Housewife of the Year review: Award-winning documentary unearths the sad stories behind an Irish TV relic

Irish Independent

2 days ago

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The period between feature documentaries showing at festivals and cinemas, then turning up in our living rooms has shortened significantly in recent years.
Ciaran Cassidy's excellent Housewife of the Year (RTÉ1, Monday, June 2) did the festival circuit last year, winning a prize at Galway Film Fleadh, and enjoying a limited run in cinemas.
And yet television, where it will reach a much larger audience, feels like its natural home.
After all, television was the home of the bizarre spectacle that was the Housewife of the Year competition. It started in 1967, was televised live by RTÉ from 1982 and lasted – astonishingly – until 1995.
From the outset, it was a cringe-inducing anachronism. The contestants were judged on qualities including sense of humour, budgeting skills, civic-mindedness and their ability to prepare 'a simple meal' for the hubby coming home from a hard day's work.
They were also encouraged, Rose of Tralee-style, to do a party piece. 'It's very good to be good-looking, but that's no excuse for bad cooking,' ran one self-penned poem.
Presiding over the whole thing was host Gay Byrne. Clips from the original broadcasts, skilfully assembled by editor Cara Holmes, remind us that Byrne – who always received an inordinate amount of credit for supposedly dragging Ireland into the light of modernity when it was others, mainly women, who were doing the real heavy lifting – could be gratingly patronising.
'Are you a women's libber?' he asks one woman, as the audience whoop with laughter and clap like performing seals. The whole thing was an embarrassment ripe for mockery, and mock it plenty of people did.
Cassidy uses the Housewife of the Year competition, absurd as it was, as a jumping off point for a look at how generations of women were subjugated by the State and the church
A lesser documentary might have gone down the point-and-snigger route: 'Look at this! Can you believe how backward Ireland was in those days?'
Instead, Cassidy uses the Housewife of the Year competition, absurd as it was, as a jumping off point for a look at how generations of women were subjugated by the State and the church – which were basically one and the same entity – sometimes with the collusion of their husbands and parents.
In its own unwitting way, the competition was a small brick in the wall of sexism and misogyny that kept Irish women where the patriarchy thought they belonged: in the kitchen and the maternity ward.
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There's no narration, no learned talking heads. Just the faces and voices of some of the women who entered it and, in some cases, won.
We see them first as they were in those old clips, then as they are now – standing on a bare stage, telling their personal stories of sadness and cruelty from a time when contraception and divorce were outlawed, and women had to give up work as soon as they married (teachers were an exception).
One was married at 20. At 31, she had 13 children, including four sets of twins. 'I didn't know which end of me was up,' she says.
Her husband drank their money. The more kids she had, the more he retreated to the pub. She used to take a pot to a food centre to have it filled with stew.
On the bus home, everyone could smell the stew – the smell of embarrassment. She entered the competition for the prize – £300 in cash and a gas cooker – and won.
Another, having taken some photos of herself and her two friends on an innocent rowing boat trip with some boys when she was 16, left the film in the pharmacy for developing.
The pharmacist brought the pictures to the local priest, who showed them to her parents and said: 'You need to do something about this one.' They took his advice and deposited her with the Magdalene Sisters, then left without saying goodbye.
Vivid and moving as their recollections are, there's a remarkable lack of bitterness here
There were stories here of a woman abandoned by her husband, of one who made contact with the mother who'd given her up for adoption, only to be told by her half-sisters, 'You weren't wanted then and you're not wanted now,' and of one who gave up a nursing career in London to marry into a life of domestic drudgery. 'I was doing things that didn't need doing at all, just to occupy my mind,' she says.
Vivid and moving as their recollections are, there's a remarkable lack of bitterness here. The Housewife of the Year show may have been a symbol of a repressive society, but some of them look back on it with a certain degree of affection.