{"id":35875,"date":"2025-09-01T05:12:30","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T05:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/35875\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T05:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T05:12:30","slug":"my-favourite-room-while-i-live-in-an-ultra-modern-house-my-stories-are-old-fashioned-at-home-with-the-creator-of-the-riordans-and-tolka-row","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/35875\/","title":{"rendered":"My favourite room: \u2018While I live in an ultra modern house, my stories are old-fashioned\u2019 \u2013 At home with the creator of The Riordans and Tolka Row"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-91174671_secondary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom4 indo-1d70522a_marginleft0 indo-1d70522a_marginright0 indo-1d70522a_margintop4\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\" data-testid=\"title-summary\">\nChristopher Fitz-Simon was the first director of RT\u00c9 News and pioneered soaps like Tolka Row and The Riordans, but far from resting on his laurels, he continues to write entertaining stories and novels in the modern home he shares with wife Anne Makower\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Writer Christopher Fitz-Simon and his wife Ann Makower, former RT\u00c9 producer\/directors, outside their contemporary mews which they bought in 2011. It\u2019s a complete contrast to their last home, a Victorian villa which they\u2019d lived in for 50 years. Photo: Tony Gavin\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/3d2d6a0d-bf4d-4510-a93b-d88f801b7aba.jpg\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"100%\" data-testid=\"article-image\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_caption1 indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_secondary indo-66f0fec7_regular indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_marginleft0 indo-1d70522a_marginright0 indo-1d70522a_margintop3 indo-b48c4984_left\" style=\"color:var(--color-grey-60)\">Writer Christopher Fitz-Simon and his wife Ann Makower, former RT\u00c9 producer\/directors, outside their contemporary mews which they bought in 2011. It\u2019s a complete contrast to their last home, a Victorian villa which they\u2019d lived in for 50 years. Photo: Tony Gavin<\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_primary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_margintop0 indo-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">Large expanses of glass are an integral part of today\u2019s house design and when Christopher Fitz-Simon and Anne Makower found their very contemporary home in Dun Laoghaire in 2011, the amount of glass was one of the things they loved about it. However, there was one snag \u2013 where to put a catflap. \u201cWe have one and a half cats. We have Rosie and another cat who visits whom we call William because he\u2019s orange,\u201d says Christopher. \u201cI was a cat in a previous existence or I\u2019m going to be one in the next. I couldn\u2019t live in a house without a cat. It\u2019s a presence, a connection with something primeval. Tyrone Guthrie said there are star cats, leading cats, supporting cats. Rosie is a character cat and William is a leading cat.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_primary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_margintop0 indo-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">Fortunately they solved the catflap problem by finding a niche upstairs. It was inevitable they would solve it because both are very resourceful people. Christopher is an author\/broadcaster and pioneer of RT\u00c9\u2019s TV drama, while Anne spent her entire working life, apart from the first few years which she spent at the BBC, as a broadcaster in RT\u00c9 until her retirement. Both are 91 and in fact both were born on the same day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christopher Fitz-Simon was the first director of RT\u00c9 News and pioneered soaps like Tolka Row and The Riordans,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[3412,18,117,19,17,4746,1181],"class_list":{"0":"post-35875","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-life-magazine","14":"tag-rte"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}