Alan Hurley, from Ballymacoda, Cork, is raising a few laughs in New Zealand. (Pic: PJ Ahern)

A Cork comedian has won the New Zealand Comedy Guild Award for Best Newcomer.

Alan Hurley, from Ballymacoda but based in Auckland for the last 18 months, was selected by his peers to receive the award following a series of side-splitting performances, which included a routine aired on New Zealand television.

Alan spoke to the Irish Echo about his delight of receiving the award.

“I was delighted by it. Really shocked that I got it, when I went up to give my speech I was completely speechless, which is ironic considering it is my profession to stand up on stage and tell jokes. I was really dumbfounded.”

He continued, “I awoke the next day with a fuzzy head and a hint of confusion before I realised I had won. I only went in to work that day because they have really good coffee in the office.”

Alan works as a civil engineer in Auckland and is a graduate of University College Cork (UCC).

His stand up career got off to a bumpy start, when he entered a comedy competition in UCC, singing some self-penned comedy songs.

He was, unfortunately, too drunk to win, to sing distinctly, or even play in tune.

However, upon realising that there was actual prize money for the winner, he sobered up in time for the next year’s competition, winning it with some straight stand-up and thus began his stand-up comedy career.

In December, he appeared on a comedy special called AotearoHA: Next Big Things on New Zealand’s TV3.

Hurley is the second Irish comedian to win the award, after Dubliner Alan McElroy triumphed in 2010 and follows in the footsteps of previous winners, Sarah Harpur, Urzila Carlson, Rhys Matthewson, Jim Brown and Andrew Holland.

It has proved to be an educational transition to the comedy circuit in New Zealand, as he swiftly adapted to the local style of humour compared to the Irish wit.

“Performing in New Zealand is a lot different to performing in Ireland. Besides having to talk slower, a lot slower, I had to trade a lot of my Irish references for international references. In New Zealand, the humour is a lot dryer and very stop/start. You perform a joke and immediately they want to know what the next one is,” he said.

“Some of my material is about the expectations of the traveling Irish. In one bit I talk about how I was asked for ID in a bar in Hamilton and the barmaid said, she didn’t think I looked very Irish after looking at my passport, what was she expecting, for me to be walking in the door eating potatoes?”

Alan is currently organizing gigs for March when he returns to Cork for a break.

Tumble Circus perform as part of the Jacksons Lane Postcards Festival in London in July, 2011. (Pic: Jane Hobson)

Roll up, roll up, the circus is coming to town — and it’s Irish.

Tumble Circus sees Belfast-based Dubliner Ken Fanning and his Swedish co-star Tina Segner take their act to the stage for their third Australian tour in three years.

Described as a circus of the absurd, the latest show “This is what we do for a living” sees the pair blend humour with acrobatics, hazardous aerial tricks and flying hula hoops.

“There has to be a lot of comedy of course, because we’re Irish,” said Ken.

“But we try to weave narratives into our stories to create a modern circus.”

According to Ken, who teamed up with Tina after a chance meeting on Dublin’s Grafton Street 15 years ago, Australia is one of the best places for contemporary circus enthusiasts to try their luck.

“Australia has some of the pivotal circus companies, and has a 30 year history of contemporary circus so the audiences here have a very high regard for what we do,” said Ken.

“We were working with Lunar Circus in Western Australia in the early days there was no other new circus company touring in Western Australia, and the audience really didn’t know what to make of us.

“But then in Ireland there is no real tradition of contemporary circus, there are only one or two other companies besides ourselves and they are also very small, and we are better known over here because we have been coming to Australia every summer for the last 12 years.”

The pair have just finished a stint at a circus festival in Carindale where they spent a month performing, teaching and training.

“We have just had one of the best times of our lives at the festival in Western Australia where we spent a month teaching kids how to perform,” Ken said.

We have been teaching these kids for the past 10 years and now that they are young adults, and are probably better than us, they are ready to start their own circus careers. It’s a phenomenal legacy we have left and we are very proud of them.”

Ken added that the pair are really looking forward to performing across Perth and Adelaide, before heading to France to work on their new material.

“We are in Perth at the moment, and then it’s then off to Adelaide, then we can go home for a bit before we head to France to rehearse the new show,” he said.

“This show is just me and Tina, but sometimes we do bigger shows with five or six other people. Circus training is a very long process because you have to perfect the skills. We started the process of learning our new show a year ago and now we can’t wait to put it all together with a director.

“We have our own big top back in Ireland to do shows in so were a proper circus but a small one — and a modern one,” he added.

