After more than 40 years in broadcasting, the veteran newsman and journalist, Bryan Dobson, is calling it a day. Donal O'Donoghue meets him to talk about endings and new beginnings.
"When I was very young, I would sometimes turn the sofa around and preach as if from a pulpit," says broadcaster Bryan Dobson, teasing out his formative beginnings. "Back then I think my mother thought that I’d become a clergyman." He laughs.
The Dubliner is not, and never was, he hastens to add, a religious person: the appeal of the pulpit was simply the appeal of preaching to a captive audience. His vocation lay elsewhere.
For the past 37 years, he has forged a path to become one of the most recognisable broadcasters in the country, a household face and voice, self-deprecating about his 'celebrity’ (he once quipped that he modelled himself on Ron Burgundy from Anchorman) and a steady hand at the tiller on TV and latterly, radio.
On May 3, the man known affectionately as ‘Dobbo’ hung up his microphone and stepped back onto civvy street.
We meet on a Friday afternoon, shortly after the broadcaster wraps the final weekly instalment of News at One. "Just two more weeks to go," he says with a look that scratches my opening question about his overwhelming emotion on the eve of retirement. He's leaving early – still a very sprightly 63, having lost some four stone in weight in recent times (of which more anon) – and on his own terms. Dobson’s choice, if you like, a decision made, as ever, in tandem with his wife, Crea.
"I wanted to leave in the spring or summer," he says. "I could have done one more General Election and was a little tempted. But I’ve covered them over 20 years or more." Did anyone attempt to cajole him to stay a bit longer (he won’t be 65 until October next year)? "No" he says and laughs when I joke that they were probably glad to see the back of him.
Unlikely. In his pristine shirt and signature braces, Bryan Dobson echoed an earlier golden era of broadcast news. But there was more to him than the fashion accessories of his trade. In his 21 years as anchor of RTÉ’s Six One News he got to quiz the leading politicians of the day, relentless in his questioning of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and his finances and similarly dogged in querying Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou MacDonald on the eve of an election (such is the vagaries of his profession that some thought he was too soft on Bertie and too hard on Mary Lou and vice versa).
"I don’t think it’s about being too hard or too soft," he says now. "I’m resistant to the notion that an interview should be all about putting someone in the stocks and throwing rotten vegetables at them. Our job is to ask questions but sometimes you don’t get answers, even if you ask the question umpteen times."
"I haven’t done a lot of very different things in my life but when I have made changes (in recent years he moved from TV to radio, from the Six One News to Morning Ireland and now the News at One), I have found it quite easy to move on."
Timing is everything and he believes the stars have aligned for his departure. "I have good health, I have good friends, a wonderful family and grandson, and I can retire, as I have a level of financial security. So now I have written a list of people I intend to spend more time with – relations, former work colleagues and friends."
Ten years ago, I spent a pleasant September morning cycling through the streets of Bryan’s childhood in the leafy Dublin suburb of Sandymount. He gave me his bicycle clips that day – he really is as decent as they say – as we pedalled into the past. His mother and father, the late Violet and James, instilled the importance of education in their children, Bryan and Jane, in a home alive with the import of politics.
"I got interested in journalism in school," he says of Newpark Comprehensive in Blackrock, where, during transition year, then a new part of the second level curriculum, he participated in a journalism module. He worked behind the scenes as a producer of a radio show and the big ‘coup’ was an interview with the school’s principal. "It was a little moment of revelation that under certain conditions, you could hold powerful people to account," he says. "And I thought I’d like to do that."
He learned his trade on the hoof, firstly with the pirate radio stations (Southside FM, Radio Nova) and then as a reporter with BBC Radio Ulster from 1983 to 1987. "It was my university as I didn’t go to journalism college," he says of what was also his first time living away from home in Belfast.
"It was a strange contrast. You had this big international news story with The Troubles so you could be covering a bombing or shooting or riots but also the station was serving the local community, so you’d be covering a council meeting or a dog show and all those local news stories."
During the pandemic, he posted images on social media of his ‘office’ at home – an uncluttered table with the tools of his trade set against a backdrop of a wall of books. He also posted images of a gallery of colourful mugs including Mr Dobbo of Mister Men fame. But at heart he’s a private man.
