Casting aside their hard-earned reputation as the authentic voice of the common pervert, the Ballydung brothers have betrayed themselves and their fans by succumbing to dreary TV convention with The Podge and Rodge Show (RTE2, Monday & Tuesday), a depressingly formulaic chat show. For the first time in their careers, the gruesome twosome are actually behaving like puppets.
Created and operated by Mick O’Hara and Ciaran Morrison, the inspired double-act who also had a hand in the success of Zig and Zag, Podge and Rodge have long provided Irish pop culture with a refreshing breath of foul air.
For nine years, their A Scare at Bedtime series on RTE2 has offered an earthy antidote to the self-conscious trendiness of most late-night cult entertainment. With their stalwart devotion to sewer-of-consciousness storytelling, the duo displayed a warped integrity, a dogged refusal to reform or conform. Until now, that is.
No matter how its makers try to disguise the fact with wacky games, The Podge and Rodge Show is just another comfort station on the increasingly crowded chat show circuit. Softer than fresh slurry, the series is everything you could possibly want in a chat show — provided your name is Brendan Courtney.
The programme’s guest list, meanwhile, could have been borrowed straight from the stand-by trays of The Late Late Show or Tubridy Tonight. The inaugural edition opened with a visit from Diarmuid Gavin, the gardening heartthrob who has become a hardy perennial on Irish talk shows.
Advertisement
Monday’s second guest was Senator David Norris, a booking whose exclusivity can be gauged by the fact that he was simultaneously appearing on RTE1’s Questions & Answers.
Admittedly, Podge and Rodge boast considerable advantages over their chat-show-hosting peers. More lifelike than Pat Kenny, more youthful than Ryan Tubridy and more refined than Courtney, these bug-eyed gargoyles can be extremely sharp-witted. Stretched across two half-hour programmes every week, however, their dog-eared repertoire of smut quickly grows tiresome.
All too heavily indebted to post-pub Channel 4 shows such as Bo Selecta and So Graham Norton, the series is an unworthy vehicle for characters who started out as true Irish originals. Moreover, O’Hara and Morrison have made few allowances to accommodate Podge and Rodge’s transformation from raconteurs to interviewers.
Rather than deploying their alter egos as diversionary camouflage from behind which they can ask disconcerting questions, the puppet-masters seem happy to carry on using them as protective shields from behind which they can shout rude words.
“Are you an airport blonde?” Rodge asked Marisa Mackle, the flaxen-haired chick lit author, on Tuesday’s show. “Y’know, blonde on top but you have a black box?” Guests on The Podge and Rodge Show may wince at the hosts’ crudities, but they can remain secure in the knowledge they will not be seriously discomfited by a programme that essentially showers them with flattery disguised as insolence, praise with faint damnation. In fact, the only indignity meted out by the series is visited upon Lucy Kennedy, a gifted broadcaster here reduced to the humiliating status of decorative assistant.
Advertisement
As presenter of The Ex-Files, a dating game show, Kennedy proved she was no slouch at barbed banter or fiendish interrogation. As handmaiden at Ballydung Manor, however, her duties are confined to introducing the guests and conducting vox pops. Now that they have joined the showbusiness elite, it seems, nobody is permitted to overshadow the star gobsheens.
The arrogant folly of much contemporary comedy is also highlighted by The Blame Game (BBC1, Friday), a would-be satirical Northern Irish news quiz that demonstrates the futility of topical humour in a society where the topic never changes.
The show’s title is the best thing about it. Holding others responsible for self-inflicted woes is the national sport of Northern Ireland, a pursuit neatly encapsulated in the programme’s catchphrase: “Don’t blame yourselves, blame each other.” Unfortunately, the joke ends there.
The Blame Game presents itself as “dangerous comedy”, but is wrong on both counts. Though billed as a TV adaptation of a Radio Ulster series, the show is actually another doomed attempt to replicate the wit of Have I Got News for You by simply plagiarising its format. Each week, the regular panellists — comedians Colin Murphy, Jake O’Kane and Neil Delamere — are augmented by guest comics. Without the leavening effect of contributors from backgrounds other than stand-up, however, the banter frequently dissolves into a babble of tiresomely competitive whimsy.
The show’s satirical heft is supposedly provided by host Tim McGarry, a performer with vast experience of converting the dross of Northern Irish politics into the rancid dross of Northern Irish political comedy. He is, after all, a self-confessed writer and star of the sitcom Give My Head Peace, one of the worst atrocities in the Troubles’ history.
Advertisement
McGarry’s delivery is as unconvincing as his writing. He stutters through the autocue as though it was an optician’s test chart, decreasing in size line by line. Given that he knows how lame the pay-offs are, of course, his hesitancy is understandable.
Apart from the pretence that it’s funny, The Blame Game’s most irritating conceit is that ho-ho-ho references to paramilitary violence and criminality are somehow daring, risky or provocative. In reality, these self- satisfied “gags”, and the uproarious audience laughter that greets them, are themselves symptoms of the social complacency that tolerates the existence of the racketeers in the first place.
There were more performers making heavy work of simple tasks in Mighty Talk: A Journey With DruidSynge (RTE1, Tuesday), a picturesque but pointless documentary that chronicled the Druid Theatre Company’s preparations for the staging of all seven theatrical works by the 19th-century Dublin-born playwright JM Synge in one eight-hour marathon.
Acclaimed though the production may have been, the film told us little about its creation beyond the fact that directors frequently get exasperated and actors like to embrace each other a lot.
Despite the insistence by Garry Hynes, the project’s driving force, that Synge’s work offers uniquely commanding roles for women, the extracts featured in the programme were unlikely to attract newcomers to his writing. Raucous, puerile and lecherous, most of Synge’s characters sounded uncannily similar to, well, Podge and Rodge.