Legendary career of larger than life Ivan
There have been several things in my life that have not been particularly appropriately named.
The Royal Enfield Bullet I rode from Delhi to Belfast, for example, whose only resemblance to a bullet was the fact that it was made of metal. Or the Triumph Spitfire which was my first car, and which only lived up to its moniker when the engine burst into flames as I hurtled down the M2 flat out, the only speed I knew in those days.
But as far as people are concerned, Ivan Little, who’s been Ulster’s second tallest journalist for as long as I’ve known him, takes not only the biscuit, but the whole packet.
The lofty legend began his career with the Portadown Times, moved to the Belfast Telegraph, then abandoned his pen for a microphone with Downtown Radio and joined Ulster Television as a reporter in 1980.
In his 29 years at UTV, he reported for Good Evening Ulster, Six Tonight, UTV and ITN, in a career which included everything from a famous hands-on encounter with Ian Paisley live on air to a rather hairy rendezvous with the Orange Volunteers complete with submachine guns and a Bible reading.
In recent times he has reported on the 9/11 attacks in New York, the tsunami in Thailand and the war in Iraq.
He took voluntary redundancy from the station in January to concentrate on acting, although he’ll still be appearing on our screens as a freelance.
As an actor, he has played the lead role in of one of Northern Ireland's most successful plays, The History of the Troubles (accordin’ to my Da) which has been enjoyed by nearly 200,000 people in the last five years.
He also performed in the extended run of Educating Rita at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and in the award-winning Scenes from the Big Picture at the city’s Waterfront Hall.
His recent autobiography Little by Little figured in the top 10 of local book sales and showed that behind the scenes he had enjoyed a colourful romantic life.
He met his first girlfriend, fellow Grosvenor High School pupil Joan Beattie, at a school formal on April 1 1969, and they were together for the next 15 years, first as a courting couple, then as an engaged couple and finally as a married couple, with a daughter, Emma, born in 1978 - until Ivan strayed.
Mind you, he had been warned, with his welcome to UTV from veteran journalist Ivan McMichael.
“Well, big man, you can say goodbye to your privacy and to your marriage,” were McMichael’s words in Maxies, the pub next door to Havelock House, on the first Friday night outing after work.
Although Ivan Little almost choked on his pint at the time, the other Ivan was right: Little had only been with UTV a couple of years when he began seeing someone else, then going out with and setting up home with UTV colleague Kate Smith.
He split up with Joan in 1985, and said later that telling their daughter Emma that he was leaving was the most difficult thing he has ever had to do.
By 1989, his relationship with Kate Smith had crumbled, a situation made more awkward by the fact that they sat right next to each other in the newsroom, and before long he was back to the life of the bachelor, heading out every Friday night from his newly acquired apartment to legendary drinking spot the Wellington Park Hotel.
“I used to get stick from my mates that the only reason I liked going there was because my ugly face was regularly on television. Honestly though, a balding, overweight one-legged midget with bad breath and a hunchback could have pulled in the Welly - and that was on a bad night,” he said.
However, one of the women he met there, a successful solicitor, proved to be more than a fling when she gave birth to a baby girl, Claire, in July 1990.
By now, Ivan knew he had to get his life sorted out, or the Friday night frolics, along with ongoing excesses on the merry-go-round of amateur drama, would catch up with him one way or another, so he decided to get out of Belfast altogether and rented a small house in Holywood with the intention of settling down and wising up.
But fate had other ideas. On his very first night in Holywood, he was just settling down to a quiet night in alone when a friend from UTV, Stephen McCoubrey, called to say hello, and they went into town for a jar. Just the one, mind.
Inevitably, they ended up in the Welly, and within minutes of arriving, Ivan had spotted a girl called Siofra O'Reilly, who had been a set designer with one of his old amateur drama groups, the Circle.
With one final irony of all those in Ivan’s life so far, she turned out to have been living only a few hundred yards away from him in Belfast, yet it wasn't until that night, after he moved out of Belfast, that they bumped into each other for the first time
Fifteen years later, they are still together.
What’s your earliest memory of childhood, and what sort of childhood did you have?
Sitting in my pram in Connsbrook Avenue. There was a girl who walked past every day and stopped to talk to me. Then being terrified when my brother Raymond tried to push the same pram off the walkway at Ballyholme. That’s where I think I got my fear of heights from, which makes even standing up a problem.
The SDLP always tells the story of how I had to go up in a cherry picker with Brid Rodgers for an interview looking down over the scene at Drumcree. She was sitting holding my hand while I was bombarding her with critical questions.
Dad was a milkman, and I helped him deliver the milk from when I was about five. He’d pick me up from school every afternoon and we’d deliver the milk all over east Belfast and the Craigantlet hills.
I loved being out with him, because that was our time together. He was a quiet Cavan man, and that was the time he talked to me most.
