This weekend on Newstalk, as part of our Autumn Season of Documentary on Newstalk, we broadcast award-winning programme ‘Flatlands’.

In this fast-paced and humorous documentary, Producer Francesca Lalor hears from a wide range of different contributors, as they reminisce about the trials, tribulations, and thundering good times experienced when living in bedsit-land…

Cast your mind back to when you first moved out of home, leaving the nest and all of your home comforts for an adventure in the city…Maybe you were starting college. Maybe you had just landed your first job. Remember what a steep learning curve it was? The excitement? The panic? The characters you met along the way?

Everybody has a story to tell about that first bed-sit in Ranelagh, that chaotic house-share on the South Circular Road, the dodgy landlords, dodgier flatmates, coin operated phone boxes, missing your rent, getting your furniture out of skips, living on a diet of beans on toast, and the monthly trek home to mammy with a bale of dirty laundry…

One by one, the participants in this programme tell their tales of falling in love, dodgy electrics, ramshackle buildings, and friends for life made in the flatlands of their youths….

Quotes

“You had to flush the upstairs and downstairs toilets at the same time, or they wouldn’t work- we developed a call system though…”

“This guy’s brother moved in for a week, and it took us a year to move him out. He made himself a bed behind the sofa, and just gradually became part of the furniture”

“I had never cooked a chicken breast before. Or used a microwave. When I opened the door of the microwave, it had shrunk to the size of a sparrow”

‘Flatlands’ will air on Newstalk on 7am on Saturday November 23rd and repeated at 6pm on Sunday November 24th.

‘Flatlands’ was Produced, Recorded and Edited by Francesca Lalor. Additional recording by Joe Coffey. And Mixed by John Davis.

The project was supported by a grant from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, as part of the Sound And Vision Scheme.