To celebrate Roddy Doyle’s ‘Barrytown’s Trilogy’ receiving its official coronation as April’s ‘One City, One Book’ choice, Radio NOVA dished out chips to hungry early morning commuters this morning.
The station’s breakfast show ‘Morning Glory with Dee & Marty’ breakfast show paid tribute to Doyle’s trilogy with a nod to ‘The Van’ by serving chips from a ‘borrowed’ chip van on St. Stephen’s Green!
In response to a challenge from a listener, NOVA’s roving reporter Electric Eddie had three days to ‘blag’ a chip van and serve up chips to people on their way to work.
Meanwhile, presenters Dee & Marty enjoyed the interest of the listening public in all things chips, with Love/Hate’s Peter Coonan (a.k.a. Fran) taking part in the action live from the NOVA studio.
The Barrytown Trilogy consists of the first three novels by Irish writer Roddy Doyle – The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) – all three of which have been adapted into successful movies. The trilogy is focused on the working class Rabbitte family from Dublin, and is set in “Barrytown”, a fictitious working-class quarter of Dublin.
In “The Van”, Brendan “Bimbo” Reeves gets laid off from his job as a baker and uses his redundancy money to buy a van to sell fish and chips with his best mate, Larry.
Electric Eddie (pictured, second from right, above) joined NOVA’s Morning Glory team earlier this year and is set regular challenges by listeners, which he is given a certain length of time to achieve. He said: “This was a tough one but we were determined to win the challenge. And the next challenge? Bring it on!”.