For more information on Tumble Circus see http://tumblecircus.com/

Sharon Corr is relishing her career as a solo artist. (Pic: Barry McCall)

After clocking up 15 years of international success, 40 million album sales and numerous No.1 hits, any artist would be forgiven (but not forgotten) for taking a well-deserved break from the music business.

Yet somehow Sharon Corr has also managed to squeeze in a successful solo career, raise a family and become the face of Oxfam Ireland as well as other charitable causes in the short time since legendary Irish group The Corrs took a hiatus in 2005.

So how does she do it?

“I’m not sure,” laughs Sharon. “I’m a big time working mom, and it’s tough at times but I am doing what I love and what makes me happy, and that makes the kids happy. But then it’s not a nine-to-five job, so when I have time off I can spend lots of time with them, but I try to never spend too much time away from them; I always want to do what’s best for them.”

A working mom Sharon may be, but ordinary singer, songwriter and violinist from Dundalk she certainly isn’t.

In the seven years since the siblings went their separate ways to focus on raising families, Sharon has been relishing her career as a solo artist, playing festivals such as Glastonbury, touring extensively and enjoying the success of her stunning solo album, Dream Of You.

But song-writing is something that comes natural to Sharon, who lists watching and listening to her parents sing and perform amongst her earliest memories.

“Dundalk is a very musical town,” she explains. “There were always great sessions there when we were growing up so it was natural that we would end up in a band, especially because mom was a great singer – she was very like Karen Carpenter – and dad played keyboard and piano. They both lived for the music, so it was part of our conditioning too because we were brought up listening to them.”

As violinist, songwriter and backing vocalist for The Corrs, Sharon was partially responsible for the band’s enormous success, their sold out tours and string of chart topping singles and albums.

Now as a solo artist, she has taken centre stage as lead vocalist – a nerve-racking move for any artist who has relied on the support of  band mates, not to mention brother and sisters, for most of their careers.

“I am not too nervous on stage now because I have been solo for such a long time, but at my first gig I was almost hyperventilating,” admits Sharon.

“But my family have always been very supportive of me, singing  and playing music is what I have always done, so it made no sense to stop. When The Corrs finished in 2005, I had my children, and it always felt very natural for me to continue to sing. Then before I knew it I had a lot of songs – almost an album’s worth – so I decided to make one.

“Now I have taken to being a solo artist like a duck takes to water, I believe it’s important to have different experiences in life and to cherish each one, and I really enjoy being in control of my own gigs,” she adds.

“I wanted to experiment, to make different music and to progress forward. But I was primarily known as the violinist in the band, and I have been playing that instrument since I was six so I have continued to weave that through my own music because I don’t want to deny my past – it really bothers me when artists become different people almost overnight after leaving a band, because that really is impossible.”

Much to the delight of Corrs’ fans worldwide, however, Sharon says the group haven’t ruled out a possible reunion sometime in the future. “I will work on my solo career forever, well for as long as I’m upright anyway,” laughs Sharon.

“But I don’t know exactly what will happen with The Corrs. When you decide to work with your family 24 hours a day, it’s not all roses in the garden – in fact it’s probably insane, but for us there were more positives than negatives so we worked well and made music. There are no real plans for a reunion yet, but somewhere down the line, perhaps.

“Right now I am trying to progress and move forward as a solo artist, I’m almost finished writing a new album and this time I’ve chosen to collaborate with others, because writing alone is a safe environment for me. I wanted to stretch myself and get out of my shell, it’s been really good.”

Now as the runaway success that was the European leg of the Dream Of You tour draws to an close, one of County Louth’s biggest superstars is preparing to set the stage alight all over again when she supports Ronan Keating during his Oz tour this summer.

“I can’t wait to tour with Ronan because I have known him a long time from being backstage in corridors all over the world together,” says Sharon.

“I really admire him as an artist because we both know how difficult it is to go solo after being in a successful band and to carve out our own identity, so we identify with each other.

“But I am also really looking forward to coming to Australia because I haven’t been there in a while. It used to be almost a ritual for The Corrs to go there in January and February. The Irish have a great affinity with Australia and it’s always lots of craic, so I’m looking forward to the good weather, the beaches – and the beer!”

April 15 marks 100 years since the Belfast ocean liner sank.

In the sixth century AD, Gregory of Tours noted at the beginning of his history of the world: “A great many things keep on happening, some of them good and some of them bad.”

This conclusion by the perceptive Gregory has been backed up with further evidence over the last 1,400 years of things, predictably enough, continuing to happen.

During 2012 the anniversaries of many of these, both good and bad, will be marked.

The 100th anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker is a day to note in your diary. The story of extravagantly-fanged Count Dracula was essentially a fiction from Ireland played out in Whitby, London and Transylvania – probably the first time these places had ever occurred in the same breath.

