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"It was also a thrill to speak with Conor Grimes, one of a handful of actors used during the broadcasting ban: voices I heard every day for six years of my childhood, and whose part in this story has always filled me with wonder."

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  "Growing up in Derry, this was the reality in which I came of age. I was not yet three when the ban came into effect and nearly nine when it was lifted. Even then, I found it hard to believe Martin McGuinness’s voice possessed some especially dangerous siren’s allure, given that we sat behind him in Mass. I thus heard his distinctly unremarkable tones in real life every Sunday, but only ever heard him speak on TV or radio with a weirdly dulled and ponderous actor’s voice.
  
  “At the start,” one of those voices tells me, three decades later, “we’d go in and do a good Martin McGuinness [affects a higher register, with a distinct Derry twang] but the BBC put out a remit straight away that said there’d be no more of that.”"

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  "The work was “fleeting but lucrative,” Grimes remembers with fondness. “I think it was £90 for TV and £60 for radio” he says – not bad for an hour’s work in Belfast in 1988. “And when they got you in for one, you were always hoping they’d say: ‘Would you mind waiting about in the canteen because we think there’s going to be another statement.’ You’d be rubbing your hands.”
  
  But there were provisos. Dead-on impersonations were prohibited first, followed shortly afterwards by a diktat against any lip-syncing that matched the speakers’ mouths too closely. “It was all being made up as it went along,” he says now. “They didn’t really know what they were doing.”
  
  To increase his chances of securing these coveted gigs, Grimes bought a pager. Another associate bought an answering machine and paid it off within a week. Grimes even bought a car with his proceeds although, he insists, “that only cost me £340”."

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