Sam Hanna Bell and the ideology of place.

Abstract

This chapter describes the career of Sam Hanna Bell, writer and radio producer at BBC Northern Ireland for most of the second half of the last century. Bell’s radio output expressed a sense of Ulster as an historical and cultural entity rooted in centuries of history and the unchanging geography of Northern Ireland, a view associated with the Protestant majority. Although arguably an ideological version of Ulster, Bell’s radio output was also characterised by a depiction of rural culture as expressive of a more ancient and more ‘Irish’ past. Bell avoided more recent and indeed worsening social divisions with his highly evocative non-sectarian sense of place somehow chiming with both Protestant and Catholic sensibilities.