RADIO REVIEW:GOOD POLITICAL satire is like a homemade chocolate soufflé. It must be richer and more lovingly prepared than the one you buy in the shops, not too plain or too obvious and, like all comedy, well-timed. Open the oven too soon and it will implode. Leave it in there too late and it's burnt and tasteless.
The Emergency (Newstalk 106-108, Saturdays) was both underdone and overcooked. It didn’t have any new insights into the economic crisis; it had an Éamon de Valera soundalike doing the introduction, for Chrissakes. And by heaping easy scorn on an already sinking ship, this sketch show comes several years too late.
Gerry Stembridge and the late Dermot Morgan’s Scrap Saturday, the radio satire against which all others are judged, created a complicated hall of mirrors, reflecting the corruption and tragi-comic hypocrisy of the time.
Scrap Saturday was dropped by RTÉ amid allegations of political interference. There is no chance that anyone would try to extinguish the burning embers of The Emergency. “Martin ‘The Viper’ Foley” is one of the head-the-balls on the new board of a fictional Anglo Irish Bank. A common little criminal in Anglo? They can do better than that.
“Brian Cowen” slurred a State of the Nation speech. The fake Taoiseach’s inspiration? “I looked to the man who’s been a good friend of all bankers, developers and Fianna Fáil all down through the ages, going forward, a man who can inspire the leader in all of us . . . and that man is Bob the Builder.” That cake just about everyone else prepared earlier.
“Banking Masterminds” featured “Miriam O’Christ-Not-Another-Baby”. Miriam O’Callaghan is a working woman with a big family. So bloody what? Was this a double bluff on the real housewives of Dev’s green, white and orange counties? Not likely. It’s the same old casual misogyny we’ve always had: a lazy, cliched, gender-specific, drive-by insult.
She asks “Sean FitzBorrowings” what kind of person would borrow €87 million from a bank where he is chairman. Actually, it was €122 million. But that’s beside the point. Even the most merciless satire should have a sharp, observational edge. Taking the worst from the news without analysis and putting it in funny voices does not a comedy make.
Like a deceptively delicious Yorkshire pudding, Mark Steel’s in Town (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) showed how effortless comedy can seem, mixing subtlety and affection with quick-thinking asides and credible political point-scoring. In the first episode of a UK tour, he tailor-makes stand-up for locals in a livestock auction hall in Skipton, Yorkshire.
Steel is a comedian on a political mission. Sometimes the reaction to oppression is as intolerant as the oppression itself, but not in his case. He has a lightness of touch that belies its force. A couple in an industrial mill conversion: “It’s got so much character! There’s a wonderful feature in this room of a severed hand of a girl who got it caught in a Spinning Jenny.” He gently mocks the cattle market that gets hosed down and turned into a theatre. “Not only is that true,” he says, “the people of that Skipton think that’s normal.”
But he finds many redeeming features, like their unwillingness to sacrifice their town to chain stores and hypermarkets. Of Skipton’s Italian Society, Steel says, “Areva bloodah derche!”
The Colm and Jim Jim Radio Show (2FM, weekdays) is allegedly a slapstick morning show. But it’s stuck in 1980s pirate radio hell, pre-Scrap Saturday, where every two-bit jack-actor was on radio. Their forced banter sounds like two blokes in a pub secretly bored by each other’s company. And, no, I don’t get the adolescent “Jim Jim” thing either.
On Wednesday, they did a Grange Hill jingle and played Paul Weller. “The Style Council kicking your ass on a Wednesday morning!” The duo do comedy too. In a recent gag, “Ryan Tubridy” phones a Polish man with the Internet. One was “Tubridy” and, maybe, the other was the Pole. “You live in Warsaw? That makes you an online poll!” Get it? La Tubs loves to bake. That would have made better material. As it was, their schtick was limp and uninspired, even if the impersonation was cookie-cutter accurate.
qfottrell@irishtimes.com