Big Red Book
Celebrating television's This Is Your Life
Nominated as Personality of the Year in 1960 by the Guild of Television Producers and Directors, the thirty-eight-year-old one-time insurance clerk, boxer, and radio columnist from Dublin received his award after ten remarkable years in British broadcasting in which he has become inseparable from such programmes as What's My Line? (ten years), This Is Your Life (seven years), Crackerjack and Playbox. Last year, however, to his regular appearances he added a prolonged session at the Rome Olympic Games as a boxing commentator - thus returning to his first professional activity as he does from time to time. It was, in fact, at the age of seventeen that he made his first broadcast, for Radio Eireann - giving a commentary on a boxing tournament in which he was due to take part. Perhaps less known is the fact that he studied acting under Ria Mooney of the Abbey Theatre, and has written a play called The Moon is Black. Tonight he will once again be on hand with his weekly surprise for someone to whom he can present the book titled This Is Your Life.