‘Information, Please’: Brian O’Nolan and the Radio

Abstract

This article proposes Irish radio broadcasting as an unexplored context for new directions in Flann O’Brien studies. Brian O’Nolan’s involvement in Irish radio spans at least two decades, from the early 1930s into the 1950s, yet the contributions of O’Nolan and his literary circle to Radio Éireann and the BBC remain an under-researched area of Flann O’Brien scholarship. Scholars are faced with the absence of a sound archive to refer to; but this article argues that such absences are part of the ephemeral nature of radio as a medium, and that we must view O’Nolan’s work in radio as an emerging, amateur practice within a wider, sustained artistic project. Though we cannot resurrect the live performances themselves, the article draws on new archival evidence to offer a short history of O’Nolan’s radio appearances. It attempts to fill the gaps produced by lost media with original radio schedules, reviews, letters, and typescript drafts, and by contextualising O’Nolan’s portrayals of radio within a wider social and technological milieu, via the radio-related activity of his circle (Niall Sheridan, Donagh MacDonagh, Niall Montgomery). This context helps us to see how radio aesthetics influenced O’Nolan’s metafictional writing, as demonstrated through close readings of how the modernist ‘radio’ mode informed ‘!CEÓL!’ (1932), Blather (1934), and At Swim-Two-Birds (1939).