When television arrived in John Doyle's small Irish town, everything changed.

The boy who would become The Globe and Mail's celebrated television critic was stunned by what he saw – as was just about everyone in rural Ireland.

Now Doyle has written a book about his introduction to the wonders of TV, called A Great Feast of Light.

Doyle tells CTV's Canada AM that his book's title came from the feeling he had in 1961 growing up in the town of Nenagh, in County Tipperary, Ireland.

"An extraordinary thing happened when I was around four years old. In rural Ireland, electricity came. People had light in their homes. Shortly afterwards, television came and that meant that people had light from other places. They saw sunny California, the bright lights of the world outside. So television came and Ireland changed in amazing ways."

Small-town Ireland was then fairly isolated from the rest of the world, ruled by priests, traditions, and steeped in anti-British politics. Divorce and contraception were outlawed, many books and films were banned, and new ideas of any kind were viewed with a suspicious eye.

"Ireland was a conservative Catholic society. There were rules about this that and the other. You realize that the Taliban had nothing on these people," Doyle explains.

"A lot of the establishment was sort of terrified by television because of all of these things on it and being discussed."

Doyle's book recounts an incident involving a government leader decrying television that he says summed up an entire age in Ireland.

"A famously conservative Irish member of Parliament, Oliver Flanagan, was just terrified of television and outraged and appalled about it. He stood up in Parliament and fomented against it, and described all of the things that people talked about that they hadn't been talked about before, like sexuality and adultery. And he said, 'There was no sex in Ireland before television!'

"It sort of went down in history."

An excerpt of A Great Feast of Light, by John Doyle

My own school, the Christian Brothers, was just across Sarsfield Street and down John's Lane. The building was old and crowded. The year I started there, they had just put in portable classrooms in the yard. After a few weeks inside the old building my class was put into one of the portable classrooms outside. It was much more bright and sunny than the old building but it only had a tiny heater and when winter came we all shivered inside it. Some of us left on our coats until the room warmed up. The head brother came in one day and saw some of us sitting in our coats at our desks. He told us to take them off. "If ye can't stand a bit of cold, ye'll never be Tipperary men."

…

Brother Riordan was smarmy and touchy-feely. A boy himself, smooth faced and with a lonely look about him, he gazed out at us in the classroom and saw his own youth, just passed and missed. He tried to ingratiate himself with little boys by watching television and talking about the shows with us. He was taken with Get Smart.

Every week he asked us if we'd seen the show. If he asked a boy a question in math class and the boy didn't know the answer or gave the wrong one, he'd say, "Sorry about that, Chief!", hoping we all joined in his little joke. One day, he even took off his shoe and tried to imitate Maxwell Smart using his shoe-phone to have a conversation with headquarters. We all saw Riordan as a softy, but some of the boys - the ones who would be corner-boys or poltroons according to Spellacy - despised him.

Once, Micky O'Brien, who came from the working class enclave of St. Joseph's Park and knew a fool when he saw one, asked Brother Riordan about his favourite parts of Get Smart. As Riordan began to smirk and talk about Maxwell Smart's many bunglings as a spy, Micky O'Brien said, "But what about Agent 99, sir? Do you like her?"

An expectant hush fell on the class. Micky O'Brien had hit the nail on the head that day. Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon, was, especially to nine-year-old boys in Nenagh, an exotically sexy creature. A lanky brunette with her hair cut in thick bangs hanging heavily above her large and knowing eyes, she talked in a husky drawl and every little boy sensed the meaning of the languorous way she moved. She slowly batted her long, long eyelashes at Maxwell Smart and drawled a cooing joke that straight-out advertised carnal desire. Any eejit could see it.

We all waited for Brother Riordan to pronounce on Agent 99. Either that or he was going to lunge for Micky O'Brien and drag him by the ear to the front of the room and unleash a leather strap on O'Brien's hands and arse. "Well..." was all Brother Riordan said, stumped, with small flashes of blush appearing on his soft white cheeks.

Then Micky O'Brien upped the ante, like the rebel he was. My Dad would have called him a cute hoor for the manner of his manipulations. "She was dressed like a man the other night, Brother. She was acting the driver for yer man, Maxwell. Trousers, cap and all, Brother. Did you see that one?"

Riordan's eyes flashed suddenly. Intuitively, he knew he was being led into hell. Of course he'd seen Agent 99 dressed as a chauffeur, in men's boots, pants and her cap at a jaunty angle. He was being mocked. A small boy with an innocent look and an anarchist's mind was talking to him about lust.

Riordan composed himself and sighed deeply. He went toward Micky O'Brien and sat on the side of O'Brien's desk. He settled a hand on O'Brien's face, tracing his finger on the prominent cheekbones and along his chin. "Now, Micky," he said, "There are many women we must admire. But Agent 99 is not one of them. We must admire Our Lady, Virgin Mother of God. And Saint Brigid, whose cross appears on the television every night. Will you pray to Our Lady, Micky? Will you say five Hail Mary's when you go home today?"

Micky O'Brien said he would, a terror having struck him deep inside with Brother Riordan's tender touch. But he knew, as the rest of us knew, that Agent 99 was more a model to O'Brien's many sisters and all the young women in St. Joseph's Park, Nenagh, than the Virgin Mary would ever be.

I was nearly ten and started to have the feeling it was good to be young. The teachers and all the other adults never had television when they were young. We had different stories from theirs. We had stories coming to us from America every day. We could catch the teachers out and sometimes it looked like they didn't have a clue and they couldn't see what was going on under their noses. It was the teachers who needed to get smart, not us.

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