What are your best and worst memories of childhood?
Best was being out with dad. Worst was falling through our glass front door and nearly ripping my ears off. And when I was four, Raymond dared me to turn my eyes in at a party, and one stuck. I must have had five operations over the years to straighten it.
Which school subjects were you top and bottom of the class in?
I was tremendous at being lazy. When I went to Grosvenor, all I did was try to get out of rugby on Saturdays. I used to play for the Under-14Bs with my clothes on under my jersey, then haul my trousers on and head off to watch Linfield. One day I bunked off completely and was walking through town to go and see the Blues when I met the team and the master coming the other way.
Then I was threatened with expulsion when I refused to go to the Schools’ Cup semi-final. But Grosvenor was great. That’s where I discovered acting when Sam Ross, the master who took drama, picked me out one day and asked me to read a part. I never had any inclination towards acting because I was very shy at school and I wouldn’t have looked twice at anybody, but he gave me a very small part in Macbeth as the Third Murderer. After that, maybe because I was big and could play more adult parts, I always ended up playing the lead roles, and I found that I loved it.
I applied to drama schools in Bristol and London, but the cost was completely out of my folks' league, and the thought of spending my life watching cricket as a county scorer in England didn't thrill me either.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I fancied being an actor, but didn’t know how to go about it. I’d no intention of being a journalist, but applied for the course at Belfast College of Commerce because I thought it would fill a year.
Then Joan had got into Stranmillis, so I applied to there and got accepted for teacher training, but the journalism course organised a visit to the Portadown Times, so I went down, talked to Davy Armstrong the editor, liked what he said, liked the fact that he loved soccer, even if he did support Portadown, and accepted a job there and then.
How did you feel in your first week at the Portadown Times?
Writing was never a problem, but I was terrified, because I was really shy and quiet and had no social skills. I still remember walking from Thomas Street to Edward Street to interview twins who were emigrating, filled with dread.
It got better with time, and I got great encouragement from Davy Armstrong and Victor Gordon, the best reporter I’ve ever met, by a country mile. He was a real mentor.
Which was worse, the hands-on encounter with Ian Paisley or the Orange Volunteers with submachine guns?
The Paisley one’s become a bit of a myth. It was just after he was elected, he wasn’t well, and it was the first time he’d talked in weeks. I repeatedly asked him if he would actually talk to Sinn Fein, and he just grabbed me by the lapels. I just thought: ‘This is going out live. What do I do? Do I tell him to get his hands off me?’ Then I thought: ‘This is great TV; I hope the cameraman’s getting it.’
Afterwards I switched my phone back on and there must have been 50 calls from journalists wanting to know what happened, then even more from all over the world. My brother rang from Canada because he’d read in the papers that I’d been assaulted, but it wasn’t like that. Paisley wasn’t out to hurt me, and afterwards he was laughing and joking in the canteen, and told me to send the bill to the DUP if he’d damaged my suit.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that he’d come out with the quote of the election: “I’m not talking to Sinn Fein, and anybody in my party who does talk to Sinn Fein will be out of my party.”
What have been the best and worst bits about journalism?
Nothing sends a shudder down my spine quite like the day I stumbled into the hell that was Sean Graham's bookies shop on the Ormeau Road in Belfast in 1992. I’ve covered other massacres like La Mon, the Shankill, Greysteel, Omagh, Enniskillen and Loughinisland, but for the most part, I arrived on the scene long after the event.
This time, I’d been driving past the bookies when I saw the terror unfold and I witnessed sights inside and outside the shop which I pray I will never see again.
It was a full 15 minutes before any other journalists arrived on the scene. A rival broadcaster congratulated me and my cameraman on our scoop, and it was all I could do not to punch him. Whatever else the Ormeau Road was that day, it was not something to celebrate.
That was the worst, but there were so many hundreds of funerals over the years that you tried not to bring home, not always successfully.
Interviewing Bruce Springsteen was probably the best, since he’s been such a hero.
Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11 and the tsunami were all amazing, from a journalistic point of view.
I really enjoyed the lighter stuff, because it gave me a chance to feed my awful addiction to puns.
Are you really as pissed off as you sound on screen?
I don’t mean to be. I did get pissed off at the futility of all the Troubles stories I did. And people pumping their horn when I was trying to do a piece to camera.
You produced some incredible work from the tsunami in Thailand. Was it as moving as it sounded?
It was horrendous, particularly because Albert the cameraman and I were with the family of Conor Keightley, the Cookstown man who was missing out there, and when we heard that his body had definitely been identified, it was like losing one of our own.
The scenes of devastation there were horrendous, with thousands of bodies in temples. Looking back, I don’t know how I coped with it.
You got into acting by accident at school. What attracted you to it after the initial shock?
