Man With The Mirror

“Bear Grylls going to Oxegen. Mature Gary Barlow. Lord Henry Mountcharles. Mary Lou McDonald. Mary Byrne. Constantine Gurdgiev…” The king of Irish satire sits with a cuppa in Brooks Hotel scanning his phone and reading aloud. Rather than boasting about who he has on speed dial, he’s reciting from the list of ideas he keeps, new names and concepts ripe for parody. “Mick Wallace and Ming Flanagan are two characters I’ve enjoyed doing this year. When you hear them on radio, you can almost see them. Immediately you can see Wallace’s pink shirt and the Joey Tempest hair. Gay Mitchell? It’s like the guy who starts a sentence with, ‘With all due respect’. He disclaims everything: ‘This might sound a bit odd, but what about Dublin for the Olympics? Stay with me on this one but… what about the Queen as titular monarch of a 32-county Ireland?’” At this point, Mario Rosenstock drops the perfectly pitched impression and acts out the part of someone whose head is exploding with disbelief. Jammed as it is with whole armies of beleaguered celebrity send-ups, you fear his brain could actually surpass capacity and burst messily over the couch.
Hopefully he holds out long enough to spill all that contained comedy from the Olympia stage this November. Gift Grub Live 2 follows on from a hugely successful live jaunt two years ago that gathered up sketches from The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show and took them around the country. Mario and his friend Ian enjoyed it so much they just had to do it all over again. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the theatrically-inclined comic. “Yeah, it does feel like that,” he nods. “I started off primarily as an actor on stage. You’d feel this tension from the audience and you’d really feed off that. Then I started doing comedic plays and you’d hear the laughter coming back. It was like a shot of adrenaline into your arm. You’d start becoming addicted to this buzz. Coming back to the stage with Gift Grub brought that back completely. You know that feeling you get when you go back to a room you haven’t been to in years and you get the same smell? It’s that thing.”
Having spent more than a decade together making the nation chuckle along with the wireless each weekday morning, the live show also breathed new life into Rosenstock and Dempsey’s relationship. Sounds like a bit of a second honeymoon from the way Mario tells it – not that it was getting stale, you understand. “Myself and Ian had an amazing time putting it together and we grew much closer as a result. For years, I’ve been working on The Ian Dempsey Show. It’s his show and I’m the comic element. But with this, there’s a change in dynamic and I always wondered how that would work. He’s completely rode in. In a sense, I’m the main person and he’s the main support. That really changed our relationship in a brilliant way, and made it fresher and stronger. When you do something like we do on the radio, it is like a marriage and you do have to work at it.”
So Gift Grub is their precocious little kid?
“We both mind it, you’re dead right. We take care of ‘that’…” Myself and Mario glance at the non-existent baby in the corner he’s signaling towards. “In a funny way, the longer you know each other and the more you like each other, the harder it gets. You can’t take each other professionally for granted, you can’t go, ‘I’ve done so much with this guy, he’ll understand if I’m really lax for the next three weeks.’ That would be disastrous.”
That careful and continued emphasis on maintaining standards after all these years was duly recognised at this year’s PPI Radio Awards in Kilkenny. Long celebrated at the annual ceremony (he’s scooped six gongs previously), in 2011 he joins an elite group who’ve been presented with an award for Outstanding Achievement. Told all about it during the summer, Mario wasn’t permitted to tell a soul until the big announcement. Well, just one or two or three... “The only people I told were my wife, Ian Dempsey and Tony Fenton. So I was going around grinning at them every so often, winking my eye. People must have thought, ‘what’s wrong with those guys, are they alright!?’ It’s a strange concept isn’t it? Being told you’re being given an award and not being able to tell anybody for four months. Still, a nice secret to have.”
