I wrote this piece on my blog in 2005, ten years ago while I was still enjoying my weekly airings on WLR. I actually kept up these cookery slots until about three years ago when I retired gracefully from the radio.

On Air from May 17th 2005

Billy McCarthy and myself broadcast “Food Matters” on WLRFM

When I was about 13 and in “The Loft”-the Cork Shakespearean Society- someone from Radio Eireann came up and talked to us about being on the radio. The wanted to interview some of us for a programme called something like Children at the Microphone. This woman talked to me about various things but what she was most interested in was a holiday we had taken in a horse drawn caravan. She promised to get back to me to organise a time to go down to the studio and record this interview.
I was of course on air to be on air. Fame at last. I told everyone and then waited for the call.
It never came.
I just had to duck the head and avoid all references to radio in conversations. This disappointment made me a frustrated radio star.
I definitely harboured notions of getting on air.
I had a couple more brushes with the media over the years, most notably with Saor Raidio(sic) Connemara (which is another story) but nothing to satisfy my yearnings for radio fame.

In October 1989 we started Dwyers Restaurant. By May of 1990 we realised that some drastic action was needed to keep the business going. The advice was we needed to advertise, people just didn’t know about us.
Advertising is not cheap, that was the moment I thought of killing two birds with one stone. If I could get a cookery slot on the radio I could get some much needed advertising for free, and satisfy my ambitions for airway exposure.
WLR, Waterford Local Radio, stopped being a pirate and became official at around the same time that I started the restaurant. I had met some of the DJs and plucked up the courage to approach one to find out about my chances of getting a slot.
I turned out to be the right person in the right place and at the right time.
The following week I was doing a piece in Billy Mc McCarthy’s Deise AM programme, this was on Tuesday 4th June 1990, just nearly 15 years ago.
That means that Billy and I have been looking at each across the deck of the studio for the last 5,250 Tuesdays.
Or to put it another way I have roughly given out 15,750 recipes to the long suffering people of Waterford.
Scary isn’t it.
I suppose the main result of my achievement of my long held ambition to go on air was that it did make an impression on the people of Waterford.
Quite a few of them came in to eat and to see “yer man on the radio”.
15 years later we were still in business and I was still on air.
The other, and I swear unexpected effect was that I gained a small bit of celebrity status. It being radio, this meant that I was never recognised until I opened my mouth. These recognitions happened so rarely that they became pleasures instead of nuisances.
Like the time the man in CIE enquiries when I asked him the times of the Dublin train said “I know that voice”. Obviously it requires a certain very receptive ear to recognise someone just by their radio voice. Sometimes you would be half way through a monologue in a shop, faced by a puzzled assistant, who’s brow would suddenly clear and he would say
“You’re that cookery chap aren’t you?
My best two stories were ; recently when I was going on a Glass Society week end I bought a return to Belfast in the station for the early train.
Looked around in vain for my friend Eamonn, a glass engraver, who was travelling with me, I decided to board anyway. When my friend finally joined me in the carriage he said “Do you know that man in the booking office?”
I didn’t. Neither did he. But apparently when he ran in –just on time- to buy his Belfast return he was told “ You’re late. Martin Dwyer has been waiting for you for the last ten minutes!
But my best moment of recognition happened about 2 years ago in Charleroi Airport. I was coming back to Dublin after various meetings in Brussels and realised that I wasn’t going to be in time to catch the last bus home. I was chatting, quietly I hope, to my colleague , another Irish Chef, when we heard a lady in our vicinity coming up with the immortal words
“I know that voice”. (We were remember in Belgium!)
It was, you’ve guessed it. A citizen of Waterford. And furthermore one who was being picked up in the airport by her son and driven back to Waterford that night. “Would I like a lift?” Would I what.
A little celebrity is a wonderful thing.