Twenty years on - remembering Dermot Morgan

Long before there was Fr Ted, there was Fr Trendy, and then, Scrap Saturday. 
Frank Hall and his Pictorial Weekly coming out of Ballymagash series was but a dim and distant memory when Dermot Morgan and his friends launched a Saturday morning satire series on RTE radio, and Mario Rosenstock's Gift Grub and Oliver Callan's Nob Nation would come along later as modern imitators. 
But for a generation, Scrap Saturday was, and still is, the greatest Irish satire show. It was a very daring series for the State broadcaster to take on at the time. There was a suggestion that RTE wanted to see the scripts before the show was broadcast, but this wasn’t always possible as they were being rewritten up to the last minute of broadcast or adlibbed a lot of the time.
Charlie was Taoiseach, with Gerry Collins as Minister for Foreign Affairs, Michael Noonan as Fine Gael leader and what Morgan, Gerry Stembridge, Pauline McLynn and Owen Roe got away with at the time was incredible. Before there were ever any allegations of multi-million donations or Terry Keane and her love affair, the Scrap Saturday team were depicting Haughey’s lifestyle as very expensive and even had a bat called Terry trying to get into his Christmas party. One of the most amusing was the Christmas nativity scene, with Dessie O’Malley as the bleating lamb, while there were characters such as Bernie the Baghdad Nurse and of course, Charlie Bird roaring all over the place. 
Yours truly recorded may of these shows from the radio on a Saturday morning, and made a fortune selling bootleg tapes at college, before the compilation CD was even hear of! And during these years, Dermot Morgan did many live shows - 'Jobs for the Boys' where his Padraig Flynn ‘Flynnstone’ character was another favourite. I can recall attending one in the Tivoli Theatre, where I got to participate in a small way from the audience when he pounced on me in my aisle seat to do an impersonation,  and one in the County Club in Dunshaughlin, when I won tickets in this very newspaper, the Meath Chronicle, in my student days
I can also remember where I was on this day 20 years ago – it was nowhere out of the ordinary, driving home on a Sunday morning after from a night out in Trim, when the 12 noon headlines came on the car radio.
Dermot Morgan had died in London, just after wrapping up on a series of Fr Ted, on which he was working for Channel 4.  Like Fr Larry Duff receiving a call from Fr Ted, I almost drove off the road. Twenty years on from Dermot's passing, we say thanks for the laughs.