Make way, make way. A path is made through the throng. We part like the Red Sea in Shelter@Vicar Street. The spotlight picks out the elegant figure of comedian Barry Murphy picking his way nimbly to the stand. The man all comedians love has arrived to launch RTE Radio 1's newest series - which starts this morning - Stand-Up Stories.
The six-part series will feature six comedians acting out their own scripts. "They are like cocks," says Murphy of them. "They think the sun has risen to hear them crow." The six accused beam in the darkness. Murphy who, with Kevin Gildea, is script editor on the series, asks us to raise our glasses to toast "the last 75 years of radio and the next three or four". There is great applause and an eagerness to hear the series. First up this morning will be Galway man Karl MacDermott, who goes on air at 11.02 a.m. His story is about "a guy on a bus (going from Busaras to Eyre Square) who has a comic Proustian Odyssey". Cool. Sean Kavanagh's odyssey, which goes out on Saturday, June 5th, is set in a classroom and "then all the same fellows end up in the mental hospital in the same seats", he explains. It's all fictitious, but his classmates from St Mary's Primary School on Haddington Road in the late 1960s will probably recognise some of the lines, he says.
Other young men who feature in the coming weeks are Gildea himself, Brendan Burke, Mark Doherty and Eddie Bannon.