Playing the Game: Brian O’Nolan’s Broadcast Media Positions

This essay seeks to enrich and complicate the evermore detailed picture which we have of O'Nolan as a cross-media writer. In particular, this essay attends to the conversation between O’Nolan’s efforts to get work on the radio and Myles na gCopaleen’s unfavourable reflections on the developments of radio as a popular medium in Cruiskeen Lawn. In focusing on this conversation, the essay suggests that one is able make out a tension between O’Nolan, the writer that makes professional decisions to secure jobs within the broadcast media world and Myles, the perfect vehicle with which to air grievances about that same broadcast media world. This essay submits that contained in and between these two voices is a complex picture of the experience of being a writer in the changing landscape of mass communication and entertainment in postwar Dublin.