Johnnies vs Dev prove all has changed utterly
The 2 Johnnies’ Late Night Lock In RTÉ 2, Thursday The Records Show RTÉ One, Sunday
Best Place To Be RTÉ One, Tuesday
You have to hand it to the 2 Johnnies, Johnny ‘Smacks’ McMahon and Johnny ‘Johnny B’ O’Brien from Co. Tipperary. From humble beginnings with a podcast that became the most listened to in Ireland, they moved on to presenting a travel series from the United States for RTÉ, then taking over the drivetime show on RTÉ 2fm, and now to their own series on RTÉ 2 television, The 2 Johnnies’ Late Night Lock In. Their appeal is to culchies (and I use the word with caution, since that’s what they call themselves). Indeed, on the new show, they had a camera in Dublin and, picking individuals from a group that had gathered, they played a game called Dub or Culchie?, based on their perception of what the people were wearing and their general demeanour.
Their rise, by any standards, has been meteoric, and it shows how the path to fame has changed beyond recognition. Where once they would have had to put in the hard hours as Montrose interns, they effectively invented themselves and were bought as a package, and hats off to them for achieving that.
The problem is that it often seems as if they still can’t believe it themselves. For all their exposure and fame, they have the look of two lads who, in a crisis, have been plucked from the stands in a lastditch attempt to win a county final when the substitutes have run out.
What that leads to is over enthusiasm that needs to reined in, because The Late Night Lock In is a good idea, with a hint here and there of Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. The guests are present throughout, sitting at the bar, and are invited to join in the games.
The young audience standing around drinking their pints are as raucous as you might expect, and it’s a clever stroke to have a house band comprising older women.
I am not their audience, and I’m not supposed to be. I’m an older man from a Dublin suburban background, so road frontage, Superquinn sausages and country and Irish music are almost as alien to me as North Korea. And yet, despite a wobbly start when a woman put her best friend in the doghouse because she has a laugh like a seal, I got more involved in it as it went along. I could live without ever again seeing Una Healy show off the unusual talent of being able to raise both big toes in the manner of a double thumbs-up, and comedian Seann Walsh performing a manic riff on Henry the Hoover.
But I enjoyed the literal parochialism of the Parish Quiz, in which teams from Coolgreaney in my now home county of Wexford, and Whitegate in Cork, had to answer questions about their locality, though a later scene of Marty Morrissey surrounded by a women’s GAA team wearing Marty Morrissey masks was deeply perturbing.
The show presents an interesting snapshot of Ireland, never more so than when Walsh was pantomime booed when he said he no longer
drinks. It’s not always an Ireland I know well (county tops worn as leisurewear baffles me), but I enjoyed finding out a little more about it.
For a first show, it was much better than I expected and, with a tighter rein, it has a lot of potential.
A genuinely different Ireland was evident in The Records Show as Katie Hannon trawled through the National Archives (they have 50 million documents in boxes in the old Jacob’s biscuit factory) to tell stories about the closure of the railway to Donegal, the building of council houses, and a behind-thescenes kerfuffle over president Mary Robinson’s admission that she took a sleeping tablet before a flight to Somalia.
The critique of Robinson’s book about the trip reeked of distaste that seemed rooted in the misogyny embedded in the culture of the State since its foundation. During the drafting of the 1937 Constitution, a coalition of women’s groups sought to soften the clause that said a woman’s place was in the home.
Taoiseach Éamon de Valera replied that public opinion was against allowing women work as equals with men, even though these women made up half the population – and, indeed, elsewhere there was a list of jobs they could not do, including delivering post and acting as customs officials, presumably because they might have seen smuggled condoms. Ooh, the danger!
There was damning criticism of this policy in one letter sent to Dev, in which a woman who had taken part in the Rising, declared that the nascent State treated women worse than they had been under British rule. Little did she know it would take three more generations for that situation to change in any meaningful way.
One woman who decided enough was enough is Joan Gallagher. She and husband John decided in 2001 to leave Boyle in Co. Roscommon for a new life in Spain. Joan wanted their four sons to grow up in an open-minded country after seeing how her sister had, she said, ‘struggled with her sexuality’ before being able to marry a woman.
The couple moved a few years ago to Falset, not far from Tarragona, and converted an old building into the Priorat Aparthotel, and also now make their own wine. Just as new means of communication gave the Two Johnnies their start, it also allowed me to follow their project on X, formerly Twitter, and it was lovely to see them star in the first episode of Baz Ashmawy’s new RTÉ One series, Best Place to Be, in which he meets Irish people who have settled abroad.
I may not watch any more episodes, though. After the weather we’ve had this week, I might be sorely tempted to up sticks for somewhere sunnier myself.