The Most Fertile Man In Ireland

A work of such pathetic, pitiable, piss-poor awfulness that it almost invites a perverse affection - and I’m being generous here on account of its Irishness - The Most Fertile Man In Ireland is quite unlike anything else you’ll ever run up against in your life. Attaining a level of comic sophistication that would put the saddest Saturday-evening ITV fare to shame, it’s fundamentally an indigenous take on the Paddies-as-retarded-virgins genre (closest living relatives: Waking Ned and The Closer You Get), with a tiresomely cloying ‘anti-sectarian’ twist added by way of an additional bonus.

Although it manages to become at least engagingly dumb for a moment here and there, The Most Fertile Man’s net effect is to leave you gasping for breath. It follows the adventures of its titular hero, Eamonn (Kris Marshall), a thoroughly nerdy twentysomething virgin of Northern-Irish Papist stock – pasty-faced, pigeon-chested, carrot-haired and, well, unattractive. When his virginity is almost forcibly removed by the extremely eager and experienced local slut, it soon transpires that she’s pregnant – and in no time, our intrepid hero becomes identified as (you’ve guessed) the most fertile man in Ireland.

This plunges him into an unwilling position of supreme power over Northern Ireland’s uncertain demographic future – Eamonn has it within his gift to fulfil the Rev Ian Paisley’s darkest prophecies about Fenian rats outbreeding the democratic majority (as if this were against the rules). However, his help is also being earnestly sought by the ‘other’ side – cue hilarious scenes of tight-faced, unsmiling wee Monicas and Elizabeths welcoming Eamonn into their immaculately-kept homes in order to service their reproductive needs.

As intriguing as Most Fertile Man probably sounds, and as potentially entertaining as the premise might hint, it must be gently pointed out that the film ranks alongside the most excruciatingly embarrassing I have witnessed in my entire life. The two or three jokes on which the whole thing is based wear very thin after their first repetitions, and the actors all look suitably embarrassed, with James Nesbitt’s stupendously unfunny turn as a fanatical loyalist bigot by no means the worst display on offer. Most insufferably at all, the actors have all apparently been instructed to exaggerate their Northern accents for the presumed comic effect. Memo to anyone ever minded to try it again: there is no sound on earth less inherently funny than an NI accent.

An episode best consigned to history and never even discussed again.