'Getting to the bottom of what made people tick, that was his nature': From a passion for Winnie-the-Pooh to working on Liam Neeson's first film, the late Charlie Warmington remembered by his family
The News Letter’s late Roamer, Charlie Warmington, was warmly welcomed like an old friend into the lives of readers all over Northern Ireland.
Behind the column, his family remember a warm and gregarious man, the life and soul of the party and always with a strange and hilarious – if occasionally a little risqué – tale to hand.
Charlie, who died earlier this week, took a path in life as unusual and colourful as the people and traditions he detailed in Roamer, from working on a movie that gave Liam Neeson his first film role to helping establish the Belfast Barge moored on the River Lagan, alongside an enviable track record as a print and broadcast journalist.
As nephew Andy and sister-in-law Joyce describe him, away from his work Charlie was a fount of information and fascination, as well as generously supportive of his younger relatives’ ambition and inquisitiveness.
“Growing up, he let me and my brother in to see what TV and radio work was like, visiting studios [at the BBC],” Andy told the News Letter. “My old brother, Mark, did his first work experience with Charlie in Belfast, and he released his first documentary last year.”
Joyce remembers regular visits to the family home, stating: “At Christmas he always had plenty of stories for the boys, and our sons loved funny songs he wrote, but there was a little-known talent – he was quite the keen dishwasher.”
One of the peculiar detours in his life was when he wound up doing set design for the film that first put Liam Neeson on the silver screen.
A talented artist, Charlie had done some work as a set designer for local theatre productions; in 1978, he wound up performing the same behind the scenes role on an adaptation of John Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress, made in Ulster by an international company specialising in low budget movies aimed at the US Christian market.
In front of the camera was young jobbing actor Neeson, portraying Evangelist, a character who puts the titular Pilgrim on the road to righteousness, and later appears stripped to the waist as a vision of Christ on the cross. But how did Charlie wind up involved? In truth, the family aren’t sure. “He didn’t speak about it,” says Andy. “[It’s one of those] things that you only find out after he’s passed.”
Joyce remembers Charlie as having a lifelong obsession with AA Milne’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh, which she attributes to his artistic side; it was the book’s illustrations by EH Shepard that drew him in, she says.
"He had a big interest in satirical newspaper cartoons,” adds Andy. “He introduced me to some of that with a Christmas present of a book of Matt’s cartoons from the Daily Telegraph; Ralph Steadman as well.”
The Roamer column prioritised everyday lives, seeing more in them than the big sweep of history or celebrities and supposedly great leaders. Charlie was the same, something Joyce believes he got from his own father.
“His father was very interested in people; he holidayed in small bed and breakfasts because he liked that immediacy of meeting new people,” she says.
Says Andy: “As a precocious teenager, I did a radio series with Charlie about surfing in Northern Ireland, which wasn’t so popular back then. He knew absolutely nothing about these people, but always had really good questions; that was in his nature, getting to the bottom of what made people tick.”