European folklore provided the supernatural cauldron from which Dracula sprang, with Ireland’s mythology contributing significant influence. Stoker’s mother Charlotte could tell many a ghoulish tale, and would claim she heard banshees calling and spirits keening on the night of her mother’s death.

Your average Irish Ma, in fact.

The Romanian tourist board will surely give maximum respect on April 20 to the modest man from Clontarf who turned their very own Vlad Dracul (of impaling fame) into the horror genre’s major A-lister.

The other big centenary in 2012 concerns maritime Belfast. Early in 1911 the world’s largest liner edged down the Harland and Wolff slipway and settled into the dark waters of Belfast Lough.

After almost a year of fitting out, on April 2, 1912, she slipped anchor and headed out into the Irish Sea. Her last port of call was Cobh before setting course for New York.

The tragedy that befell the Titanic on the night of April 15 was as rigorous an application of Sod’s Law as you might hope to find. Operational errors, disregarded iceberg warnings, and calamitous disorganisation amongst the crew all contributed to the disaster.

Meanwhile, Mr Sod would diligently carry on his work aboard a nearby ship, the Californian. Visible from the Titanic, alas, her radio operator retired early for the night and received none of the stricken vessel’s distress signals.

As dawn broke over the Atlantic, all that was left of the world’s greatest ocean liner were the lifeboats, some flotsam and jetsam, and an oil slick. Some 1,517 people had perished.

Another Belfast institution features in 2012.

On its opening night 150 years ago on May 12, 1862, the Ulster Hall was described by local newspaper The Northern Whig as “a music hall fit for the production of any composition, and for the reception of any artist, however eminent”.

So it was to prove.

The venue, during its long history, has staged readings by Charles Dickens, recitals by Enrico Caruso, sermons from Rev Ian Paisley. It has heard Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Edward Carson calling for opposition to Home Rule, its walls have resounded to the sound of God Save the Queen as well as Amhrán na bhFiann.

And in 1971 it was the venue for the first ever public performance of Stairway To Heaven – surely as musically a momentous occasion as Handel’s little gig in Fishamble Street.
2012 also marks the 25th anniversary of pianist Liberace’s death.

At the time, the obituarist on London’s Daily Telegraph commented that  “Liberace’s private tastes were steeped in the absence of sobriety.”

RTÉ journalist David McCullagh's book on John Costello is a welcome addition.

It is likely that if given a set of photographs of prominent Irish politicians of the last century, most Irish people would not be able to pick Jack Costello.

He was a naturally retiring man who never attracted the mystique that characterised his contemporaries like Dev, Lemass, McQuaid or Noel Browne, and neither did he have the international recognition of someone like Sean MacBride.

I include MacQuaid among the examples because he was as much a political as a religious figure.

Although he was in his mid-20s in 1916, Costello took no part in the Rising or the subsequent War of Independence.

When asked, he would say that he was “out” in 1916 – “out” on the golf course; mind you, he was careful not to make such a flippant comment during his political career.

His first love was the law, and he practised at the Bar even when he was an elected parliamentarian, though not while he was Taoiseach.

He was, by all accounts, an excellent advocate and unlike some of his modern political equivalents, made a sufficiently good living out of the law not to have to depend on dig-outs from friends.

Possibly his most famous case was as defence counsel when Paddy Kavanagh brought an unwise libel case against The Leader magazine. In the witness box for 13 hours, the Monaghan man did his best but was no match for the wily Costello.

The two became uneasy friends later, to the poet’s advantage.

There are two events that dominate any discussion of Costello’s political legacy. The first is the 1948 repeal of the External Relations Act, which resulted in Ireland leaving the Commonwealth.

This book deals fully with the events leading up to the announcement by Costello during a visit to Canada. It makes the point that the cabinet had effectively decided to go down this road and that the haste with which the statement was made had much to do with pre-empting a private member’s bill in the Dáil which would have allowed Fianna Fáil to take some credit.

Surprisingly, the book does not refer to the part played by the Australian Foreign Minister H V Evatt in preventing the vindictiveness against Ireland that was being demanded in some quarters.

The other event for which Costello is remembered is his acquiescence to the Irish hierarchy and especially to Archbishop MacQuaid on the Mother and Child Scheme proposed by Noel Browne.

It is easy now to see how supine Irish political leaders were in that controversy, though the author points out that the Irish Medical Association was an even more powerful opponent of the scheme and was delighted to hide behind the soutanes of the bishops.

When a few years later, the National University of Ireland tried to do a similar peek-a-boo on the question of setting up an agricultural institute which they felt would advantage Trinity College, Costello showed himself to be capable of dealing firmly with episcopal interference.

