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.
