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Archive on 4: A Life Less Ordinary: Episode 2: Alex Currie

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Alex Currie

Episode 2

Episode 2: Alex Currie

A Life Less Ordinary

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, A Life Less Ordinary, Alex Currie

The minister who became the reluctant spokesman for a fishing community suffering tragedy.

The Solway Harvester disaster brought tragedy and huge media attention to a community. Geoff Bird meets Rev Alex Currie to find out what it was like to become their spokesman.

In January 2000, the Solway Harvester fishing boat went down off the Isle of Man resulting in the deaths of all seven of those aboard. As the first tragedy of the new millennium it attracted enormous media attention, with scores of journalists pouring in to the remote Isle of Whithorn in South West Scotland. There they met a population in deep mourning, unused to the attention of the press and unwilling to open itself up to that attention. One of those who played a vital role as a family spokesman was Reverend Alex Currie, who in spite of his own initial hostility to the media placed himself at its disposal in order to represent the bereaved and limit the intrusion they may otherwise have faced. 

At the most testing time of his own professional life, having to conduct five funerals on the same day, Curry also had to learn the art of press spokesperson as he went along, conducting hundreds of interviews over the weeks, months and years that followed. Now in the second part of 'A Life Less Ordinary' Geoff Bird takes him back over some of the archive of the tragedy, finding out what it's like to be living an ordinary life when the media spotlight picks you out. Along the way they talk with some of those journalists involved at the time, exploring the ethics involved in approaching people suffering loss in order to meet the demands of a public hungry for information about a major news story and those it has hurt the most.

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