The book assumes that its readers will have some knowledge of Irish affairs. It does not tell us for example that Liam Cosgrave is the son of W T Cosgrave, the first President of the Executive Council or that Garret FitzGerald was son of Desmond FitzGerald, the first Minister for External Affairs.

It skips over the war years and particularly the difficulty that Dev had with the British and the Americans; one would like to have had some idea of Costello’s role at that time.

The book reveals that although he was elected as a Fine Gael TD, Costello was never actually a member of that political party! Moreover in his two periods as Taoiseach (1948–51 and 1954–57), he was not the leader, a position filled by Richard Mulcahy.

Despite some moments of lightness, the book is heavy going. I liked the different takes on the 1948 election by the two main newspapers.

The Irish Independent led with “Mr Costello is Taoiseach” but the Irish Press preferred “Mr de Valera is no longer Taoiseach”. One of the few light moments is an observation by the above-mentioned Desmond FitzGerald that “shyness is not a feature of diplomatic women – on the first meeting one may easily learn how often their husbands perform with them or how they like it done.” Since it is found in a letter to his wife, we presume that he did not take the hint.

This is a long overdue book, all the more welcome at a time when the political fortunes of Fine Gael are the highest they have ever been.

Cover art for John Connolly's The Burning Soul.

Three/Five

Dubliner John Connolly is a writer enjoying himself.

The feeling when you read this book is that the author is in good form; perhaps he has received a tax refund or has his faith in God restored now that the Dubs finally won an All-Ireland. There is a brightness, a kind of showiness in the writing, the sign of someone in complete control of his craft.

As in most of his other books, the central character is Charlie Parker, sometime private detective, living in the back blocks of Maine.

He has the uncanny ability to attract trouble wherever he goes; in this story he is asked to find out who is sending nasty messages to a reformed child killer named Randall Haight, the messages all the more disturbing because a 14-year old girl has gone missing and Haight would be an obvious suspect if his background were known.

The second string to the story is an internecine war between Irish gangs in Boston.

Tommy Morris, Oweny Farrell, Joey Toomey and Martin Dempsey are the main gangsters and they have few qualms about using extreme measures against those they don’t like. Though, surprisingly for a Connolly book, we are past page 150 before anybody gets killed.

I have to admit that the book’s ending is weak, as if the author has enjoyed himself enough and wants to tie up things quickly.

For that, he needs coincidences and less than convincing motivation; the final 50 pages take from what is an otherwise excellent read.

The book has the snappy dialogue, ruminations on life and love and death and bad people that characterise all of Connolly’s books: “It’s just a car.” “A Camry is just a car. That’s a midlife crisis on wheels”, his solicitor friend tells him about his Mustang.

There is much philosophising about the nature of evil, on all types and variations of which he has had extensive experience.

His friends Angel and Louis have small walk-on parts, as do the Fulci brothers whom he calls on whenever he wants protection for his clients. “They’re not insane. They’re medicated. The medication keeps them borderline sane … They’re sensitive men. They’re also very big, sensitive men.”

Even if it does run out of puff, this is a perfect thriller.

Mr Chrome and Blindboy Boatclub strut their stuff.

It’s several hours before The Rubberbandits’ sold-out Galway Comedy Festival show is due to kick off. The boys are already in costume. Which is to say that Limerickmen Dave Chambers and Bob McGlynn – better known by their daft stagenames Blindboy Boat Club and Mr Chrome – are both wearing faded tracksuits, cheap jewellery, and balaclavas expertly fashioned from plastic shopping bags on their heads.

No surprise there. The acclaimed comedy duo have never shown their faces in public, and they always do their interviews in character. Their style is satirical, surrealist and deliberately crude, but also usually scalpel-sharp.

Very little is known about Ireland’s least recognisable celebrities, other than that Chambers and McGlynn met while attending Ardscoil Rís in Limerick, and were entertaining their schoolfriends with recorded prank phone calls from their mid-teens. Those calls were compiled into bootleg CDs, which eventually became successful radio broadcasts, both here and internationally. They switched to television: having entertained Irish audiences with weekly sketches on RTÉ’s Republic Of Telly (which spawned the viral YouTube hit Horse Outside), the ’Bandits are now doing shows for MTV and Channel 4.

Their debut album Serious About Men – released on their own Lovely Men Music label – has just been released. It will be fascinating to see if their popularity as a live act translates into mega sales.

While some commentators dismiss them as a novelty act, The Rubberbandits are deadly serious about what they do. Not that they’d ever say it to your face…

According to a band spokesperson, “The word ‘novelty’ is something that gets thrown at them now and then, but it stems from people’s lazy desire to label things rather than deal with the anxiety of ambiguity. Novelty music is gimmick music that lacks substance or talent, ie Crazy Frog.

