Truth or dare

According to presenter Colin Murphy, the funniest moment in the current RTE television series The Unbelievable Truth ended up on the digital age equivalent of the cutting room floor.

It occurred when one of the actors, comedian Colm McDonnell, came up with a line about somebody kissing Michael Flatley and finding that he tasted vaguely of beetroot.
“I thought it was a great line, “says Murphy, “but when RTE saw it they made us take it out for legal reasons. I can’t possibly imagine how a simple harmless line like that could be deemed to be slanderous or libelous, but they’re you go. That’s what we’re up against.”
Murphy, already known to us for his Blizzard of Odd series on RTE, is now safely back home in Belfast and is only mildly aware of the reaction to a series which viciously targets well-known Irish celebrities, from The Corrs to Roy Keane, and the afore-mentioned Flatley.
Each of them is put through the mincer in the guise of telling their story like never before in standard straight-faced TV documentary style, with footage of the featured celebrity intercut with interviews with those who profess to known them and linked by Murphy’s acerbic commentary.
Thus it was revealed for the first time that The Corrs had actually been made in a factory in Athlone and we were introduced to the missing fifth Corr, Lorraine.
The show’s philosophy is firmly based in the age-old Irish tradition of having a go at anyone who becomes rich or famous or both.
“We’re great when it comes to encouraging people when they’re on the way to the top,” believes Murphy, “but once you get there you’re really in for it. Suddenly the same people start saying you’re shite. I suppose it’s a sort of defence mechanism we’ve developed to compensate for own lack of success. But look at The Corrs. They’re totally crap, shite and bland. Yet they sell shitloads of records all over the world. There’s got to be an explanation for that!”
So how did they come to pick the specific targets for the first series? “It was easy,” admits Murphy. “We just picked the usual suspects. There’s a big gene pool of Irish celebrities and we picked the biggest ones, like Eddie Irvine, Colin Farrell, Bono, Roy Keane and so on – preferably people I don’t like myself. One of the shows is more general in that it looks at the Irish people who’ve been successful in the British media, like Terry Wogan, Graham Norton, Eamon Andrews, people like that.”
Tucked away in Belfast, he’s not aware of any of the response to the series so far, apart from hearing about a couple of maulings in the press.
“People up here wouldn’t want to admit they even saw the show in case they’d give you a big head.” He has only a marginal input into the script, but he admits that with having to run each script by lawyers and RTE meant that some of the best bits have to be chopped.
“When somebody thinks you could be sued for suggesting that somebody rich and famous smells vaguely of beetroot, you can only wonder where did that come from? Was he perhaps beaten up at school for having a piss that looked faintly like beetroot and he developed a beetroot complex every since? You’d have to worry about somebody like that!”
The series is produced by the team responsible for five series of The Blizzard of Odd and hosted by the same Murphy and there’s a core acting cast of about four or five, such as the drag act Heidi Konnt and Judas The Satanist who make regular appearances.
“But,” explains Murphy, “much of the script has to be written around whatever footage we want to use, and obviously you can’t use the same gag over and over. So it’s not as easy as it might look.”
While there’s been no talk of a second series, Murphy salivates at the thought of who he’d would like to go for.
“There’s certainly no shortage of targets. I’d love to do Chris de Burgh, Sinead O’Connor, Daniel O’Donnell, Joe Dolan, Dolores O’Riordan, Liam Neeson, people like that. And Gabriel Byrne, he’s made a whole bunch of films that were howlers.”
When I point out to him that there are no politicians in the series, he explains that the objects of his scorn are celebrities, the rich and famous.
Apart from politicians, the only other people safe from his acerbic tongue would be his friends. But even they need not necessarily sleep too easily, since Murphy admits, “Everything I say is a lie.”
RTE’s beetroot lobby notwithstanding, he dismisses any notion that any of the featured celebs is likely to sue. “Sure they’d only look ridiculous. Imagine taking a television programme to court because it claimed you were a genetically modified human being? I think it’s a little unlikely.”