Dermot was a one-off and I miss him terribly

LAST week was the 20th anniversary of Dermot Morgan’s death. I remember hearing the chilling news from his aide de camp, John Fisher. And it was hard to imagine that such a livewire, vibrant spirit had been silenced.

Journalist Sam Smyth, of whom Dermot did a wicked impression, suspected that it might be a classic Dermot prank call.

Alas the story was true. At 45 and on the brink of international stardom. Dermot’s light was extinguished by the cruel hand of fate.

Picture this. At 9am on a Saturday morning, the car parks of golf clubs all over Ireland would be full of cars containing single male occupants. They would be tuned into the satirical programme and when it finished at 9.30am, there would a rush to the first tee.

Without being sexist, Scrap Saturday had a male bias, a snigger for the lads. His humour was mostly targeted at male politicians, male sporting icons, and male lampoon in general.

Dermot was at his brilliant best when he was extemporising in Doheny and Nesbitt’s and the Berkeley Court.

He would entertain his friends with his most cutting humour, and a night out with him saw Dermot disappear into the background to be replaced by a bewildering set of characters.

Father Ted was the watershed in Dermot’s career and it was significant that the programme did not originate in RTÉ.

His interaction with the national broadcaster was fraught with disharmony and discord.

This uneasy relationship was rooted in one of the primary weaknesses of the RTÉ system at that time, failure to manage a maverick talent like Dermot’s.

He was no saint and he could be prickly, especially when it came to scripts and deadlines.

Like a lot of inspired comedians he sailed close to the wind, but instead of finding ways to ameliorate the situation, the powers that be chose instead to butt heads.

At one point, having faced a further indignity, Dermot turned up in RTÉ driving a Mercedes Benz in a show of defiance that he didn’t need their money. This was vintage Dermot. The money for this purchase would have come from Frank ‘The Bank’ Dalton, a saviour to Dermot and myself in the lean times of the late Seventies.

Frank was the bank manager in UCD and myself and Dermot would inveigle loans and overdrafts in exchange for a bit of showbiz gossip and the odd ticket for the Late Late show.

Dermot was in college at this time and he and I bonded over our mutual love of comedy songs and parodies.

Dermot had a terrible streak of insecurity and he agonised endlessly on almost everything.

My joke about Dermot was that he would come in my front door, throw himself backwards onto the couch and I would shrink him for an hour and send him off refuelled with optimism.

After all his unhappiness with RTÉ, Dermot was tentative in taking on the role of Father Ted, a straight role as such.

HE was also putting himself in the hands of unproven writers and at that point nobody anticipated that Father Ted would go on to become such an iconic comedy masterpiece.

Three days before he died, Dermot called me in a state of high excitement.

He had just come from a meeting with the BBC and he was on the brink of getting his own series.

The apogee of his career would have been a show that he could star in and also be the writer.

We will never know if that ambition would have been fulfilling enough. Probably not. He had a restless mind, a fine sense of the ridiculousness of life and a cold eye for the humbug that passes for political debate.

Most of all Dermot was a great friend and those who spoke at the gathering to celebrate his anniversary reiterated those sentiments.

Ni bheidh a leitheid aris ann!