RTÉ Media Centre

RTÉ One, Monday 8:30pm

Tiny Big Films

Episode 4: CLOCKMAKER (or HOROLOGIST)

Philip Stokes comes from a family with time on its hands. His grandfather was a legendary clock collector who could take them apart and put them back together again. His parents opened a shop in Cork. And Philip, sent to a Swiss watchmaking school in Dublin at fifteen, has spent his life continuing what they started.

Today, he is one of the last practising horologists in the country, servicing public clocks across Ireland as well as the intricate watches and timepieces that come through his Cork workshop door. In this episode, Philip takes on the full restoration of Shandon Bells tower clock – the Four Faced Liar, one of Cork’s most beloved landmarks. The movement inside, once the largest in Europe and bigger than Big Ben, is as ambitious a mechanism as the four faces that hide it. The logistics alone are formidable – scaffolding has to be erected around the tower for the first time in ninety years, a delicate operation on a protected heritage structure.

It is a family affair from the start: his son Robin leaves his bank job for a year to help on the project, and Philip’s ninety-year-old mother Sally, a proud and active member of the Shandon congregation, is put to work gold-leafing hundreds of numerals and minute markers by hand. After months of painstaking work, the faces are repainted, the hands restored, and the numbers reattached. Philip assures a nervous public that the Four Faced Liar will remain as charmingly unreliable as ever!