himself as a career person, someone determined to get up that ladder by whatever means necessary? "I think I’ve gone awfully slowly up the ladder," he counters. As you might have guessed, Marty Whelan is not a political animal.
Speaking of the Eurovision Song Contest, which RTÉ boycotted this year (and on which he was TV commentator for 26 years), he treads carefully. "The decision was not anti-Semitic, but if the Israeli government are doing those things to the people of Palestine, you can’t just stand there and say that’s all fine."
His all-time hero is the US Civil Rights icon, Martin Luther King Jr. "When MLK was assassinated in 1968, I was 12 years old, and it had a huge impact on me that this person who epitomised kindness and decency had been killed. My dream has long been to visit his birthplace. I won’t be doing that now with the current regime in the US, but I will one day."
He lives by the wise words of his late father, Seán. "My dad’s advice was always that if you can’t get through a challenge or obstacle, then figure a way around it. The most important thing was that you can’t be standing still; you need to keep going forward."
Whelan is on a one-year rolling contract with Lyric FM that’s unlikely to stop any time soon (in the most recent JNLR listenership report, Marty in the Morning was still top of the Lyric pile). "I came in here at 23, and I’m still here," he says. Any advice he’d give to that 23-year-old?
"First bit of advice would be, ‘Century Radio may not be the best plan!’" he laughs. More than anything, the 69-year-old is a survivor, and as we part – having noticed that, unlike Marty, the large bus never made it past the RTÉ barrier – I suggest the ageless broadcaster could be a cover star again for his 80th.
I’m unlikely to be at RTÉ by then, but I wouldn’t bet against Marty Whelan.
Marty in the Morning will be broadcast live from Bloom on May 28 (10am to 12 noon). Tickets are available for Marty in the Evening live with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12. bordgaisenergytheatre.ie
