The lads from Après Match talk about their characters before hitting the road again
TO INVERT a Dunphyism, Après Match are not good satirists, they’re great satirists. The trio have been lampooning football pundits, media darlings and global political leaders like Angela Merkel (“yes, that’s right, you little pixie heads”) for the guts of two decades.
Barry Murphy and Risteárd Cooper began as a satirical duo on an RTÉ television show Murphy presented called The End around the mid-1990s, and featured during the broadcaster’s coverage of Euro ’96. Gary Cooke came on board in 1998.
“I knew Gary from acting and theatre circles,” says Cooper.
“We were just sitting down having a drink one evening after a show I was involved in and he started doing this amazing impression of Eamon Dunphy. We just bounced off each other and made each other laugh. That was the initial thing,” he says.
They’ve been a staple of RTÉ’s football tournament coverage since the 1998 World Cup in France, as well as taking their mischief on the road. In February, they’ll do gigs at Vicar St in Dublin, the Everyman in Cork, and Kavanagh’s in Portlaoise, Co Laois.
Cooper says there’s no set formula when it comes to devising their sketches. One of them might have an idea for a character or an observation about a topical situation, which they will brainstorm. Invariably, they’ll take a sideways route into it. Cooke mentions a few highlights from his two sidekicks.
“Some of Barry’s incarnations of Frank Stapleton and Liam Brady, particularly some of the improvised moments are magical, out-there, wild. Likewise with Risteárd. He does so many voices, from George Hook to Pat Kenny. I remember he only had one line from The Edge years ago but it was great: ‘Yet again I agree with Bono but I am independently interesting.’ ”
LASTING IMPRESSION
Cooke says the key to unlocking a character could be one of several things, and it might be either physical or behavioural. For example, how the persons sound, their body language, their attitude, their overall personality or public persona.
“Sometimes, there is no one thing. Most people think of it being like: you sound like somebody; therefore your impression is good, but it’s actually not the only thing you need to have. You can not sound like somebody but really get them in some way. Or sometimes you can sound exactly like them but there is no depth to it.
“Taking Dunphy as a baseline, I’m sure there are people who sound more like Dunphy than I do. Dermot Morgan’s old impressions were at times more vocally accurate. He very definitely caught a certain thing. I manage to capture something else. It’s a good voice likeness but it’s not perfect. It’s more of an attitude as anything. The more outspoken they are, the easier it is to turn it into something.”
Dunphy is possibly Cooke’s greatest creation, certainly his most well known. He says it is inevitable the real Dunphy has become a caricature of himself with the passage of time.
PLATINI MOMENT
“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — the more Dunphy or anybody else does their thing, the more people expect them to do it. Say in 1984, when Dunphy spoke about Michel Platini not being “a great player”.
He said Platini didn’t live up to his billing. That’s a reasonable thing to say about a person if that’s what you believe. However, then Platini went on to score two hat-tricks in the next two matches.
“That was one moment in time but it gets mythologised for the rest of time — ‘Platini is a good player, not a great player.’ It ends up having very little to do with the initial point. These people like Dunphy exist in reality and at a level of mythology. People end up confusing the two things. They bring their Dunphy mythology glasses to what he’s saying in the here and now.”
With the broadcaster Pat Kenny, Cooper says he found a way into him from the mechanical way he carries himself. “I remember with him, we were looking to do a sketch on The Late Late Show. People were saying, ‘God, what can you do with Pat Kenny?’ Nobody had ever done him before so there was no real indication of the way to do him.
“I decided to look at him on The Late Late Show. I noticed he had this robotic kind of movement. In the frame of the TV, he very often moved in particular ways that were very like an automaton,” says Cooper.
“It was like he was locked in this little box, with very static movement. It sort of fed into his personality that came across. The flagship light entertainment show on RTÉ just didn’t seem like a very natural fit for him to be interviewing fluff from a soap opera or models.
“He didn’t seem to be that comfortable. Only in Ireland would that be the case. It was something to develop. I started doing his voice and I noticed he had a kind of quirk in his vocal patterns. It all snowballed. We did this typical Late Late Show tragic sketch when Pat Kenny interviews somebody who is in a terrible state. The guy he was interviewing had a sexual attraction to hoovers. He was trying to deal with that and The Late Late Show was obviously the perfect platform in which to air it.
“On the other end of the scale, George Hook as a character is not as subtle, but I can’t do an impression of George Hook without getting physically contorted. My chin ends up on my forehead. It’s an exercise in contortionism doing him.”
UNDER THE SKIN
Cooper has an interesting take on why he is almost compelled to impersonate certain people who come into his orbit. “I suppose it’s the same with a lot of people. They strike a chord with you. It’s the same with [any satirist] or any person watching television — the people have an effect on you, they kind of get under your skin. The way I react to that is by doing an impression of them.
“I find if I’m rehearsing a play, for example, and I’m around people all the time, the director or whoever it is, it might not be somebody that I’d know particularly well before we’d go into rehearsal but in the rehearsal process I find myself doing impressions of them because they rub off on me.
“In a way, it’s a way of dealing with big personalities — you’re digesting this personality and it’s some way of processing it, if one was to be psychological about it.”
Après Match will perform at Vicar St, Dublin ( February 7 and 12); as well as the Everyman, Cork on February 14; and Kavanagh’s Portlaoise on February 19.
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