Colm O'Regan: We need proper funny Irish programming, so why was The Den cancelled?

Roger Kenny Photography Actor Head Shots www.rogerkenny.ie

It didn’t get much better than that. My photo was on the Den for my 9th birthday. Dempsey’s Den. Not to be all hipster but I remember Den 1.0, even Ian Dempsey’s first day. It’s like I bought the Den on vinyl. The photo was a two-year-old school photo. There weren’t many in-focus, non-scowling, non-jumper-for-painting photos to spare. So everyone who saw it thought I was small for 9. And everyone saw it. But most importantly l saw it. 

I had that out of body experience seeing my own face on the television. Like I’d been put there by Willie Wonka to teach me a lesson. How else would I get there? There was no scanner or digital camera or email or scart or HDMI, or USB keys then. To put my asymmetric mammy-cut fringe, dimpled head up on a screen in the house, we just posted, with no expectation of getting it back, the spare of the photo to PO BOX TWO TWO TWO TWO-TWO-TWO in Dublin 4. Someone in RTE took the photo out of the envelope and then did some sort of mysterious spell and there I was on the screen with a sort of pretendy-frame graphic around it. Pure sorcery.

“His Mammy says he was GLUED to the radio to hear Zig and Zag last Sunday,” read Ian from my mother’s card. “That sounds dangerous, to be glued to the radio.” Said Zig. Boom. Off the cuff.

The radio incident referred to Poparama. Poparama was a ‘Young People’s Programme’ on 2FM on Saturday and Sunday mornings. And the previous Sunday Zig and Zag were making a guest appearance. Evening Mass was gone to. The radio was re-tuned. To 2FM? In the kitchen? It might as well have been on Radio Moscow. The Grundig Satellit 205 Transistor radio seemed surprised. Years of inertia meant it was practically hard-wired for Radio 1.

That was early Zig and Zag. But we turned it over for Zig and Zag. This was before the albums, the magazines, the trips to America, Dustin, the Channel 4 defection, 2Phat, MTV. They were huge.

So when they came back last year during lockdown along with Dustin, it was like a vision of our ancestors to help us make sense of the present. That’s the kind of over-the-top stuff you’ll hear from people who grew up with the Den.

It’s the jokes, stupid. Lookit, I’m no expert on making children laugh. My kids-comedy career consists of two gigs. My daughters now know that I ‘do stories and not ..like funny jokes or anything’ but when you see it done right you just know. It’s about being subversive. It’s nothing so simplistic and frankly boring as ‘non-PC’, It’s the defying of authority, the silly, the rude, the toilety stuff. The nod to grown-ups without patronising anyone.

And also long-running, frankly scary, segments where Podge the evil postman managed to turn all of them against each other. But mainly it was the funny.

As Apres Match’s Barry Murphy said once of another natural comedian. “We ‘do’ funny. He is funny”. The Zig-Zag-Dustin-Soky-Snotser Galligan collective, ably facilitated by Ray Darcy in his best role, just was funny.

I don’t know what they’re going to replace it with. It might be far more worthwhile than Ireland’s Fittest Fitters or Ireland's Favourite Vulture Funds. All I know is they are getting rid of something that just is funny.

Funny is hard. So when a program just effortlessly makes a lot of people laugh… Well you just need to be aware that it’s very hard to replace. And that’s what 40somethings and Other-somethings were howling about when they heard the Den was being cancelled.

We need Proper Funny programmes made here. Now, more than ever.