Remembering the multi-talented country traveller Miss Helen

I’ve never even nearly perfected her fluent virtuosity, but it was the late, great, uniquely-talented writer and broadcaster Helen Madden who inspired my love and respect for our very special country and its inhabitants.

Better known to many as Miss Helen on UTV’s popular 1960s and 1970s Romper Room programme, she was also an accomplished actor, author and celebrant for non-religious funerals, weddings and baby-naming ceremonies.

Sadly, Helen passed away last Friday and having been enormously privileged to have worked with her in the BBC, I want to add just a few of my memories to the many, many warm tributes already circulating.

It was the beginning of the 1980s and I was assigned to Radio Ulster’s Up Country programme, a twice-weekly, half-hour compilation of interviews and narratives from the towns, villages, townlands, highways, byways and sometimes isolated crossroads of Northern Ireland.

Helen thrived on talking to the characters she met in all sorts of surroundings and endearingly, the bulk of her interviews started with local folk asking her if she could see their name in her mirror.

On Romper Room she looked through a ‘magic mirror’ to see who was watching at home, listing the names of some of her young viewers, and she often repeated the performance on location, to the delight of her nostalgic interviewees!

They loved her as much as she loved them - capturing their conversations on a microphone rendered indiscernible by her captivating smile and enchanting eyes - talking to local folk in farmyards, forests, fields or front rooms.

She was intensely interested in everything they told her, urging them onwards through conversations about everything under the sun that occasionally shone on them; rain hail or snow, Up Country happened!

Pettigo blacksmith David Elliott showed her his membership certificate of The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths and explained how he became a registered blacksmith exactly 100 years after his grandfather, James Elliott, began his indenture into the trade.

David outlined the craft he learnt from his forebears in the little whitewashed forge adjoining the cottage where he was born.

He pumped the ancient bellows, turning smouldering coals to red-hot before sizzling a perfectly-crafted horse shoe in cold water and presenting it to Helen.

She talked to him through the whole, antique ritual, putting the age-old scene into words that were stored in her tape recorder till tomorrow’s edition of Up Country. Meanwhile David beckoned a fiddler and danced with Helen!

Her interviews ‘recreated’ country life so vividly she won a Northern Ireland Tourist Board Award for Endeavour.

Uniquely, she was presented with an official Féis Dhoíre Cholmcílle certificate for ‘Community Interviewing’ - a much prized accolade previously restricted to Irish music and dancing!

An oyster farmer toppled backwards off his oyster raft and she continued the interview, kneeling on the edge of the raft with her microphone as he answered her questions. She told me it captured the atmosphere and it most certainly did!

An enormous snorting horse loomed from a sudden snowstorm during a ploughing demonstration and she continued to interview the fast-retreating commentator.

A country magician sawed her in two with his chain-saw before she levitated, all the while vividly describing the proceedings on tape with not a single pause for thought or a second take.

She panned for gold in the Sperrins, and found a few flakes. She interviewed a seaweed farmer, standing in the surf near Donaghadee, fearlessly munching some of his harvest.

She questioned an academic on a mountain-top about an important archaeological find and commented authoritatively on the topic.

She knew most of the plays and plots at a leading country drama festival.

Editorially, Up Country did what it said on the tin and focussed on the countryside, local history and rural culture, but there were occasional forays into the unexpected, such as Shaftesbury Square!

Helen was expecting her first child with husband Brian Walker, also an acclaimed BBC journalist, and even as the birth drew closer she insisted on continuing to record Up Country!

Compromising with her ever-lengthening seat belt in my car, our journeys ‘afar’ were curtailed, and I have vivid memories of Helen reporting on the wildlife of Belfast’s Shaftesbury Square!

We recorded at night to minimise traffic noise. Helen enthused eloquently and knowledgeably - from her former teacher’s fount of general knowledge - whilst being very ably introduced to the major road junction’s surprisingly abundant ornithology, zoology, botany, marine biology and dendrology by nature conservationist and later Honorary President of Ulster Wildlife, Joe Furphy.

On another occasion when we veered from the rural, Helen asked the skipper of the Liverpool Ferry if she could sound the ship’s horn. He agreed, she gleefully pushed the button, loud blasts echoed through the Port of Belfast and all on the ship’s bridge shouted urgently into their walkie-talkies. She’d unwittingly sounded ‘man overboard’ and almost caused a full-scale emergency. But like everything else, Helen Madden recounted the event vividly and immaculately on tape. The ship’s Captain smiled endearingly and tomorrow’s audience enjoyed every minute of Up Country.

Her motto was ‘if it moves, record it!’.

We’ll greatly miss you Helen.