But wait – aren’t those type of accolades generally given out as a kind of end-of-career pat on the back? Mario, you’ve still got so much to offer…
“That’s the first thing I thought! ‘Thanks a million, but we’ve had enough of that now. If we give you an award, would you give up?’ I’ve been at these awards over the years and I’ve seen this given to Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, Gay Byrne or whatever. They’re a little more experienced than I am. I hope that I can still be doing this in 30 years.” More experienced maybe, but it’s likely he’s the only one that can impersonate all their fellow recipients. “That’s a good point actually,” he notes. “And I probably have!”
Lately, however, he’s been focusing more on the political end of things. With his wickedly funny, dead-on parodies on TV3’s Tonight With Vincent Browne, his satire has now infiltrated our dour current affairs programming. Think Special 1 TV without the sports and employing ‘puppets’ of a different kind. It’s proved so successful, particularly during the run-up to the Presidential elections, that Rosenstock is in talks with the station about creating a stand-alone show. “We’ve sat down and we’ve talked about trying to develop a series of satirical sketches but it’s very finance-sensitive and it costs a load of money to produce a sketch series. We’re trying to find the money. The willingness is there definitely and I’d love to go more down that direction.”
So what pointed him in that direction to begin with? If there’s one lesson to learn from this interview, it’s this: if you drunkenly accost Vincent Browne in a Dún Laoghaire pub, you’re likely to end up on television. Rosenstock leans in, approaching the tale in conspiratorial fashion. “Okay, I’ll tell you the truth,” he begins. “It was a Tuesday night and I knew, for once in my life, that I didn’t have to do Gift on Wednesday morning. So I went out and had a few drinks in Walters in Dún Laoghaire. You know, those sneaky midweek nights when you go out late and by 12 you’ve had three pints and are saying, ‘I feel great!’ I was walking out with my friend and who was at the bar doing a crossword?” No need to guess. “Yep, the distinctive Vincenzo. I didn’t know him personally but I was thinking ‘he has a show on Radio 1, I better go up and give him a piece of my mind!’ Full of it, cock of the walk. So I went up to him…”
Rosenstock plays out the scene between the two – his drunken self and the distinctively irascible broadcaster.
Mario: ‘Hello Vincent’.
Vincent: ‘What? Oh, hi… I, I, I know you…’
Mario: ‘Do you know what’s wrong with your programme? It’s so boring, it needs life, it needs energy. You need some sketches on it. I’m on Ian Dempsey’s show and we have so many listeners because we’re populist. You should be more populist.’
“In other words,” sighs Rosenstock. “I was talking shite.” The regret set in immediately. And then the phone calls started. “After I left I felt I’d offended him – ‘Jesus, I’m stupid. I’ve just made a fool of myself.’ He subsequently called me over ten times asking me to come on Tonight With Vincent Browne. I thought he was calling me to ambush me. I thought he was going to get me on and go, ‘And now we turn to look at the papers with Mario Rosenstock… I met you in a pub and you came up to me and you said my show was crap. Now I have you on my show, what are you going to do now?’ I was scared out of my life.
“One day I got a call while I was on the tennis court. ‘This is Vincent Browne, don’t hang up. Will you meet me?’ So I thought, okay, I can do that, he’s not going to humiliate me in public.”
The two met in the Westbury Hotel and Browne offered him the gig. Rosenstock had one condition – that he could do an impression of Browne himself.
“He went, ‘I don’t give a bollocks!’ There’s a big difference between ego and narcissism. Of course he has a big ego but he wasn’t personally vain about me doing him, as long as it was successful. So that was it, I got going on the sketches.”
It’s proved an easy process. “The only thing I’m learning is that sometimes it’s important not to say anything. Because you can see it. On the radio, I have to fill in every gap with volume or a sound effect. On TV, sometimes a look is all that’s required. So the move from radio was fairly seamless, but I had no idea how it would go. The only reason it went so well was because of the freedom TV3 gave myself and the director Damian Farrell to play around, they didn’t interfere at all. I was allowed to write any kind of sketches I wanted and there was that sense of play.”
