Any eejit can tell us the facts, but what we crave is the truth
Seriously, what we need is a national coalition government of comedy, says Declan Lynch
Sunday June 14 2009
THEY say it's not about personalities, it's about policies. In fact, they say it so often, it can't be true.
Comedians have always understood this better than political correspondents. Which is why, at certain times, it is only the comedians who can tell us the truth.
For example, when we realise that some prime minister of the 18th Century was, say, an opium addict, this aspect of his personality surely tells us a lot more than some piece of legislation he drafted on the subject of agrarian reform.
Dermot Morgan and the Scrap Saturday team understood that public life in Ireland in the Eighties was largely about the personality of Charles Haughey, that the answers lay in his enthusiasms and in his appetites, and not in his collected speeches. So every week they were able to tell us the truth in ways that the policy merchants either couldn't or wouldn't.
And we devoured it, like starving dogs.
Now we are in that place again. Nob Nation on the Gerry Ryan show, with its relentless focus on personality, has been filling in a few crucial pieces of the current puzzle. And there is also The Emergency on Saturday mornings on Newstalk. But it is not enough. We need a more co-ordinated effort to bring about the change which we so desperately need. The solution is out there, but the system is suppressing it.
There is now quite clearly a need to end these useless old divisions, and to create a grand coalition. A sort of national government of comedy.
It is time for Nob Nation and The Emergency to work together, in the national interest. In this new dispensation, you could have Oliver Callan of Nob Nation as the main man, due primarily to his outstanding Biffo, which tells us as much about the state of modern Ireland as Morgan's version of Haughey.
Indeed, Callan is Haugheyesque in doing most of the voices himself, speaking for the male members of the Cabinet, and thinking for the females.
But The Emergency is a much stronger title than the vulgar and frankly poor Nob Nation, and it has its own iconic figure of De Valera, piling on the recessionary agony.
This would make the top table in any new arrangement, and key positions could easily be found for the voices of Morgan Jones, Dermot Carmody, Joe Taylor, Karen Ardiff, Eoin Byrne and Nick McGiveney.
They still do a very good Garret FitzGerald, for example, and there's never any harm having one of them around the place. I'm thinking, too, of numbers like the Celia Larkin character as Eva Peron singing Don't Cry for Me Argentina -- "so I chose ... curtains".
Their Biffo and their Dermot Ahern would be surplus to requirements, and all the funny voices must never be allowed to divert us from the essential savagery of the task.
Callan has already established a reputation in this regard, which would make him the "strongman", the inspirational leader who can bring the best out of each member of the coalition.
But it will be hard -- much harder than the work of the political journalists, who tend to stay away from this crucial area of personality, precisely because it is not easy, it is hard.
Any eejit can tell us the facts; it takes blood, sweat, and tears to tell us the truth, and there will be days when there are no laughs.
I can only offer the suggestion that, at such dark times, they abide by this iron rule: if you can imagine it being read out on It Says in the Papers, it can't be funny.
That's enough policy.
