‘Counterproductive and silly’: 30 years since the end of the bizarre Irish political voice ban

‘People [my] age can vaguely remember a few examples, maybe,” says director Roisin Agnew. “But they didn’t think of the broadcasting ban as a phenomenon – the only thing that comes up is that Chris Morris sketch.”

Agnew is speaking to me as her new film The Ban is being screened at festivals. The 26-minute documentary tracks the genesis, enactment and fallout of the law which barred spokespeople from Sinn Féin from speaking on the British airwaves between 1988 and 1994, as well as the experiences of those caught in its crosshairs.

It’s a wonderful film, and a striking document of a time that now seems curiously memory-holed, barring a half-remembered sense that it was all quite strange and, yes, the enduring popularity of that minute-long sketch from Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci’s BBC news parody, The Day Today. In it, Morris quizzes Sinn Féin spokesperson Rory O’Connor (played by Steve Coogan) who, he solemnly informs us, “must inhale helium to subtract credibility from his statements”.

Coogan’s high-pitched delivery of “your tone is antagonistic and it’s making me very angry” remains not merely hilarious but, undoubtedly, the ban’s longest-lasting cultural tail. So much so, in fact, one wonders if younger audiences consider it a flight of pure absurdity, uncoupled from the weirdest British media policy in living memory.

Tomorrow marks 30 years since the lifting of the broadcast ban, the terms of which were simple: from 19 October 1988 to 16 September 1994, it was illegal for British media to broadcast the voices of anyone speaking on behalf of 10 banned groups within Northern Ireland. That list included the IRA, INLA, UDA and UVF but, in practice, Sinn Féin were its main focus. The law was introduced by home secretary Douglas Hurd, reflecting the Thatcher government’s hardline approach to Irish republicanism, after years of IRA violence, including numerous attempts on the life of the prime minister herself.

Unlike any of the other named factions, Sinn Féin were a significant, and growing, force in British politics, polling 10-15% of the Northern Irish vote, with 43 councillors and one MP in then party leader Gerry Adams. For six years, and for the first time in modern political history, the UK therefore made it illegal to broadcast the voices of dozens of elected members of its own state. Thatcher’s oft-quoted desire to deprive Sinn Féin of “the oxygen of publicity” was now law, and one the British media would have to enforce.

“The more we went into the story,” Agnew says, “the more we felt that newsrooms and the media themselves were much more central to the broadcast ban than anyone else. Her documentary eschews talking heads and sweeping vistas in favour of briskly cut footage from the archives of grainy, smoke-filled news HQs. The tapes hum with CRT static, and the film’s minimal expository text is overlaid in sickly, teleprompter green.

“Often, people think of it as the BBC’s broadcasting ban,” she says. “And in a way, that’s true. Not in the sense that they’d conceived these draconian measures, but they were the people who implemented Thatcher and Hurd’s law and created the system that made it work.”

The system in question did not involve helium but was, from certain angles, equally absurd. The voices of the sanctioned speakers were barred, but the words they spoke were not, resulting in the unique workaround for which the ban is now chiefly remembered: six years in which anyone claiming to speak for Sinn Féin would have their voices dubbed by actors. First tested in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary in which Stephen Rea voiced Gerry Adams, the process was soon applied across the board, leading to the ubiquitous process of dozens of elected representatives and spokespeople having their words dubbed from English to English on all broadcast platforms.

Growing up in Derry, this was the reality in which I came of age. I was not yet three when the ban came into effect and nearly nine when it was lifted. Even then, I found it hard to believe Martin McGuinness’s voice possessed some especially dangerous siren’s allure, given that we sat behind him in Mass. I thus heard his distinctly unremarkable tones in real life every Sunday, but only ever heard him speak on TV or radio with a weirdly dulled and ponderous actor’s voice.

“At the start,” one of those voices tells me, three decades later, “we’d go in and do a good Martin McGuinness [affects a higher register, with a distinct Derry twang] but the BBC put out a remit straight away that said there’d be no more of that.”

Aged just 20, Conor Grimes became one of “about eight actors – mostly men” at the vanguard of a new gold rush: the burgeoning market for Belfast voiceover artists suddenly called on to make reporting the news possible. The Ban ­features their stories too, specifically the unexpected – and often joyously mercenary – cottage industry that emerged in the restrictions’ wake.

