Independent television producer/director Bob Collins died in Dublin on Wednesday 21 June, at 54 years of age, after a year-long illness. Having spent his early career as a producer/director/executive producer in RTE, he left to pursue a broadcasting career in the UK, working for TVAM, TVS and extensively in the independent production sector. He was also one of the co-founders of the Irish production company, Frontier Films. On returning to Ireland some years ago he was appointed senior producer on the RTE book series Imprint, produced by Loopline Productions. Them's the facts. But there's more.
I knew Bob very well; he was one of my oldest friends. We began working on the Saturday morning children's programme Anything Goes which ran in the early 1980s. He was the head honcho; I was the young Turk, producing and, oh yeah presenting the latter part of the show which specialised in music. Bob initiated a system whereby one and occasionally two 'pop promos' were made each month; the best remembered are probably those by the Blades, 'The Bride Wore White' and 'Downmarket', and Philip Lynott s 'Old Town'. But there were many others of real merit which Bob either directed or executive produced.
It was a clever system that saw the state broadcaster effectively make promotional vehicles for emerging and established artists for free; the payback was that people who wanted 'music television' genuinely did watch to see what we were doing and the promos were the engine that drove the final half hour of the programme. In addition, most of the musical talent of the time appeared on the programme at one time or another. And the timeless image of Philo walking down Grafton Street would be just a figment in the collective imagination without the 'Old Town' video.
Bob also made a number of high profile documentaries, including the Boomtown Rats In America when such an endeavour was almost inconceivable in an Irish production context and Renegade; The Philip Lynott Story. He was also responsible for televising Thin Lizzy s final Dublin concert in the RDS.
In addition to a passionate commitment to music, Bob refused to be bored and managed to embrace many of his interests in his work, for his was indeed a marvellous and mysterious CV. He worked with the beautiful Marie Helvin on Channel 4's Frox On The Box, yet also directed perhaps the only documentary on the enigmatic Indian teaching figure Krishnamurti. Indeed one of his first projects when appointed as a producer in RTE was a documentary series about alternative approaches to life and living called Other Ways. This was in the late 1970s. Back then he felt that people thought he must have been mad to be bothering with what is now coined 'New Age' thinking. But he wasn't; he believed that other ways of seeing and doing things are the essence of pluralism, a term much more bandied about of late.
Contrast this with his spell on the trailblazing Channel 4 'yoof' series Network 7, where the likes of Charlie Parsons cut their teeth or The Media Show with Muriel Gray, and you get some sense of the restless and contradictory spirit that drove much of Bob's life and work.
During the 1980s he also worked in Ireland, where he made The Session which helped jump-start Nanci Griffith's European career and which set in train a host of friendships with the likes of John Prine, Philip Donnelly and 'Cowboy' Jack Clement. Town And Country, a six one-hour performance and documentary series for Channel 4, took him farther afield, to Tennessee and Texas, where he spent time working and hanging out with Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. I can't help but think of Guy Clarke's moving elegy to his old Western mentor, 'Desperados Waiting For A Train', when recalling a hot Lubbock night when Joe Ely and his family gave a dinner in Bob's honour. I guess I was the sidekick.
But music was just one of many loves in a lifetime of laughter and longing. Bob could quote Carl Jung and Lowell George in the same breath and somehow manage to make some sense or connection between the two. Driven to communicate that which he valued, his was a mind that inspired and occasionally infuriated his many friends and colleagues, one of whom recently remarked that he could be counted on saying the right thing and the wrong thing but always at the right time . And she was right.
In a monstrous twist of irony, Bob had been contemplating a career counselling the terminally ill. This was before his own diagnosis came through. So it's no surprise that his last 'production' was a self-made film about dying that was recently screened, along with a headline speech at Dublin Castle, to an extraordinarily appreciative audience. And while the process took its toll it was an exhausting experience it was another example of what his daughter Layla described at his funeral service as a burning need to communicate . I think he'd also found that his life-long interest in spirituality in particular the disciplines and practices of Buddhism made his final months a challenge rather than an endurance. I salute his courage.
His five children, Emma, Layla, and Jessie in Ireland and Alaister and Lauren in the UK will surely reflect on a parent who possessed a remarkable ability to leapfrog the obstacles of everyday life and land himself, and whoever was with him, in a place of frenzied fun, boundless possibility or quiet contemplation. They have lost a father. The world has lost a good man. I have lost a friend. He will be sorely missed.