Feckers by John Waters Read Free Book Online Page B

Neil Blaney would have basked in any glory that might have arisen. He must therefore be conferred, if only symbolically, with the blame. The ultimate irony is that Blaney was one of the most unapologetic republicans to emerge in Irish politics in the second half of the twentieth century.

10 Gay Byrne
    W hen, at the end of the twentieth century, Gay Byrne retired as host of The Late Late Show , his departure was attended by a predictable avalanche of commentary focused on his contribution to the ‘modernization’ of Irish society. Reading account after account of how Gay Byrne had led Ireland out of the depths of Stygian blackness, it was difficult to keep stifling the yawns. For anyone reading such treatises would have been driven to the conclusion that, were it not for Gaybo and his Late Late , the people of Ireland would have been incapable of boiling an egg or operating a flush toilet. And not merely was The Late Late essential to our ability to stand unaided on our hind legs, but it was always unmissable.
    In fact, The Late Late was never any good except when you didn’t see it. You could sit week after week watching a monotonous parade of mediocrities and then, Lent over and your penance completed, the one week you skipped out to the pub you could be sure that nobody would talk about anything else except what had happened on The Late Late . This suggested that either you were unlucky to always go out on the wrong nights, or The Late Late was never as scintillating in reality as was subsequently ‘remembered’. It was afterwards, in the days following certain shows, rather than on the screen on Saturday or, later, Friday night, that the legend was created.
    Of course, in the beginning nobody expected The Late Late to be anything other than a mildly diverting talk show. Its ‘importance’ was not an issue until the 1980s, when it was adapted as part of the apparatus of modernization employed to propel us forward from the ignorance of pre-television Ireland. It then became the main springboard used to catapult us out of a mythical and distorted version of our past, which had been caricatured to provide the maximum quality of propulsion. Since reality was much more complex than this caricature required, it was necessary for those who sought to bring about certain changes in Irish society to manipulate the evidence so as to increase our desire to ‘progress’ by making the past seem as revolting as possible.
    It is even taken half seriously by some people, that, as the Fine Gael TD Oliver J. Flanagan once jokingly put it in a Dail speech, ‘there was no sex in Ireland until Teilifis Eireann went on the air’. In truth, there was far more sex in Ireland before The Late Late , if only because people had nothing else to do in the long evenings. Declining fertility rates in recent decades suggest that people started having less sex from about the time The Late Late Show went on the air.
    A researcher on The Late Late once related how, when he compiled a selection of the programme’s greatest hits for some anniversary or other, he was afterwards assailed by people wondering why he had not included the episode known as ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’. He asked them if they knew precisely what this item entailed, and they responded with claims that this was one of the seminal moments in Irish television history. Yes, he said, but do you know that in the episode of ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’ there was no bishop and no nightie?
    All that occurred on the screen on the night in February 1966, when this stirring tale of modern Ireland unfolded, was that a woman, taking part in a light-hearted party game based on a format ‘borrowed’ from another TV station, when asked what colour nightie she had been wearing on the night of her honeymoon, replied ‘none’, before quickly adding ‘white’.
    It can hardly have been news, even in the most ‘traditional’ parts of Ireland, in 1966, that people sometimes took their