Clive James once predicted that, in the future, TV would be peopled by presenters who knew only about television and radio. William Crawley, who did his PhD on the American Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, isn’t one of them.
With his tweets about theism and global politics, the 47-year-old is generally regarded as one of the brightest Ulstermen in broadcasting. Yet he failed his 11-plus and revived his academic career only thanks to a precocious phone call to one of the province’s most prestigious schools, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, known as Inst. So it’s particularly apt that he took over as presenter of BBC Radio Ulster’s phone-in show Talkback last November.
Crawley outlines his family history over coffee in BBC Northern Ireland’s favourite hangout, Deane’s Deli. “My father Sammy was an alcoholic and it was my late mother Anna, whom I miss to this day, who said if I got a bad report, it was the teacher’s mistake.” After Crawley’s father died, the then 15-year-old William took control of his own destiny. “I am thankful to some great teachers at my secondary school who taught us how to make a proper phone call and how to present ourselves. I rang Inst, got through to a secretary, and persuaded her to put me through to the head,” he recalls. Crawley wangled himself a place, conditional on getting some O-levels.
He is now reaping the rewards of that early chutzpah. Talkback was recently nominated in the PPI Radio Awards in the “interactive speech programme” category. Tonight he starts a three-part series on BBC2, entitled Brave New World Canada, about Ulster Scots emigration. It’s a timely subject, as Europe debates how to deal with the biggest human migration since the Second World War, and questions of identity and integration are in the air. “It is very current,” Crawley agrees. “Sadly, refugees are everywhere and some of the Canadian migrant stories I covered are also refugee stories. But the majority were economic migrants, moving from Northern Ireland to North America in the hope of a better life. Not for benefits, just more opportunities. These people wanted a bit of land to work.”
Crawley’s own family emigrated to Alberta in 1957. The youngest of seven children, he might easily have been born Canadian.
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“My parents emigrated with two young children — my sister Linda and eldest brother Eddie — but had to return two years later in 1959 because Linda suffered from chronic asthma. They came back for the NHS and the weather here, which, oddly, was better for her condition.”
This is the less well known story of emigration from Ireland, quite different from the Catholic-Irish experience that featured in the movie Titanic and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. Why isn’t the parallel narrative about Protestants who made their home in places such as New Zealand — the subject of a Crawley series last year — and Canada as well documented? Is it because of Presbyterian reticence? “I don’t think it’s that,” said Crawley. “This is a story of assimilation and, while the Irish Catholics tended to retain their Irish identity, the Ulster Scots became New Zealanders or Canadians within a generation and very rarely referred to themselves as Scots Irish.”
The numbers involved were vast, with there being an estimated 600,000 people of Ulster-Scots descent in Canada, which represents 1.8% of its population. These hard-working, God-fearing people did well in their new home, and being identified as an Orangeman in 19th-century Canada was a surefire way of getting on. “You virtually had to be an Orangeman at one point to become mayor of Toronto,” Crawley notes.
A Presbyterian minister and university chaplain, it was a slot presenting Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster in 2000 that led to Crawley’s broadcasting career. In 2002 he started presenting Sunday Sequence, and two years later got a roving contract from the BBC that allows him to do both TV and radio projects.
Crawley began presenting Talkback in November 2014, with help from producers Colette Maguire and Louise Duffy. “We based the format on the Jeremy Vine show. Both producers worked with [ex-presenter] Wendy Austin and have come on this journey with me,” he says. Crawley’s province-wide daily seminar runs Monday to Friday, starting at noon, with serious topics discussed at length by every Tom, Dick and Sammy. Talkback’s PPI nomination was for a show last February featuring the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the theoretical physicist Lawrence M Krauss.
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“I’ve interviewed Richard Dawkins several times,” says Crawley. “We quite easily get to talk to him on BBC NI as he likes to challenge the position of religion in our society. Both men tweeted afterwards that they found the audience here interesting and were surprised at how many callers rang in to support their [anti-religious] stance.”
The show is noticeably male-dominated, Crawley admits. “That’s a problem, and it’s a Northern Irish issue,” he says. “Discussions shouldn’t always be male and with blood on the carpet. We sometimes need to take a gentler approach.” He enjoys getting high-profile guests, such as Ken Livingstone talking about the Labour leadership race, or Edwina Currie on bad language. “Ulster audiences like to question top people. When we started the new Talkback, I knew I wanted studio-quality guests, I wanted more substantial discussion and I wanted music.”
Yet the new format involves risks. Under Austin, topics ran to about 15 minutes. If you weren’t interested in the flags protest, the grass-verges debate would come along soon enough. Now, however, single items might last up to 45 minutes.
“As people get used to the format, I think they’ll know when the item they don’t like is finished; they can tune back in and rejoin the debate,” he says. The introduction of music — three numbers, often steamy soul — has been contentious. “We did that to give people time to think of what questions they want to ask, and it’s working,” he explains.
The presenter lives in a detached house in north Belfast, just a few miles from the housing estate where he grew up. He had two nightmares as a child: “One was of the nuclear bomb going off; the other was of the IRA coming to our house and killing us.”
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No apocalyptic vision interrupts his sleep these days and he feels optimistic about his homeland’s future. “I could live in other places, and I spent three years in America when I was at Princeton. But this is my home and I choose to live here because of friends, family and my sense that things are changing.”
Has he any unfulfilled ambitions? “I’d like to do a proper talk show as I enjoy working with live audiences,” he says. “Current chat shows are mostly run by comedians — Graham Norton, Alan Carr — and have that format. You can’t imagine Noam Chomsky going on [as a guest]. I admired John Freeman, who died last December, and I think Michael Parkinson and possibly Russell Harty are the nearest we’ve had to the great US chat show host Dick Cavett.”
Brave New World Canada, a three-part series, begins tonight at 10pm on BBC2 Northern Ireland