The GAA’s 125th anniversary celebrations are apparently being given the Pat the Plank treatment tomorrow night in the form of a Late Late Show special (RTE 1, throw-in 9.30 pm). The late, great Joe Dolan had one of these the other week but sadly he wasn’t around to milk all the adulation. Nickey Brennan and all the other GAA bigwigs won’t, I trust, make the same mistake ahead of the show at Montrose tomorrow night.
My spies tell me that there will be at least one Mayo connection to tomorrow night’s TV extravaganza. This is in the form of an appearance by the Cill Aodhain Choral Society from sweet Kiltimagh, who will be sharing the bill with Aclare crooner, Tommy Fleming. I’m not sure if Kiltimagh’s own Big Tom Byrne will be in their ranks – I think not as, if I’m not mistaken, the same man kept his singing to the football field.
It promises to be a good night’s entertainment, Pat Kenny’s wooden stewardship notwithstanding, and the show is an appropriate way to kick-start the Association’s anniversary celebrations. Will there by an All-Ireland medal for everyone in the audience? On second thoughts, seeing as the audience will be made up entirely of GAA greats from down the years, a good number of them will already have All-Ireland medals of their own at home.
Rushing out to Mass but I will unload anyway. Firstly the kids were watching another channel and I could only dip over. What I saw annoyed me. First up what Bertie, I took a leaf out of An Spalpins book and when I dont like something I swittch off or away. When I returned after the mumbler finished it was to see a comedian (at least I think he was a comedian). I honestly found him embaressing and cringey. Naturally he had a cut at Mayo. Time to switch once more. Finally I returned to hear Fat Face Cahill praise Cora (correct) and insult the forwards of the Mayo senior team. This from a man whose county team last featured in a senior final back in 1995, Mayo, bad forwards and all, have played four since then. Once more I returned to watching Billy Connelly, now he’s funny. More than likely the rest of the prog was great and maybe I have a soft centre and get easily upset!
I sat through it all, ontheroad, and while I enjoyed much of it, some of the choices as regards guests were a bit bizarre.
I didn’t object to seeing Ba-Ba-Bertie there, given that he is a genuine GAA man and he was instrumental in giving our tax money to the GAA for the Croke Park redevelopment but what the fuck was Dunphy doing there with him? Dunphy knows bugger all about the GAA and his contribution to the proceedings was embarrassing – Henry Shefflin being the Ronaldo of hurling being the highpoint of what he had to say (and fair play to The Plank for pointing out to him that he was on record as saying that Ronaldo was no good!). Putting him on as one of the first contributors to a GAA anniversary celebration smacked of a D4 know-nothing mindset to the programme and I think that coloured the proceedings from the outset.
Although I thought the guy doing the Enda take-off wasn’t that bad, they could have done worse to put the real Enda on with Bertie, given his family GAA connections and to provide him with a chance to appear on the box when talking about something other than politics.
The most bizarre contributor, however, was Brush Shields. Could they really find no-one better to go on with Spillane (who I thought was good) and Eileen Dunne (who was also fine)? The guy is a total fool, had nothing of interest to say and then they let him go on and butcher an already awful song (The Fields of Athenry), a song which has nothing whatsoever to do with the GAA and which only began to be sung at Croke Park when the rugby lads arrived on the scene. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why this was considered appropriate (more D4 out-of-touch with anything outside Ballsbridge, I think) and the faces of the GAA top brass during Brush’s music-meets-masturbation effort showed clearly what they thought about the performance.
I thought that more could have been made of the audience – which was packed to the gills with GAA greats – but it was always going to the pot luck as regards who was going to be picked out. It would have been nice to hear something from Dermot Earley, for example – a man who has excelled professionally as well as on the field of play.
For once, I thought Des Cahill was alright – at least he knows his GAA and was genuinely in thrall at seeing all those famous faces in the audience. It would undoubtedly have been a better programme if Des had been allowed to present it.
The Kiltimagh lads and lassies sang in tune with Tommy Fleming as well so it wasn’t all off-key but, in terms of production and how the show was put together, it could have been far, far better.
I only flicked in and out of it to be honest, but it looked awful shite (apologies WJ for the bad language!)….
Pat the plank hadn’t a clue what he was talking about in his “packed show”! It was more a tribute to the Kerry Dublin football era moreso than anything else…
You should know by now, Mayoman, that I’m the last person in the world you need to be apologising to about profanities!
Pat was totally clueless and, as I said above, his choice of panellists was poor enough too. That’s always the problem with RTE when they do anything open-ended on the GAA: all they can think about is the so-called Kerry/Dublin rivalry and it ends up with the same old faces telling the same old stories. It was such a pity, as they had loads of interesting GAA heads they could have talked to but it was obvious that Pat didn’t know one from the other.
The program was very disappointing considering the depth of talent in the GAA. It was the same old faces all over, nothing new and nothing to encourage the young viewer to watch or to get involved. Dunphy sent a lot of people to the pub, what a crappy choice of starter. The “comedian” was also a cringe fest – who thinks that guy is funny?