He’s making mischievous with some very grim raw material. The trivialities of the cosy Celtic Tiger are out, a little more mangy cat comedic bite is in. Unlike the majority of his competitors in Ireland, Mario has always had his finger on the pulse, whilst simultaneously thumbing our funny bones. It’s a splendid act of contortion that has kept him in the public consciousness. These days, everyone’s tuning in to watch Vincent Browne (both versions) harangue the hapless powers that be. Back in the early days of the ‘00s, all we seemed concerned about was Roy Keane’s escapades in South Korea. Rosenstock has been at the centre of both (he played the lead in the massively successful I, Keano in ‘05) and has tapped into the changing climate better than most.
“With the times we live in now, the barometer of the nation is definitely politics. All politics. The barometer of the nation in ‘02 was Saipan, not Bertie.” Suddenly, he’s possessed by the contented ghosts of the Age Of Ahern. “Everybody was going, ‘Go on Bertie! Man United! Down to the pub! Sky Sports! We all have money, let’s buy a fuckin’ apartment in Bulgaria!’ Taxi drivers with four or five apartments in Thailand…
“I mean I used to get a lot of flak from people saying that I made Bertie Ahern cuddly. What else could I do? Because Bertie Ahern was cuddly. He was presiding over a government which was creating a thousand jobs a week, people were too busy spending money, there was no interest in politics. I watched Reeling In The Years 2005 a few weeks ago – no political stories. On the whole programme. On Reeling In The Years! Which you associate with: ‘1983 and Charlie Haughey is battling with Garret FitzGerald! This crisis! That crisis! Hung Dáils…’ No political stories for 2005. Construction, that’s all you saw. Bertie in a hard hat.”
So what’s an impressionist to do at times like these? Outline the role, Rosenstock. “It’s the same as it ever was. I’ve always thought the role of someone like me is to reflect what’s going on, to hold a mirror as it were. And the mirror should be slightly skewed, it shouldn’t just be a copy. You should almost be showing why it’s ridiculous, why something is awful or desperate or sad.”
You suspect every single comedian out there is secretly hoping for something to go wrong at any given moment. Don’t judge them, they need fresh crises to joke about. “Yeah, we have the Joe Duffy factor,” he grins. “We’re all Liveline-rs! Liveline-rs waiting for somebody to fall down the escalator in Terminal 2. We kinda want something to go horribly wrong so we can write a great sketch for it and then for it to be fixed the next day, so it doesn’t actually do any lasting damage.”
Mario maintains that this made the job of his predecessors easier in the ‘80s, and recently argued that we should take off the rose-tinted headphones when we listen back to stuff like Scrap Saturday. “It was the only thing around at the time,” he shrugs today. “There was a massive political target, almost the greatest, most colourful political target of all time, Charles Haughey. If you can’t have fun with Charles Haughey and Pádraig Flynn then you’re in trouble. They did it rather well, I don’t think they always hit the mark. I always notice when they replay bits of Scrap Saturday on the radio, there’s only one or two bits they ever play. In other words, there’s not a whole lot that people seem to want to hear.”
Over the course of today’s chat, Mario is remarkably candid, particularly for a man not entirely at ease with being interviewed, with opening up and letting the world see the real personality behind the personalities. He’s careful to keep his TV chat show appearances to a minimum, in order to preserve the mystique required to believably act as someone else entirely.
“Maybe I’ll grow out of it, but I have a thing in the back of my head where I think the more you show of yourself on screen – as yourself – the more people won’t be surprised by you as a character. They’ll figure you out – the way you move your eyes, your cheekbones, just the look of you. Then audiences get tired of looking at you and go ‘oh, that’s just Mario doing an accent.’ It’s a bit precious to be honest, maybe people would like to see who I am but I think it takes away from your performances.
“I think the first person I ever saw saying this was Robert De Niro. Not to compare myself to Robert De Niro but when you see somebody like that coming out with it, you definitely take a lesson off them. Daniel Day-Lewis is the same. When you watch them in a film, you don’t want to go ‘that’s the guy I saw being interviewed on the couch.’ You want to be going ‘no, this is the guy in the movie...’”
