David Elcock in the mourning

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

THEORETICALLY, I love all mankind; in practice, I can tolerate very few individuals. I accept John Donne’s dictum that every man’s death diminishes me and never send to know for whom the bells toll, but most people’s deaths don’t bring me down and some actually perk me up; on hearing someone I disliked has died, I usually say, solemnly, from the heart, “Good!”

Dave Elcock’s death last week leaves me deeply upset.

Big Brother Dave, the name he gave himself, calypsonian-style, on 610 Radio, was the first person I remember (outside of family and faculty) who showed my 11-year-old self what it was to be a professional in Trinidad, to respect oneself and to take one’s job seriously – even as he cracked me up every weekday morning on the way to school.

Every morning, whenever my father switched his car radio from David Elcock in the Morning to Radio Trinidad, even though I enjoyed the Passing Parade, I wanted to get back to 610 to find out whatever the hell it was Dave Elcock was doing now.

Dave Elcock did not fill time on radio; he used it.

Perhaps even before the term “hook and tease” was coined, Dave Elcock would lay down a series of them every day. The moment 610 went to ads and my father switched to Radio Trinidad, like a DJ at the CPL at the end of an over, I would start an explosive clamour for Dav-id El-cock in the Morn-ing! I just had to hear the catch of whatever bait Big Brother Dave had set.

In what I did not yet know was a pappyshow land where nearly everything was a pappyshow, Dave Elcock was dead firetrucking serious. He had perfected the art of keeping his listeners’ attention just as a writer strives to avoid losing that of his readers.

The plethora of characters he created for his listeners’ amusement reflected his own ingenuity and our capacity to have our horizons stretched. Dave, a genuine artist (even if his brush was a mic and his palette a sound effects board), gave his audience, not what they thought they wanted, but what he knew they needed. (Audiences do not know what they want; that is why they are audiences.)

In an industry – and a country – that was almost entirely “make-as-eef,” Dave Elcock knew exactly what he was doing.

And, by doing what he did so very well, showed us all how it all should and could be done. You didn’t need spectacular production values as much as your spectacular imagination and the capacity to make it real.

I was disappointed but not surprised to hear he had become a born-again Christian, because Trinidad has so very many of those and so few rational thinkers with both eyes open – and our only Big Brother Dave was one of the first humanists I encountered.

Maybe it was because of his latter-day faith that he never took me up on my repeated offers – all right, it was more like repeated begging – to have him in my Monday Newsday feature, Trini to the Bone. Or maybe he had left that version of himself and/or Trinidad behind when he moved to New York. Or maybe he was just on a different beat.

But there will be a gap in my own heart that should have been filled by finding out what Big Brother Dave would have declared a Trini was; and what TT meant to him.

Still, I can’t vex with him. In the five years I spent at CIC, I learned more from David Elcock in the Morning than I did from my teachers all day long. I left St Mary’s with one O-level 50 years ago; I’m still using what Dave gave me today. Right this minute.

Big Brother Dave, for a few minutes every morning, remixed my personality from its constituent 99 per cent misanthrope/one per cent philanthropy into something far more human, patient and tolerant. I’d like to think that, in a way, I do the same thing for my own miserable readers (except for the patient and tolerant bits, of course).

Sadly, very sadly, Big Brother Dave is gone.

But, as long as he is here, Little Brother BC will continue to celebrate David Elcock in the mourning.

BC Pires is a Leggo Beas’ but being without a Granny might turn him into Mr Bitter or a rooster with a booster