“The lads make comedy music, or as they describe it, music that happens to be funny. More importantly, their music is not merely a vessel to carry jokes, but rather it is equally as important as the joke. They write, perform, record, produce, mix and master all the music themselves. The songwriting, production and melody are just as important as the jokes and satirical undertones in  the songs.

“Take Horse Outside – remove the lyrics and just listen to the structure and the melody. You are left with a pure pop song that sticks in your head.

“Because they take the piss all the time, people assume that their music has no creative merit. Just like the way that some people think that they’re fools, because the characters they play are fools. The fact is that they’ve had the biggest-selling Irish single since Westlife, with a song they wrote, performed and produced themselves in a Limerick bedroom. That requires talent, creativity and an understanding of the art forms of both song-writing and comedy.”

Back to backstage in the Roisín Dubh. The Rubberbandits are in fine fettle. Spin South West disc jockey Paul Webb – who regularly appears on stage with them in the guise of Willie O’DJ – brings up a tray of drinks and the madness begins …

OLAF TYARANSEN: Does it take you guys long to get into character or do you just put the bags over your heads in seconds?

MR CHROME: Four-and-a-half hours of make-up!

BLINDBOY BOAT CLUB: They’re specially moulded to our heads! Honest to god, he’s got a mould of my head that he made and he gets a dryer and it shapes exactly to my head so I don’t get sweating issues or breathing issues.

OT: You both come across as Limerick skangers, basically, and reportedly you’re not…

MC: We’re not, we’re middle-class gentlemen. We’re kind of like … we’re between classes. We’re between middle class and upper class. We’re upper upper upper class.

BBC: Everyone thinks we grew up in the suburbs and all of that, but we grew up in mansions with butlers. Upper upper upper upper class. That’s why we love drugs and horses.

OT: How did you guys meet?

MC: We first met on a dating agency on the internet. Nah. We met in school. We both hated everything in school except art. We loved art both of us, and in art [class] we had a teacher called Bog Man and he let us do whatever we wanted.

BBC: When we got in trouble in other classes they’d send us up to the art room to do loads of art.

OT: When did you form The Rubberbandits?

BBC: Erm … I was stalking a girl who worked in a pet shop when I was 17, or 16, and my heart was broken because she didn’t want to go on a date with me, and then he started hanging around with me because he could see that I had a broken heart…

MC: I wanted to fix it.

BBC: …then he told me to fix it, that I should show her how good I am at art and stuff. And then we forgot about that idea and went to his house, he had a free house, and we recorded a lot of prank phone calls.

MC: You wrote a poem about her! Do you remember that?

BBC: I did yeah, I wrote a poem about her, and I made all the boys watch me read the poem down by the church when we were smoking fags.

MC: Daniel read it and I was like, “Don’t show it to anyone because they’ll all laugh at you and think you’re a steamer for writing a poem,” but then it turns out that Daniel was already a poet and he didn’t know it.

OT: Do you remember the poem?

MC: Do you remember the line? I remember some of the lines…

BBC: Don’t be quoting the lines of the poem! She still knows me!

MC: The pet shop, you used to have to walk down steps to get into, and the last line was something along the lines of…

BBC: Don’t! Come on, she’ll read that, stop!

MC: … ‘Subterranean lair into which I dived in, my pet shop girl’ (laughs). I was trying to tell ya, “Look, people are going to think Pet Shop Boys and it’s like you’re subconsciously telling the world that you’re a member of the steam theatre!” There you go.

OT: So it was prank phone calls that started you off?

BBC: Yeah, yeah, prank phone calls.

Streams of nonsense.

BBC: So we made a CD of prank phone calls for the benefit of about six people in our class, and then we found out that people in another class liked it and we couldn’t believe that someone in a different class liked the CD, and then half of Limerick was passing it around. And this was like 2001.

OT: What age are you guys?

MC: We’re both 21. We’ve been 21 now for about … 16 years. It’s great though because you get 21 kisses every year. They’re all from our mothers but they still count, you know?

Anyway, back to the CDs of prank phone calls…

BBC: So yeah the CD passed around all of Limerick and we couldn’t believe that. And then we spent a long time doing nathin’ and then, then I’d my heart broken again by his cousin. And then he said to me, ‘cos I was making music in my bedroom, he said, “That music is good enough for people to listen to,” and I was, “F**k off!” He said, “We’ll make a few tunes.” That was about 2007, so we started making songs, we made Bag Of Glue, we put it onto MySpace, didn’t think anyone would like it…

MC: And then … boom! Half of Limerick were listening to it.

BBC: And that’s when Dublin got involved.

