On the tenth anniversary of the comedian’s untimely death, Myles Dungan reminisces with Gerry Stembridge (BA ‘79, MA ‘80, HDipEd ‘81) on Dermot Morgan’s journey from Theatre L in UCD to Craggy Island, via Scrap Saturday

It started with the hapless and hilarious Big Gom and the Imbeciles in UCD’s Theatre L (the eponymous crooner being a send-up of that oversized Thomist of the country and Irish persuasion) and it ended tragically and prematurely 10 years ago after a triumphant second series from the surreal Craggy Island, home of the child-priest Fr Dougal, the satantic Fr Jack, the demented Mrs Doyle and the presiding genial, Fr Ted Crilly.

In between, the career of one of Ireland’s most resilient comedians waxed and waned. Dermot Morgan (BA ‘74, HDipEd ‘75) needed to be philosophical as he watched the highs of full houses for his stand-up shows in the Olympia crash against the lows of an RTÉ TV series truncated into a single ‘special’.

Morgan was unusual for a comedian in being just as funny off duty as he was on stage or on screen. He could also be chaotic and undisciplined. I know of at least one unfortunate RTÉ Radio producer who would tear his hair out on a weekly basis when Morgan, consumed by other projects (the real and the patently unrealisable), failed to come up with his quota of material for a weekly radio series. Following a salvo of phone calls to a coven of much lesser talents (your humble scribe included), enough scripts would materialise to ensure that half an hour was filled on a Saturday morning.

In late 1990, RTÉ agreed to allow Morgan to do something highly unusual for radio (and I don’t mean to create a comedy series that actually made people laugh out loud), which was to independently produce a series of eight comedy programmes. On TV such an occurence was commonplace but on radio it was virtually unprecedented to farm out production of any kind.

Gerry Stembridge, co-writer and studio director of the beloved Scrap Saturday, a series that made us laugh while we held our breath (a difficult feat I know), wondered if RTÉ had gone too far this time. He and Morgan had first met across a crowded Literary and Historical Society (L&H) event in UCD in 1980. Morgan, fresh from his successes on The Live Mike on RTÉ TV, was guest speaker, Stembridge was resident, L&H, worldly-wise cynic. No respecter of rank, the student heckled the guest. “Dermot heckled me back,” Stembridge recalls. “When we met 10 years later I wondered if he remembered the encounter. He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. All the while we worked together I never mentioned it. Now I’ll never know.”

That meeting, in the autumn of 1990, took place in an upstairs room in Ballsbridge, at the office of Cue Productions, Morgan’s company. Intrigued by a ‘youth’ comedy series called Nothing To It which Stembridge had written and directed for RTÉ TV, Morgan was sounding out the Limerick man to see if he might possibly be interested in contributing to a new radio comedy series. It was going to be called Scrap Saturday (“A name which did not make me feel wonderful,” admits Stembridge). Having recently left RTÉ at the time, Stembridge was, in his own words, “ready for something else”, and agreed, or so he thought, to be part of a team of writers contributing to the series. It was only at the second meeting that he realised he was the team!

Stembridge suspects that the size of the creative panel was dictated by Morgan’s difficulty in getting anyone to work with him. He was aware of the comedian’s reputation for disorganisation so his working philosophy was a simple one. The scripts were divided on a 50/50 basis (they never wrote together) and “Dermot soon realised if he didn’t write his half that only half a show would get written because I wouldn’t do any more”.

He also recalls Morgan’s unbounded buoyancy and positivity. At that first meeting in Ballsbridge, he had insisted to Stembridge that, “people are gasping for this, if it takes off it will be huge”. Stembridge nodded politely, but he’d seen that kind of optimism before. It took about four or five episodes before he realised they were actually creating something which would, despite its brief life, have a huge impact. Aside from the often searing scripts, Stembridge feels part of the success was down to Morgan’s PR nose. “He was above all a great man at feeding journalists and after a while you had all sorts of positive stuff turning up in the papers.”

Perhaps it was the combination of Morgan and Stembridge, or maybe it was the tag team of Charles Haughey and PJ Mara (as portrayed by Morgan and Owen Roe), but Stembridge notes, “by the time of the election of Mary Robinson, we’d really taken off”.

A pub quiz question. How long did it last? Three years? Four? (At this point a discordant buzzer sounds.) Sorry – wrong answer. It was all over by the beginning of 1992, after three series – less than 18 months. “We didn’t even catch the end of the Haughey era,” Stembridge recalls, without a trace of wistfulness. “People like to assume RTÉ killed it, but that wasn’t the case. After the third series, I suggested a ‘softly, softly’ approach with RTÉ. We’d given them a winning series. Let’s wait and see what they’re offering. Morgan agreed and, frankly, time passed and RTÉ didn’t come looking. They probably expected us to approach them. They didn’t kill it off but they didn’t make any effort to restart it.”

In truth, both Stembridge and Morgan were ready to move on anyway. “There wasn’t a hunger in us to redo it. I actually felt a little bit relieved.” Furthermore, Stembridge reckons once Scrap Saturday had become a national institution, Morgan’s mind had shifted to other things. His thoughts were turning back to forging a successful TV career. He was not to know at the time that he would do just that, but by performing other people’s material rather than his own. Arthur Mathews, Graham Linehan and Channel Four would make Morgan a household name in the UK. Sadly, he did not live to reap the rewards of the apotheosis that was Father Ted.

And part of the secret of the working relationship that gave us “Maaaaara” and Donie Cassidy’s mobile wig? “I discovered a way of getting annoyed with him which made him work,” says Stembridge. For an Irish nation starved of decent political satire at the end of the ghastly 1980s, it was like Columbus discovering America.