Stunt bikes - so Seventies. As kitsch as Wonderwoman's perm. The sequinned jump suits, the rings of fire, the trembling double-decker buses . . . it's enough to drive you to Babycham.
Australian stunt-rider Matt Coulter deftly sidestepped the Boogie Nights cliches at the annual Wicklow County Show in Tinahely yesterday, breathlessly hurtling a 400lb quadbike over a row of trucks and cars spanning 80 feet end to end.
Styling himself the Kangaroo Kid, Coulter, a rangy Antipodean sporting a deep-fried tan and jawline straight out of Neighbours central casting, doesn't make a habit of crashing. When stunts do go awry, the results are spectacular. Nine years ago the 30-yearold ploughed a quadbike into the business end of a paddle steamer.
Those nursing hopes of a repeat performance at Tinahely departed unfulfilled. The gig threatened to derail only once, when Coulter, struggling to achieve a sustained wheelie on the slippery turf, let slip a Viagra joke via his in-helmet microphone, eliciting puzzled glares from the under-12s and winces from suddenly awkward parents.
The Kangaroo Kid sideshow served as an entrancing novelty, but the central attraction unfolded elsewhere yesterday. The jumble of bleats, moos and barks above the incessant basso grumble of Coulter's quadbike pointed towards the real business at hand. Most of an estimated 20,000 attendance had come to browse and shoot the breeze amid the welter of agricultural displays, food halls and livestock exhibits.
If the weekend's Witnness rock festival partied like an over-stimulated teenager, Tinahely came across as the reflective elder sibling. Less given to florid displays of ebullience, but in its own quiet way equally expressive.
For Matt Coulter, this was a swansong of sorts. A US movie career beckons (he's already featured in gung-ho crash-fests on Fox TV and MTV). The Kangaroo Kid and Hollywood are well met. Anyone capable of maintaining deadpan sincerity while exhorting the occupants of a muggy Wicklow field to "pretend we're down in the beach in Australia, just wheeling down the beach . . . " is gilt-carved for stardom.