MC: Yeah Dublin got involved. All you need to do is impress half of Limerick – that’s how David Bowie got Ziggy Stardust off the ground.

BBC: He did, yeah. Before you know it…

OT: Where and when did you play your first live show?

MC: Our 21st.

BBC: No, it was the courtyard of the Trinity Rooms at a moustache party on the banks of the Shannon.

MC: Ah that’s true, yeah.

BBC: Our first ever show had 1,500 people, because we had already built up an underground legacy.

MC: It was half of Limerick. And 1,500 people.

BBC: We played on the banks of the Shannon and it was a moustache party, as in… our manager Coco, at the time, it was the first time that we met him and he organised this because he was running a nightclub and there was 1,500 people there and they all had moustaches on. If you wore a moustache you got free drinks or something, and that was our first ever gig. Limerick had been waiting about six years to see The Rubberbandits, and the first time they saw the plastic bags, we did one song and we f***ed off, and they were very disappointed (shakes head sadly).

OT: Why did you call yourselves The Rubberbandits?

BBC: When I was 17, it just came to me. And I went into the art class and I said to him, “I have the name for our group, it’s called ‘The Rubberbandits’,” and he didn’t contest it, he said, “Yeah, great name!” and now we’re stuck with it.

MC: We fight tooth and nail over everything, you have the ideas parties where you sit down and talk about ideas and all that kind of s**t. The Rubberbandits for some reason, we had no discussion about it, and we f**king hate it.

BBC: Yeah we don’t like it at all. It’s a silly, silly name.

MC: We want to be called loads of brilliant things.

BBC: I hate my name, (disdainfully) ‘Blindboy Boat Club’!

MC: I hate my name ‘Mr Chrome’!

BBC: I want to be called ‘Freddie Honey’.

MC: I want to be called ‘Vincent Fist’ (shakes head wistfully).

BBC: And what do we want our band to be called?

MC: ‘The Gorillas In The A**’. Or ‘Don’t Tell Dennis’.

BBC: Or ‘Steam Theatre’. Loads of brilliant things. ‘Lying About Malta’. All great names, great names for a band. And we’re stuck with The Rubberbandits.

MC: With ‘Rubberbandits’ you think, “It’s s**t, but at least people will remember it” – no they won’t! Everyone goes up and goes, “Aren’t you in that band… the Rubberduckies?”

BBC: I know ye, you’re The Spanish Pirates.

MC: The Gay Terrorists. Just, the list of names goes on that aren’t The Rubberbandits. It’s a silly name, for silly boys.

OT: Do either of you guys have criminal records?

BBC: I’ve got a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks on original vinyl and Sid Vicious was a criminal when he recorded it. I’ve got all of Dr Dre’s. Snoop Doggy Dog was caught selling hash, so I’ve got plenty of criminal records. Gil-Scott Heron, that’s another one of my criminal records. John Lennon, he done a couple of silly protest things, I’ve a few of his records.

OT: Were you surprised with the online success of ‘Horse Outside’?

MC: On a serious note, yes. Absof***inglutely! Shocking.

BBC: Here’s proof of the fact that we didn’t know it was going to be popular. We just released it as a video on TV and made no plans for it to be released on CD or anything whatsoever. None. We were on Republic Of Telly every week so it was just, here’s another sketch. A little bit more effort put into it than the other stuff but this is a song we made on our computer.

MC: I think if you expected it to be [big] then you’d sing in key and have better jokes in it. The video would be more expensive we would have made our c**ks look bigger, all that kind of stuff, but no.

BBC: Total accident. At the time we were getting about 100,000 views from the sketches we put up from Republic Of Telly, and we were expecting this one might go about 200,000. We knew it would be a little bit more special than the sketches because there was music in it. But it’s around eight million [views] now.

MC: It’s a song and you can walk away with a song in your head.

OT: You wound up competing with The X-Factor for Christmas number one last year …

BBC: That was a complete pain in the h**e. We wanted nothing to do with it.

MC: It was moronic. We weren’t trying to be cool. We didn’t give a f**k about the Christmas number one. It’s for (adopts particularly strong Limerick accent) c**ts. Christmas number one is for c**ts.

OT: Actually a DJ friend of mine played it at a music festival in Portugal recently. He told me the whole place went mental …

BBC: Really? My bag’s from Portugal. This Brazilian woman got in touch with us and started supplying our bags and she sent boxes and boxes of bags over from Brazil and Portugal. That’s where we get our bags now.

OT: How many bags a night do you go through on stage?

BBC: One bag a night on stage. This one has had a few uses though. The sickener is that you get three or four uses out of it, you get used to it and then you have to throw it away. It gets comfortable and it gets nice but there is a time when you have to part with the bag. This will reveal my face eventually and that’s when it has to go.

