COURTROOM DRAMAS

Actor Malcolm Douglas, along with partner-in-crime Joe Taylor, has spent the last year-and-a-half in court. But only as an interested spectator.

The duo have become one of the attractions of RTE Radio One s Tonight With Vincent Browne, reporting daily on the goings-on at the Moriarty and Flood tribunals, and providing a unique and entertaining take on events.
The duo, along with singer Susie Kennedy and pianist Gabby Smith, bring their Will We Get A Receipt For This...Will We F**k! revue to HQ at the Irish Music Hall Of Fame from Monday, September 4th.
I m not sure I d call the show satire in the strictest sense, explains Malcolm. With satire, you re actually taking the piss out of whatever it is you re targeting, but we re not doing exactly that. Although we do include anecdotal pieces in the show, most of what we re doing is reporting verbatim on what s actually being said by the principals.
The strange thing is that often what s being said is absurdly funny. For example, an exchange between Senior Counsel for the Flood Tribunal Des O Neill and Michael Bailey of Bovale Developments, who is, obviously, a builder, on the subject of a cash-filled brown paper envelope allegedly given to Ray Burke is just high farce. In an effort to describe the exact size of the package, which had been described by Daly as a brown envelope, O Neill got involved in a long discussion about brick sizes. The idea of one of the countries most revered legal minds involving himself in an extremely long and involved discussion about masonry with a senior Irish businessman is one you wouldn t dare to invent!
How does Malcolm feel about the events disclosed by the various tribunals he s attended?
You could ask if these sittings actually serve a real purpose...I don t want to go down the road of personal politics; suffice to say that I m not and have never been a staunch Fianna Fail supporter, but like everyone else I m equally dazed and confused by the revelations.
One of the most pleasing things about the live show is that people have come up to us and said that they felt quite bamboozled about what was going on at the various tribunals we quote from, and the show actually helped them to get a handle on what s really going on, he continues. It s sort of a beginners guide.
Was it difficult to condense everything they had covered to fit in with the time constraints of a stage show?
You get an overview of the proceedings, Malcolm replies. It s a bit like the Kimberly Diamond mine, it s so huge it s visible from space yet it s only produced a couple of pounds of gems. The musical numbers also give us an opportunity to do stuff we don t do on radio; we pastiche popular tunes like Can t Take That Away From Me and change the lyrics to suit. Another thing we can do live is comment on stuff that has been struck from the public record, which is a little too dangerous for us to do on radio.
Have the duo experienced any interference from the powers that be?
Everybody asks this and the truth is that we haven t! I can only imagine that it s a glass houses situation... When we did the previous run of the live show Justice Flood came down on the second night, which as you can imagine was a bit unnerving for us but, to give him his due, he chuckled quietly through the proceedings. We have an excellent team of lawyers on the show who read through our scripts very carefully, so I don t think we re going to end up in court, except in the public gallery.
How do the boys get on with Vincent Browne, a man who is reputed to have a tendency towards the irascible?
Vincent is an angel! He doesn t suffer fools gladly, of course, but he s a bloody tenacious journalist and he doesn t let go. The whole idea for the slot Joe and I do originally came from Vincent at the time of McCracken, but it took a little longer for us to get it together. Our relationship with Vincent, both professional and personal, is excellent.
Have the boys become political pundits, given the extent of their research in the last year-and a-half? More specifically, has Malcom any predictions?
Well, I ve got to be careful here. I d say there are some surprises down the road. There are people who are being assiduously not named, if you know what I mean, and that will change