Tommy Tiernan Show review: Mike Murphy recalls the candid camera skit that never aired
Mike Murphy on the Tommy Tiernan Show
There were laughs a-plenty on Saturday night’s Tommy Tiernan Show when the comedian came face-to-face with former RTÉ broadcaster Mike Murphy.
Murphy, who is best known for legendary candid camera sketches on The Live Mike, recalled some moments from the show that stood out – including one skit they felt they had to cut.
“One of the ones that I remember we had to wrap it up. We got a coffin and a hearse. They show some of them but they couldn’t show the one that we had to wrap up,” he said.
“I was in the coffin, Dermot Morgan and Fran Dempsey were dressed as undertakers. They were half holding the coffin in and out of the hearse. [They asked] a passerby, 'Do you mind holding on to that while we get the flowers?’ There was one man that we couldn’t show. The coffin is half in, and he’s holding it.”
Murphy said he began to groan and moan in the coffin before pushing on the coffin lid, opening it. “He leaned on it and said ‘He’s trying to get out!’ The next minute, he turned around and ran down the road. I didn’t see it because I was still in the coffin but he stopped against the railings further down, clutching his heart, saying ‘I’ve a terrible pain in my chest’."
“Tell him to wash his f***** mouth out” 😱
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) March 12, 2022
Mike Murphy and @Tommedian share stories about their Fathers #TommyTiernanShow pic.twitter.com/qk6VgpR9QA
He said Late Late Show presenter Gay Byrne was shocked when Murphy announced on air that he was not returning to The Live Mike, surprising even the show's producers.
“Gay Byrne and I were very close friends. He came into my office and he said ‘What have you done? You have destroyed your entire career. Do you not realize what you've done?’ But I just wasn't enjoying it.” He added that he misses Byrne, who he describes as a career-focused man.
“We were speaking towards the end and he said ‘why did you never want to really do broadcast?’ he said. “He said ‘I suppose in a way the difference between the two of us was I lived a career when you were living a life’. And in a way that was right because I was using broadcasting as a method of doing the things I wanted to do.”
Also on the show were friends Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally, whose lockdown podcast has seen new successes for each of them.
“Before lockdown, I was just gigging, I wasn’t doing podcasts,” McNally said. "Then the lockdown started, I had to pivot into something else. We did the podcast, and you're just doing your thing, you’re working and putting out the pod and wasn't until we started selling tickets that we realized ‘oh shit, it's gone up a level’.”
She said she and Williams are planning to do a tour with the podcast.
“We’re supposed to be going on tour with the podcast, next year I’d say. I feel almost guilty because I feel like I'm getting the kickback off the pod more than Vogue is because I'm obviously on the road selling live shows.”
Williams, who is expecting her third child, said she finds pregnancy difficult. “I don't love being pregnant. I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I find pregnancy very difficult,” she said.
Finally, Tiernan was joined by historian Professor Kevin Whelan, who spoke about the long-term effect the Famine had on Ireland from religion to language.
“The church became kind of a surrogate language of identity because we'd lost the Irish language,” he explained.
“How do we stop ourselves being seen as being British? One of the key Irish answers to that became, 'you're Protestant, and we're Catholic’. Catholicism wasn't so much a spiritual thing, post-Famine. It was much more as a cultural identity and a way of saying we're not really British.”
Professor Whelan said Ireland’s strong literary tradition is a direct consequence of the Famine.
“You are marooned when you switch your language, you leave a lot behind when you switch language. In some ways, we still haven't fully recovered from that either. No other country in Europe, not one, has lost their language as much as Ireland has. Really, if you look for the Irish response to the famine, it's the Irish revival itself.”
He said writers like WB Yeats and James Joyce had to rewrite our culture.
“They're the ones who had to reimagine Ireland, but in the English language. In a sense, we had to make ourselves up, we had to reinvent ourselves. We had to find a way to be Irish in the English language and we had to take and break the English language and remould with Irish purposes. The Irish revival at the end of the 19th century is the real cultural response to the Famine.”