Because I was tall, I ended up playing all the lead roles at school, like Thomas More when I was 16. Because I was as shy as a mouse, I loved the buzz of being noticed and being in the centre of things.
Sam Ross was my inspiration. He said I had the best listening ear he’d ever known, and I should think of acting as a career. When I won the Best Actor award at the all-Ireland final in 1990, I tried so hard to find Sam, but he’d gone to England, and I couldn’t track him down.
What are the best and worst bits about it?
It was a huge amount of work combining it with journalism, especially because rehearsals meant taking three weeks off work, which wasn’t fair on Siofra.
But you get such a huge buzz out of it when you get it right. The worst bits are the uncertainty, which I’m going to face now. I’ve got work to the end of March, and the possibility of a movie, but after that, who knows? UTV wants me back as a freelance, which will help.
You’ve had a fairly interesting romantic life. Were you just a bit of a wild man in your youth, and have you settled down now?
I wasn’t particularly wild, but I wasn’t a monk either. Your face is on the TV, you’re young and the opportunities are there, I suppose. Some of the things I did weren’t particularly clever, but I’ve ended up with Siofra, which is fantastic.
What is good is that Joan and I are still on good terms, to the extent that she, Siofra and I have been on holiday together. And the two of them are going on my daughter Emma’s hen night together.
Favourite book?
William Trevor’s short stories. Mind you, I hate the man because he can come up with 50 magical stories, and I can’t think of one.
Film?
Probably very sad, but it’s The Quiet Man. The first time I went to Cong, where it was filmed, was with Joan when Emma was in a buggy, and there was no sign that the film had been there; although we were walking down the street when Rod Stewart came out of a shop with Alana Hamilton. They were obviously staying at Ashford Castle.
And North by North West. That’s the other one I can watch time and time again.
First record?
The first I bought was Well Respected Kinks by The Kinks. I bought it because it was only 7/6d and Dad had just got us a battery-powered record player.
The first record I owned was Counting Teardrops by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, which I won in a Radio Luxembourg competition.
I’m so sad that I actually downloaded it recently. First time I’d heard it in 40 years. Pure crap.
Favourite country?
Ireland and Scotland. I love the train journeys to Mallaig and Inverness. And Barbados, which is like Scotland with sunshine. I loved Thailand, but I don’t think I could go back.
Best and worst holidays ever?
Worst was last year in Fuerteventura. The weather vanished, and we had nine days of no sun. We both got sick, I got the cold, and we ended up buying warm clothes and sleeping under extra blankets.
Best was any time in Barbados. Love it, love the people.
And my brother lives just outside Toronto, so I had some great holidays there.
Dream car? Is that what you drive?
Anything with legroom. My next car will be a Skoda, because now I won’t get slagged by everyone in UTV for driving one.
Vices and virtues?
Grumpy and short-tempered when things go wrong. I was a news editor for a while, but I’d probably have killed someone if I’d stayed in the job. Virtues? I think I’m easy to get on with, when I’m not being grumpy.
Regrets: have you had a few?
That I messed up my private life and made some bad choices. I hurt people I shouldn’t have hurt, but at least it’s all come full circle.
No regrets about career. I had the chance to go to England, and didn’t because I wanted to be here for Emma, but I worked for ITN every weekend, and although part of me wonders what it would have been like travelling all over the world with them, if you work full-time for them in London, they own you body and soul.
Who would play you in the film version of your life?
Me, funny enough. I’ ve already played me in Hidden Agenda with Ken Loach. Great name to drop, that.
When were you happiest?
When I was a child. I had fantastic parents, and my childhood had happiness stamped all over it.
And last night. I had my last day at UTV after 29 years, which was very surreal.
I was at the funeral of the journalist Paul Robinson, and it was like This Is Your Life. Everyone I’d ever worked with was there, but older. And it felt very strange, walking out of the door for the last time as a staffer.
Then I came home, opened a bottle of wine, had dinner and watched an old movie. Perfect.
And saddest?
When I was making the choices I made in my private life, although to be honest, I’ve never really been sad.
Pet hates?
Heights. Bigots who are so ingrained in their hatred that they won’t listen, and I’ve known a few. And cucumbers. I fell out with my mum completely irrationally for a fortnight when she made me a cucumber sandwich.
What would be your perfect life?
Living in Glencolumbkille with an Internet connection, and writing stories.
If you had a time machine, what year would you go back to?
I’d love to go forward to see how my grandchildren, if I have any, turn out. If I went back, to 1962, when Linfield won seven trophies and I was too young to appreciate it.
My parents got married on VE Day, and I’d like to have lived through the Second World War, although I’d have been too much of a coward to fight in it.
Where do you want to be in five years time?
Still breathing.
Sum up your lesson for life in a sentence.
If it feels right, do it.
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Wednesday 30 May 2012
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