He rolls an arm my way.
“‘...This is the mass murderer Craig Fitzpatrick.’”
I don’t think that’s a role I’ve ever played, Mario.
“No,” he says with a friendly grin. “You just look like one...”
But enough about the dangerous aura I’m apparently giving out, let’s get back to the process. With those nods to Day-Lewis and De Niro, we have to ask: the impressionist doesn’t go in for all that method acting malarkey does he? Hopefully he’s not sitting at the dinner table, head lowered, eyes staring forward in derision, asking his son pointed questions about the IMF à la ‘the distinctive Vincenzo’.
“I have to say I don’t believe in that method. It’s the usual question but what does Day-Lewis do if he’s required to play a serial killer? The only way he can truly experience what it’s like to be a serial killer is to do it. And also, you hear about him filming My Left Foot and remaining in character even when they broke for dinner and he was trying to eat. I can believe it but... how far does this go?!”
Living and breathing the characters isn’t all that necessary, then. The main aim? Make people laugh. And make it smart. There’s always a pill that needs sweetening, especially with the state we’re in at the moment.
“You’ve got to strike that line between funny, caustic and satirical,” Mario nods. “When you’re doing political sketches, you have to be funny. Otherwise you’re just a taxi driver going ‘they’re all a shower of cunts.’ That’s just a fella giving out. Jonathan Swift made A Modest Proposal kick home so much because it was funny. That’s why it sticks in your brain. It’s pretty easy to find something to say at the moment, let’s face it. And so I’m saying it as much as I can. I’m doing sketches fairly regularly about how I see things, which would be fairly in accordance with the accepted world view of things being dreadful. We are being micromanaged, even more than we’re lead to believe by outside guys. They give us austerity measures, we try to impose those measures and then we’re told it’s not good enough, we need to do more. So how high do we have to jump? Do we really care about this crisis anyway? Are we going to be bailed out at the end of the day? Is it all just futile anyway, is the whole fucking world going to explode?”
Laughing in the face of defeat and certain death. Lampooning all those lost causes. Is satire in a healthy state today?
“It is. Loads of people are doing it. How good is it? Well, everybody can make up their own minds up on that.” He says he’s always enjoyed the Après Match crew and is a “great admirer” of Dave McSavage. What about the pretenders to his radio throne over at Montrose? Does he have time for Nob Nation? “I hear it and I would not be a fan,” Rosenstock admits. “I think Oliver Callan has no problems with mimicry at all but I think the massive problem is the writing. We need to move beyond ‘Up The Áras’ jokes, ‘builders’ cracks’ and ‘topping the polls’ jokes. We need to move beyond smut and innuendo, beyond lowest common denominator humour. There needs to be some decent writing. Unfortunately in the case of Nob Nation, there isn’t.”
It does seem to be an oft-neglected and seldom appreciated part of the art.
“Well, I think it’s the most important part. Although there are some characters I’d like to think I voice really well, for me it’s never been about the accuracy of the voice, it’s always been about the character. So for example, the Joan Burton I do sounds nothing like the real Joan Burton but people love to think it does. I think that’s funnier. You aim for almost hijacking the person’s real personality and making your alter ego come to the fore. You’ve got to find ways of saying something. Otherwise you’re just the guy down the pub who does his Eamon Dunphy and there are millions of them. Unfortunately, sometimes on the radio you hear too many voices with nothing to say.”
But that’s not Mario Rosenstock, the man of many voices and with plenty on his mind. The man of many faces, each a skewed mirror, reflecting the bizarre personalities that inhabit this island and the – laughable, in its way – personality of the country itself. And you don’t need to walk down a red carpet in Kilkenny to recognise that as an outstanding achievement.

Gift Grub Live 2 runs in the Olympia, Dublin from November 14-19 and 21-26. Gift Grub 12 is out now on EMI Records. Mario Rosenstock appears on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show, weekdays from 7am to 9am on Today FM.