Victoria Mary Clarke

Mark Little interview

Mark Little interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2002.

A taxi driver who had Mark Little in the back of his cab the other day told me that in his opinion your man Little is a right wanker who wouldn’t deign to carry on a conversation, just sat there reading his paper. Who does Mark Little think he is? Like any television personality, RTE ‘Prime Time’ presenter and until recently Washington correspondent is fair game for taxi drivers and anyone else who wants to have an opinion. And as we all know here in Ireland, that’s most people. Having returned to live here, after sZeven years in the States, he’s still adjusting to the cultural differences. And in the true spirit of Irishness, looking remarkably relaxed about it, he strolls into our meeting roughly twenty minutes behind schedule. But as his book “Turn Left at Greenland’ will testify, there is no such thing as a definite conclusion about people or places, when it comes to real life. Only on telly, are such things possible. Take, for instance, the Irish ourselves. As a dedicated media man, Mark is fascinated by the marketing of our image, abroad.
“On the one hand we are all getting pissed and composing poetry and on the other hand, we are learning Japanese and designing software, ‘ he tells me, utterly bemused.
So we really are totally brilliant?
“Yes, we go to bed at three in the morning, pissed, but we’ll be on the phone to some business executive in Tokyo at seven.”
We Irish are still very hip, aren’t we? I say.
“Yes, but we wrap ourselves in layers upon layers of irony and self-deprecation. There’s a contradiction in people’s attitude to the way they view themselves. So you come back, like I did, and you go through these amazing contradictory emotions. Elation at being back among people who are cynical, sarcastic and self deprecating. You go into pubs and you listen to people tearing each other apart, in America that doesn’t happen. But when you live here, you get burdened by it, after a while, it’s like the weather, it becomes oppressive. ‘You see that guy on the cover of that magazine? He thinks he’s so cool.” And you start missing the optimism of the States, and the simplicity and you start realising that irony is over-rated. As you listen to another boring discussion about whether Gerry Ryan or Pat Kenny is better.”
There’s a moment in the life of any journalist when he or she wonders whether all this media coverage of life and particularly the more tragic elements of life is actually a good thing. Mark Little, as a News reporter questions the motives of the media perhaps more than others. In his book, he talks about the ‘Tragedy Business’ about the way that you can learn almost as much about a country from it’s media response to things as you can from the events themselves. “Every time the United States is shaken by a momentous event,’ he says, ‘It turns into a frantic, babbling chat room, gushing forth opinion, like a broken water main.” Which is true of Ireland, as well, one only has to think of Roy Keane. Has he come to terms with this problem yet and does he think that all the babbling is a good thing?
“Yes, things happen, like September eleven and the constant discussion that follows it and it never has an impact, but there doesn’t have to be an outcome. It’s like Jerry Springer, or any of the talk shows, there is no outcome. The dwarf with the lesbian lover will still be sad and unhappy, after the show is over and we’ll have moved on, because we don’t care about the people we talk about. It’s like a good cry, the problem is still there, when it’s over, but for a couple of minutes, or even a few days, we are happy to be getting it all out in the open.’
Getting it all out in the open, he reckons, is something we in Ireland are particularly good at.
“It’s like the cycle of the body, during the day, You tune in to “Morning Ireland” and you get serious, sober analysis and by the time it gets to Marian Finucane and Gerry Ryan, it’s going off in different directions and then Joe Duffy begins. And for me, Duffy is the zeitgeist. If he does it, that’s it, it’s the story. And I’m sitting at “Prime Time” and we are supposed to be the sober news show, but we read the Evening Herald and listen to Duffy to see what the mood of the day is. And when we’ve finished with it, it gets handed on to Vincent Browne and then we go to bed and get up and do it all over again. And it’s great.”
What does he think it is it about Ireland, in particular, that makes people listen to the radio so much, and not just listen, but be bothered to call up and talk to the Nation about the issues of the day?
“Your minor problem becomes so inconsequential, in comparison to somebody else’s much bigger one! Like is there a future for Irish football, after Roy Keane is kicked out?!! If you are living in a grey world and you have black and white debates, like the one about is Mick Mc Carthy right or is Roy Keane right, the world suddenly makes more sense. There are no easy answers, but in the great debate on Joe Duffy, there can be.’
While in America, as Washington correspondent, Mark covered the Monica Lewinsky story. Endlessly. Why did people care so much about somebody they will almost certainly never meet?
‘Because every man who’s ever been unfaithful or had lust in his heart feels guilty about it, but Jesus, when the president of the United States gets caught in the Oval office, getting oral sex administered to him, suddenly your little bit of lust seems completely inconsequential!”
Some people end up being journalists by accident, but Mark chose his career deliberately, at the age of fourteen. Why?
“I always want to be the one with the latest gossip! There comes a point when you know what you want to do, and in my case it became an obsession very quickly. I just think it becomes a vocation, this sense that when you do something or say something, somebody will go to the pub that night and say ‘Did you see that shite that guy was talking?” You go away to Afghanistan and you see something horrible and you know that you have a chance to go back and create an outcome that might benefit somebody somewhere.”
The passion for social change and obsession with politics was nurtured by his parents. .
“My parents were working class, they were extremely honourable and they instilled the desire to do something with my life, change things. There was a tremendous idealism, even if it wasn’t consistent. One week my father would believe one thing, the next week he would believe the opposite. We would take different positions, at the dinner table, just for the sake of it. The way some people go off and kick a football, we would sit at the dinner table and have great rows.”
Like the Kennedys?
“Yes. But not so civilised.”
There’s a very cute picture, in the book, of a young Mark at Trinity, in his days as president of the Student Union, wearing a Nelson Mandela t-shirt. Being a devout radical, the young Socialist refused to go to America, in his summer holidays, because of their foreign policies and instead went to London, where he wrote for “Marxism Today.” He laughs, when I remind him.
“Yes, if you remember, in the mid-eighties it was very fashionable. I used to sell Miro t-shirts at Style Council gigs and I sold ads in “Marxism Today” to Futon companies. It was a lifestyle, we were convinced that we could create an alternative to Thatcherism.”
A Guardian reader’s world?
“Yes and we could jet off to Croatia, for our holidays and buy our muesli from organic producers and we wouldn’t buy South African oranges, but we would buy Nicaraguan coffee and listen to the HouseMartins and talk shite until four in the morning. It was attractive, as a student, to live in that world. There was a sectarianism about it, though. I came to a blinding recognition that the way you live your life is more defining than your policies.”
Almost as a testament to this new outlook, Mark is going to China in August, to make a documentary for ‘Prime Time”, at the invitation of the Chinese prime minister, to find out whether the Chinese should really be judged for their policies on human rights, or whether they too have grey areas for us to consider.