Comedy of errors

While RTÉ has always strained to produce decent comedy, most of the howlers have been provided off-screen writes Damian Corless

Another Riordans' plotline had a memorably unforeseen outcome. The fraught issue of marriage break-up was introduced when Jude Riordan and Jim Hyland split up. The eventual upshot was that Derek Young, the actor who played Jim Hyland, found himself forced to leave the show because the unpopularity of his character was damaging his career outside television. Members of the public were constantly interrupting his stage performances with yells of: "Go back to Jude!"

In 1992 the nation could only laugh while RTÉ executives explained that Irish radio's only must-hear show, Scrap Saturday, was categorically not being scrapped. It was merely being "not continued". The following year the station pulled out all the promotional stops for a new TV comedy series, Extra Extra, Read All About It. However, just before Episode 1 went on air someone realised the show was going to get slaughtered (which it duly did), and in the lone funny moment it produced, the continuity announcer introduced it as a "new drama".

The most celebrated climbdown in the history of Irish broadcasting was the axing of The Spike in 1978. The Spike was trumpeted as a warts'n'all examination of urban life as it manifested itself in a Dublin technical school. The first few episodes passed by uneventfully enough – there were some complaints about crude language, but nothing to fuse the switchboards.

On the contrary, the viewing public warmed to the series in sufficient numbers to put the show at No 3 in the TAM ratings behind perennial favourites Hall's Pictorial Weekly and Quicksilver.

The critics, however, hadn't a good word to say about The Spike. One writer deemed it "ill-judged, badly-written, wildly exaggerated, tasteless, naive and so embarrassing in its infantile approach to serious matters".

However, as the series wore on, Hibernia magazine's TV critic had a change of heart. "I vowed a couple of weeks ago that I would write nothing more on this blackboard bungle," he wrote, "but the series is now becoming cherishable. RTÉ seems to have found the magic formula for successful comedy." With Episode 5, the show entered legend.

In that memorable instalment, the school hosts a series of evening classes in subjects which include Fur Appreciation, Overcoming Shyness and Floor Scrubbing. In a not untypical line of dialogue, the Fur Appreciation teacher advises: "Having got your skin soft and pliable you will be ready for formication."

Meanwhile, the man giving the class in Overcoming Shyness is so painfully bashful that he downs large measures of Dutch courage before facing his audience. This paves the way for a hilarious scenario where the tanked-up teacher demonstrates the techniques of "bottom pinching" and "the friendly crotch grab". The episode reaches its surreal climax when the shyest girl in the class is miraculously cured. Quick as a flash she's next door whipping off her kit for the still life art group, and the viewing nation.

Strange but true: sown into the fabric of Episode 5 was an off-hand disparaging reference by one of the teachers to the League Of Decency. Slump forward Mr J B Murray, founder and Chairman of an organisation by the same name. Sitting at home that evening maintaining his customary vigil against filth, Mr Murray was seized with apoplexy. His wife told the press: "He got a pain in his chest while telephoning the newspapers to complain." According to the Irish Times, "The family tried to stop him watching it but he insisted and he got very worked up by the nude scene."

The show's series producer did himself no favours by arguing that the programme "was trying to examine attitudes of pupils and staff in a school to nudity". RTÉ's DG had a crisis on his hands. J B Murray was on the mend and spoiling for a fight. Several Limerick County Councillors were up in arms and FG's Education spokesman had drafted a stiff letter. Moloney "deferred" the show just hours before the next instalment was due to screen.

THE SPIKE GETS AXED proclaimed the Evening Press from its front page, although the shock news hadn't reached the rear of the newspaper where readers were promised an episode called Requiem For A Head. The teaser read: "When young Tommy Greene dies transporting explosives, one of Headmaster O'Mahony's best teachers comes under suspicion." When 9.20pm arrived, the station substituted Love Is The Answer, the story of an Italian boys' town founded by a Dublin priest.

The 'deferral' came too late for one actor in the series who required treatment after he was, as the Evening Press elegantly put it, "thumped by a fat elderly lady". A few days after the axing the nation awoke to the headline JB MURRAY IS BACK IN HOSPITAL. The unfortunate moralist was not much longer for this world, while The Spike was never seen again.