Panel beating

10 minutes and 50 seconds into our conversation, and Apres Match’s Gary Cooke is gone. In his place is that disagreeable Dublin drawl, so familiar that you can almost hear the pout that comes with it. I didn’t ask Gary to summon the spirit of Eamon Dunphy, but I think that deep down I wanted to hear it, and I think he probably knew that.
It’s no coincidence that Apres Match really grabbed the public’s attention in 1998, the year that Cooke, and Dunphy, joined the existing team of stand-up Barry Murphy and actor Risteard Cooper. Although the team’s versions of Frank Stapleton and Bill O’Herlihy became instantly popular, it was Cooke’s Dunphy that really caught the public’s imagination.
The exaggerated impression of the pundit, more preening peacock than football pundit, became one of those instantly recognisable comedy characters, one that its creator has little chance of escaping. You get the feeling that like Ricky Gervais and that dance, people are waiting for Dunphy everywhere that Cooke goes. Must be a pain in the backside.
“It is, but if people have kids, you can’t really not do it,” says Cooke, “so the best thing to do is throw out a line. But personally I don’t like doing it at all. It’s fun doing it professionally, but I wouldn’t do it personally.”
Not only is it fun to do professionally, but it’s a nice little earner. The team’s last DVD went multi-platinum, and now they’re back for the World Cup and some more live dates. At Home with Apres Match will mix live World Cup games on a big screen with interruptions and analysis from the team.
Isn’t there a sense that with characters so familiar and popular, people will laugh at pretty much anything they say?
“In a live context, with a home crowd, you’ll get away with a load of stuff that you wouldn’t get away with elsewhere,” he admits, “but I know from live experience they’ll laugh at anything for the first five minutes. And after that it’s kind of like, ‘Where’s the good lines?’”
Having worked extensively as an actor when he was younger, Cooke is aware of the positives and negatives of working on the stage. He says that while feeding off the audience is great, sometimes, “you get the sense of expectation and it can be a bit overwhelming.”
The trio are also aware of the danger that, after so long, the act might become tired. Indeed it was a week and a half into this year’s tournament before they filmed any clips with what Cooke describes as the “axis” of Dunphy, O’Herlihy and Stapleton. “I think if we had started with them it would’ve seemed stale, y’know?” he says. Instead the team has featured more of Football Focus, Sky Sports News and of course Mickey Kelly, from the GAA’s Department of Assimilation.
The basic concept was born in 1994, with Barry Murphy filming short inserts on his own. Cooper and Cooke joined over the next few years, with the result that some have seen the project as Murphy’s baby. But Gary points out that all three of the team are involved in the writing. “Sometimes we sit in a room and the three of us write stuff, and sometimes one of us writes something, and sometimes we sit in a room and do nothing.”
Given the massive success of Apres Match, it’s a bit surprising RTE hasn’t given the boys a blank cheque and full use of the comedy wigs department. Have the big guns at the station fully supported the project?
“The answer to that is yes and no,” says Gary. “Yes insofar as there’s probably no other station in the world that would allow you to go on air, right after their pundits have been on air, and make fun of them. RTE have got to be applauded for that. (But) in terms of developing ideas, we haven’t gotten to try and do anything that way since 1999. That’s a long time – Jaysus that’s nearly seven years – so you can take your own inference from that.”
Personally too there has been disappointment. Cooke was working on a comedy drama for the station, which never saw the light of day. “They rejected it,” he admits, “and I think that they miscalculated. I think that they were wrong to reject it, ‘cos I can guarantee that it would have delivered really well and would’ve gotten a really big audience. So I personally don’t feel supported by them.”
Gary takes his football punditry seriously, and he’s less than enthusiastic about the BBC’s coverage of the tournament, where the smugness of Gary Lineker and mangled English of Leonardo are trumped only by the nonsense of Ian Wright. “If I was responsible for a performance like Ian Wright’s, I’d expect to be fired,” he says, “he’s a fucking eejit.”
One thing Gary still has an appreciation for, and not just because it’s been paying off the mortgage for the past few years, is RTE’s selection of pundits, or the “Dream Team” as he calls them. “You’ve got the everyman asking the questions, Bill, who’s clever and bright. Then you’ve got Dunphy who’s the agitator, and Giles is kind of the sage.”
And what about Liam ‘Chippy’ Brady, the final component of the Dream Team?
“Chippy in a way is a weird cross between both of them. He’s kind of sage and (adopts Brady impression that is both scarily accurate and just plain scary), ‘You’re going to listen to what I’m fucking saying.’ I think each of the characters are perfectly calibrated for each other... I really do think they’re the Beatles of football punditry.”