The work was “fleeting but lucrative,” Grimes remembers with fondness. “I think it was £90 for TV and £60 for radio” he says – not bad for an hour’s work in Belfast in 1988. “And when they got you in for one, you were always hoping they’d say: ‘Would you mind waiting about in the canteen because we think there’s going to be another statement.’ You’d be rubbing your hands.”

But there were provisos. Dead-on impersonations were prohibited first, followed shortly afterwards by a diktat against any lip-syncing that matched the speakers’ mouths too closely. “It was all being made up as it went along,” he says now. “They didn’t really know what they were doing.”

To increase his chances of securing these coveted gigs, Grimes bought a pager. Another associate bought an answering machine and paid it off within a week. Grimes even bought a car with his proceeds although, he insists, “that only cost me £340”.

Other than enriching half a dozen of Belfast’s finest vocal talents, it’s hard to pinpoint the ban’s concrete effects during the six years it was in operation. Barring brief pauses for election purposes, its proscriptions for Sinn Féin representatives were near total, no matter the topic discussed. Sometimes this effect was so extreme as to border on parody, as in the segment of the 1990 BBC Panorama documentary about the Maze prison, The Enemy Within, in which an IRA prisoner’s voice is dubbed even though his only contribution is a polite discussion with guards about the quality and size of the prison’s sausage rolls.

More often, however, the result was chilly silence. Actors like Grimes may have made a brisk trade revoicing big ticket statements or commentary from Sinn Féin representatives, but the time and money required for such dubbing created a natural disincentive for newsrooms when it came to more everyday remarks about housing, education or infrastructure – the lion’s share of what elected representatives might be invited to speak about.

“There was never once a dub of anything like that,” Grimes tells me. “The common-or-garden issues got no attention or airtime whatsoever. And Sinn Féin represented nationalist city ghettoes or rural strongholds, [areas which were] way down the ladder when it came to news to begin with.”

“Would make a good sketch,” he adds, “the actor dubbing a councillor talking about dog fouling.”

Sinn Féin themselves claimed that requests for interviews dropped to around a fifth of their previous levels within a few months of the ban’s implementation. Censorship researcher Liz Curtis has calculated there was a 63% drop in coverage of the party by 1989.

“One way of looking at the broadcasting ban is that, yes, it was abortive,” says Agnew. “It backfired and made the Thatcher government look incompetent, but it also criminalised by association. It made certain people ‘beyond the pale’. It meant that they were not being listened to on social policy, housing – and that was the thing that had the most resonance for me in making the documentary: how we in the media can criminalise by association, by stopping people asking certain questions or not giving proper airtime.”

Despite all this, the worst effects of the ban are near uniformly judged to have fallen on the UK government itself. It’s broadly agreed that the government’s intransigence on the ban delayed the peace process, but also that it raised the stature of Sinn Féin – and Gerry Adams in particular – by giving them a platform, particularly abroad, from which to rail against censorship and cast meaningful parallels between themselves and dissidents in eastern Europe or South Africa.

Granting Sinn Féin an easily legible, and factually inarguable, narrative of egregious British censorship was a propaganda coup money couldn’t buy. If the ban is now thought of as something of a joke, it might be this legacy that’s to blame, as much as the silly voices and sausage rolls.

That and, of course, the helium. “It’s always quite useful to have some helium knocking about,” Chris Morris tells me when I reach him by phone. He’s delighted to hear that a sketch he made in his late 20s still appeals 30 years on – “when you’re making stuff up you have absolutely no idea how it will resonate” – but maintains it was created based on an “instinct [that] this would be funny. It’s not born from an encyclopaedic knowledge of media suppression and censorship in Northern Ireland.”

His own contribution to the cultural moment was informed by his early career. “If you worked in radio, which I did, you were very aware of it,” he says. “There were all sorts of neuroses about Northern Ireland, and the BBC kept being attacked for one reason and another.”

Today he believes the ban was almost perfectly self-defeating. “To use the voice of an actor just gave a special presence to their statements,” he says. “It removed it from normality and put a highlighter around it saying: ‘This is a bit of special messaging now.’ It just seemed counterproductive and silly.”

He does not claim any particular political genius was at play in the sketch. “It wasn’t the result of some serious media studies,” he says. “I just, at that time, for some reason, drove around with loads of helium in the car.”