OT: How quickly can you put a bag together?

MC: I could knock a bag out now in 30 seconds.

BBC: He could. With the mould of the head and the heat gun. Yeah.

OT: It’s that advanced, is it?

BBC: You think we’re taking the p**s! That’s heat-moulded to my head.

MC: I’m a professional make-up artist.

BBC: He’s a professional make-up artist. ‘Cos if you use a normal bag that you just put holes in, you start choking, it doesn’t work like that.

This one, no matter what you do, my eyes are where they’re supposed to be, my nose is where it’s supposed to be and so is my mouth, and that’s the only way I can perform, because if I didn’t I’d be… Van Morrison did 15 years with a bag on his head and look what happened to him.

OT: Seriously, you’re a professionally trained dancer, aren’t you, Mr Chrome?

MC: I come from a family of dancers. My ma is a choreographer. My sisters are dancers, so I was in a house of dancing but I was never trained. In fact, the thought of going out on stage and dancing was as inviting as getting a kick in the b**ls, to me.

I hated it. But you can’t avoid what goes on around you. That’s what happened there. But I’m not a professionally trained dancer, I’m just f**king brilliant at dancing!

OT: How was the album recording process?

MC: It was grand. We went up in a hot air balloon, come down about three weeks later and we’ve got an album on our hands. That’s pretty much it.

OT: How are the people of Limerick taking to your success?

BBC: Limerick are grand, Limerick are … they like it. I don’t know, I haven’t been there in a while.

MC: What does Limerick make of us? (pause) They love it, I suppose. I mean, anything that comes out of Limerick everyone just latches onto and says it’s great, no matter what it is. There’s a statue of Richard Harris down in Limerick that’s s**t and everyone says it’s great. It’s a s**t statue and everyone says it’s brilliant because it’s Richard Harris and he’s from Limerick. So I assume that they think we’re great because we’re from Limerick. They might just think we’re s**t.

OT: Will there ever be a statue of you in Limerick?

MC: I hope so. I’m gonna make one anyway.

BBC: Just put it up there.

MC: Or else we’ll put a plastic bag on the Richard Harris statue.

OT: Tell me a little bit about the new TV show that you’ve done for Channel 4.

BBC: We did MTV in June … they just pointed the camera at us and we went around acting the b*****ks. We just did one for Channel 4 with the director of Father Ted, Declan Lowney. He’s a f**king mad c**t, he’s brilliant. We put effort into this one.

BBC: Yeah, we put effort into sets and lighting. The whole thing amounted to what, 24 minutes of footage? Three by seven? That’s 21 isn’t it? I’m s**t at maths, I failed maths for the Leaving Cert. 21 minutes of footage but a ridiculous amount of effort just for those 21 minutes. About three months of work. Two months writing, one month preproduction.

OT: Are you making much money doing this?

BBC: No we make about as much money as someone managing a line in Dell. After the government has its way with you and management and all of that, you just end up with a normal wage, but we don’t give a f**k.

I’d rather earn a normal wage doing this than, I dunno, skinning chickens. What do normal people do?

MC: Skin chickens.

OT: What are your expectations for the album?

BBC: We don’t care. We make songs that make us happy and put it out.

MC: We don’t care. I suppose that’s an across the board answer.

Brendan Gleeson has been nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in black comedy The Guard.

Michael Fassbender and Brendan Gleeson are among the Irish names vying for a Golden Globe at this morning’s LA ceremony.

Fassbender has been nominated as Best Actor (Drama) for his role in Shame, while Gleeson has been nominated for Best Actor (In a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy) for The Guard.

Fassbender is up against Ides of March stars George Clooney and Ryan Gosling, who had a second nomination for best musical or comedy actor for the romance Crazy, Stupid, Love.

The silent-era tale The Artist heads the Globes nominations with six, among them best comedy or musical and acting honours for its French stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo.

Tied for second-place in the nominations are the 1960s tale The Help and George Clooney’s The Descendants. Both films are up for best drama, while Clooney was nominated for best dramatic actor and The Help earned acting slots for Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain.

Also competing for best drama: Martin Scorsese’s Paris adventure Hugo; Clooney’s political thriller The Ides of March; Brad Pitt’s baseball chronicle Moneyball; and Steven Spielberg’s First World War epic War Horse.

Joining The Artist in the best musical or comedy category are: the cancer story 50/50; Kristen Wiig’s wedding romp Bridesmaids; Woody Allen’s romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris; and Michelle Williams’ Marilyn Monroe tale My Week with Marilyn.

Clooney has three nominations. Besides best dramatic actor for The Descendants, he’s up for directing and screenplay for The Ides of March.