"I’m not really on social media," he says. "I have a Twitter (X) account, but I don’t really use it because it has all got a bit poisonous. I don’t need to have that sort of stuff in my head. I removed the Twitter (X) app from my phone at Christmas and never reinstalled it. Now it is a very useful tool for news on breaking stories but there’s such other negative stuff on it."
Has he got negative feedback on social media down the years? "Oh yeah," he says. "If you work in journalism you’ll get it. But it has never unduly bothered me."
Not much seems to faze him. "It’s very sad to see," he says of the crises that have rocked RTÉ over the past year. "It has been going on for ten months now and at some point, a line must be drawn under it and RTÉ must be allowed to move on. We have had multiple reports into RTÉ which have produced plenty of recommendations. Perhaps the one thing that has been encouraging is the way that RTÉ has reported on itself as that coverage seems to have generated a certain amount of respect."
As someone who has worked in public service broadcasting for most of his professional life, he believes in its importance. "Public service broadcasting is all about creating a space for debate and discussion and where people can exchange views, that is civil and open to all points of view, consistent with the laws of libel."
Earlier this year, when I bumped into the broadcaster at a charity fundraiser, he was a physically changed man. "I’ve lost three or four stone simply because the GP said that I was overweight and at high risk of diabetes and heart disease," he says.
"I subsequently went to a dietician who told me what to do, which was basically, eat less. It was not very complicated. I reduced portions, ate more vegetables and salads, and stopped snacking between meals. It was a slow and steady progress over about two years. I don’t do much exercise apart from cycling and hiking but I do have more energy. I also believe that a lot of people’s metabolism doesn’t react the way mine did so I’m lucky. In fact, a friend said to me ‘You’re basically a thin guy who got fat’ and maybe that’s what happened."
He’ll need some of that energy for his two-year-old grandson. "It’s terrific," he says with a wide smile of being a granddad. He also says that down the years he was fortunate to have had time with his own children. "I was lucky in that I was able to look after Sophie in the mornings and then in the afternoon she’d go into the crèche," he says of his time with Six One News.
"I don’t feel that I had to sacrifice much domestically for my career. And in all the years I did the Six One News, one of the rules was that the family didn’t watch TV during dinner so very often they wouldn’t see me on TV."
But even at home, he cannot help himself from being the inquisitive journalist. "My daughters would say to me ‘Stop interviewing me Dad’ and Crea might also say occasionally ‘You’re interviewing me now Bryan!’" He laughs (he still has a cassette tape of himself as a 13-year-old interviewing his parents and relatives) and adds: "It’s an occupational hazard."
Despite his public profile, Dobson has never been approached by a political party to run for office. But following news of his imminent retirement, he was contacted by several publishers to see if he’d be interested in penning an autobiography.
"I’m not sure that there’s a book in me or if I have an interesting story to tell," he says, but doesn’t write off the suggestion. He’s a big reader though, usually with two books on the go, non-fiction (currently Dominion, Tom Holland’s history of Christianity and the West) and fiction (an Ian Rankin Rebus crime thriller). Apart from news and current affairs, he watches little TV.
He spends time in Leitrim, where he has a cottage, and when the weather improves (in about two weeks or so), he’ll be back ‘messing about’ on his sailing boat, which he co-owns. "For the moment, I’m going to take a break from broadcasting," he says, although the possibility of a podcast raises an eyebrow.
For now, there’s nothing on the horizon apart from getting his boat ready for the water and sorting through that list of people he intends to meet. Bryan Dobson is unlikely to look back – the burden of regret is something he tries not to shoulder – when he signs off for the final time on May 3. I suspect that if he had decided to be a clergyman, he very likely would have been a mighty fine one, but he chose another way.
"Staying the course," he says now of his greatest achievement as a journalist. "I’ve realised since this announcement about my retirement that the fact that I was there down all those years seems to have meant something to people. I wouldn’t have thought of it like that; for me, it was just about turning up for work each day and doing my job, just like everybody else."
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