What would certain people be doing if they weren’t stand up comedians?” I often wonder to myself, in a frenzied angle-seeking sort of way. Ardal O’Hanlon would, of course, inherit his father’s Dáil seat. The Oireachtas would echo with laughter at his crisp and quirky oratory, and the people of Carrickmacross would glide confidently into the future on the best of roads for another generation. Des Bishop would coach a young baseball team in a deprived inner-city area, fighting their disenfranchisement and frustrated by the lack of both support and anyone to play against. Barry Murphy would spend his time thinking up novel ways to embarrass people at bus stops and on golf courses.
And Colin Murphy would sit on his couch, can of beer in one hand and Marlboro Light in the other, shouting incredulous abuse at the sheer nonsense being perpetrated on his television set. In fact, he would pretty much be doing Blizzard Of Odd even if it were not returning for a fourth series on RTE 2, which it is.
Blizzard is one of those programmes on RTE which seem to survive and thrive on somehow flying beneath the conservative radar of the National Broadcaster. Whether they don’t know it’s there, they think it’s a cartoon about a potato in a snowstorm, or they know about it but simply don’t understand what is going on, who is to say? Part Robo-Mailbag, part Tele-blog, it is the ultimate in auto-ingestion. It’s a TV programme that lives off the corpses of other TV programmes. And sitting hunched in vulturine splendour on the couch is Colin Murphy: all squinting spleen and delightedly flabbergasted invective as he presents a dog’s dinner of out-takes, mistakes and piss-takes, rehashed with panache into a smorgasbord of shame.
Murphy found himself in the presenter’s seat as a result of his ability with pen and paper, allied to superior numeracy. He was the only one at the original audition who had actually taken the trouble to log the time-codes of the clips he chose to devour from the provided video footage. This superior technical ability, coupled with an innate tendency to swear at the television, made him a shoo-in as far as producer Marion Cullen was concerned.
Murphy is an old hand now as Blizzard Of Odd gears up for its fourth series starting in October. Not only that, but he seems to have carved a niche for himself in the dissection of odd television outside of RTE; he recently presented a series for BBC called TV Fads which rummaged through the archives of BBC NI to see how various areas of interest were represented over the years. Add to this the imminent return of The Panel, on which Murphy is also a fixture, and it becomes hard to see how we can avoid him.
Not that you should seek to avoid Colin. In fact, I urge you to seek him out in the flesh. I’m not advocating that you stalk him. That would be foolish, because he’s probably scarier than you in a narrow-alley situation. But if you see his name on a stand-up bill, go see. There are a few people in contention of “best kept secret of Irish stand-up” and Colin is one of the stronger contenders. Despite his TV profile as noted, I would bet there are many familiar with his mush who don’t even realise that he is one of the best Irish stand-ups you are likely to see on a stage. He has a controlled energy in his delivery of top-notch observational humour with the odd unexpected (even surreal) twist of the knife, and is always worth the money in.
He’s working on new material at the moment, and we take a while to ponder just how one is expected to work on new material while still entertaining the audience who are your guinea pigs. “Ah, I’ve found the answer to that,” he claims happily. “Alcohol”. Like all these things, once you know the answer it’s obvious. Murphy stumbled upon this truism anew recently when he went to a smallish, newish club in Belfast at The King’s Head, with the express intention of trotting out some newborn gags before the assembled mob. “It’s quite close to where I live, The King’s Head, so I ended up getting there a couple of hours early with nothing to do only drink. And all the new stuff worked a treat.” (Well, you would think that, wouldn’t you?)
Drunken forays of that sort aside, Murphy keeps his comedy muscles oiled and protruberant with regular MC gigs in a couple of venues, including the famous, nay infamous 'Empire Laughs Back' shows at The Empire in Belfast. “You can try out stuff when you’re MC because no-one expects you to be as funny as the acts.” This is an oft-observed oddity that a comedian as good as, or even better than, the other acts on the bill (as is often the case), can make an audience laugh more and for longer than anyone else on stage and still suffer such well-meaning post-match comments from punters as, “You’re not half bad yerself, chief. You should try doing an aul’ turn yersel’ sometime!”
But back to Blizzard Of Odd. Viewers can expect more of the same, but not as much web-based stuff as was once the case. “We did go through a phase when we did a lot of stuff about websites, but what people really want to see is TV they know being dismembered, or weird off-the-wall shite they never saw before.” In the latter category come the works of unknown and perhaps unknowable would-be Irish film directors who all send their proud oddities in to the Blizzard Of Odd hoping that they will be mad, bad or dangerous enough to know to make the grade. In that sense, the show has become the underground version of straight to video.
One worry is that the more mainstream output of the show’s RTE home has begun recently to fall in love with itself as distorted on Blizzard. It’s the Spitting Image syndrome. That show began to lose its edge, or at least become aware of the gravity of the establishment, when the figures in public life it ridiculed began to see such lampooning as a badge of distinction and, frankly, good PR. “I had one girl from some RTE programme come up to me recently and ask was I going to do her. For a moment I thought it was an indecent proposal, but it turns out these people want the kudos of having their piss taken on Blizzard."
Slots on the show will probably be hard to come by, if the general content is up to the standard of such promised gems as the “First Irish-made porn movie” which will debut in the new series. “It all happens in Donegal. There’s even an aul’ fellah outside the window talkin’ about the weather,” Colin enthuses. Understandably, with stuff like that in the pipeline, Murphy is not too worried about becoming RTE establishment just yet. Plus, as he points out, “I don’t come from here.” Whilst I am aghast at the hinted partitionist mentality, I can see how he can buzz down from Belfast, do his thing with the mad telly and go away again basically “not giving a toss what people think or worrying about bumping into people at Reynards.”