Glenn Close also is a dual contender, as best dramatic actress for the Irish drama Albert Nobbs and for best song for writing the lyrics to Lay Your Head Down, the film’s theme tune.

The theme was recorded by Sinéad O’Connor and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and composed by Brian Byrne.

The Globes are a precursor and guide to the annual Oscars. The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday January 24.

Brendan Gleeson in The Guard.

The Guard has proven a great success once again with nine nominations in the Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTAs).

Newly released film Albert Nobbs has also had multiple nominations, as well as up and coming actor Chris O’Dowd who has been nominated three times for his supporting role in the feature film Bridesmaids.

The awards will take place on February 11 in Dublin to celebrate the highest standard of Irish talent in film and TV over the past twelve months.

Academy CEO, Áine Moriarty believes that the awards are Ireland’s showcase to the world.

“The Irish industry consistently delivers world-class standards of work that is watched by a global audience,” she said.

“Ireland’s economic struggles have been well documented, but against this pressure it’s heartening to see how Ireland’s hard-working creative community continues to punch above its weight and really deliver.”

The features nominated for Best Film at IFTA 2012 are; the period drama Albert Nobbs; Irish psychological thriller Charlie Casanova; black comedy The Guard, and rural drama Stella Days.

IFTA winning actress Saoirse Ronan has been IFTA nominated for her lead turn in Hanna. While Albert Nobbs star Glenn Close and The Guard actor Don Cheadle have both been shortlisted in the International categories for their performances in each film.

In the Television Drama categories, RTÉ crime drama Love/Hate leads the overall shortlist with nominations in 10 categories including Best Drama.

In television acting, Brendan Coyle earns his first IFTA nomination for his performance as Mr. Bates in the BBC drama Downton Abbey, whilst more Irish talents working on international television projects feature strongly across the shortlist.

The awards will once again reflect the Irish film and television industry’s continuing development of its creative, original and entertaining output year-on-year.

Related content:
Reviewed: Albert Nobbs – ‘Gender bending film fails to hit mark’
Reviewed: The Guard – ‘An officer but no gentleman’

Broadcaster Gay Byrne remains synonymous with RTÉ. (File pic)

The 20th century began with faint radio signals and ended up with multichannel televisions, satellite dishes, mobile phones, texting, emailing, iPhones, DAB radios and all manner of technical wizardry. Certainly in the field of communication, no century can surely have experienced greater innovation.

Just over halfway through that century Ireland took its place amongst the burgeoning technological nations and launched its own television station. Telefís Éireann began broadcasting at 7pm on New Year’s Eve, 1961 – we have now had exactly half a century of Irish television.

Television, of course, had appeared in Ireland before the setting up of RTÉ (as it subsequently became known). In 1951 the Royal Dublin Society’s annual show mounted a week-long demonstration of home grown telly. Word of this new-fangled device spread, and when, later in that year, the BBC television transmitter in the north of England went on air, a few viewers in Dublin began tuning in.

By 1953 the BBC had opened their Belfast transmitter, just in time for the coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.

The transmitter power was increased in July 1955, and it was possible to watch relatively clear TV pictures in Dublin, providing a high aerial was used. The BBC could now be seen in much of Ireland, roughly north of a line from Sligo, running down to Wicklow

Meanwhile, another source of competition had emerged. On Halloween night in 1959 a choice became available to Irish viewers. Ulster Television, the contractor for ITV In the North, went on air. The picture quality was greatly reduced south of the border, however, and on the opening night UTV in Belfast had the curious situation of viewers from Dublin phoning to complain about reception.

Ever taller aerials were required to receive the newly available signals – thus the forest of television aerials on Ireland’s east coast was born. For anyone who lived in Dublin in the ’60s through to the ’70s, this is an indelible image.

By the ’70s, viewers in the east and those near the border were able to receive BBC, ITV and RTÉ. Viewers elsewhere in the country however had to make do with just RTÉ. This area was known as One Channel Land, and frequently slagged off by the Dublin intelligentsia.

Ireland’s first channel was launched with an opening address by President Éamon de Valera. The President confessed that “I feel somewhat afraid”.

A live concert was broadcast from the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. The host of the show was Eamonn Andrews, and he alluded to the fears and doubts expressed by political and religious leaders about the new technology.

The Irish Government, realising that television was inevitable, appointed a committee to work out how cheaply a national channel could be established. Accordingly, at the start of 1960 a state TV service was set up with a new chairman, Eamonn Andrews. Thus was Telefís Éireann born.

No matter whether television has been a force for the good or not, it’s here to stay. This month 50 years ago television was given the go-ahead in Ireland; it was vision on, and Irish society would never be the same again.