High on comedy

Tedious production and tangy glue at Hot Press in the 1980s lead to creative genius; nobody's talking Martin McGuinness on Let's Talk, but the Folks on the Hill have him down to a tee

The passing of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey was marked with much incisive analysis of his background and motivations in this and other publications. Yet because a considerable time has elapsed since his retirement from Dáil Éireann, one suspects that people's sense of the totality of his character has slipped with time, so that the public were left clutching onto an ever decreasing number of lingering impressions. The supreme irony is that, for many people, one of the impressions of him that springs most easily to mind is not a memory of him at all, but the memory of the fictitious Charles Haughey invented by Dermot Morgan in Scrap Saturday.

Chain Reactions, presented by Simon Delaney, (RTÉ 1, Thursday, 10.15pm) ended its run strongly this week with an examination of the evolution of Irish comedy and satire that gave birth to the aborted triumph of Scrap Saturday and the sustained achievement of Father Ted.

There always has to be a large element of contrivance in the neat brush-strokes of a "what if" version of history like Chain Reactions. Some links are always tenuous – for example, it might strain credibility slightly to suggest that civilised life in Ireland, in the form of comedy and music, emerged solely from the lynch-pin of Hot Press. But for a magazine founded in 1977, Hot Press has been incredibly successful in reinventing itself as essential reading for successive generations, with new blood merging with stalwarts from that first issue like Oliver Sweeney. We live in a computer age, where this column will depart my laptop by email to be electronically dropped into its space within Village. But magazine production in the 1980s was a more laborious and sociable affair, involving realms of printed copy being cut by scalpel and pasted into place, with everyone working in a magazine (or a small publishers) likely to emerge at the end of the day stoned from the smell of glue and Pritt Stick.

It was a world where layout artists, like the legendary Syd Bluett in In Dublin, were king, and everything worked to their pace, as they bent over their desks at work that couldn't be hurried. The premise of Chain Reactions was that it was the very slowness of this laborious lay-out work in the Hot Press office which led to contributors like Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan having time to let their imaginations run riot. While they were downstairs in the International Bar, drinking and honing the comic writing talents which led to Father Ted, on the tiny stage upstairs in that same bar a new generation of comics like Ardal O'Hanlon were cutting their teeth. The whole programme rather grew into a nostalgia-fest, but it made for such entertaining viewing that I only had to close my eyes to feel stoned on Pritt Stick and glue.

A sense of irony goes a long way, which is probably why the Northern Ireland version of Questions and Answers is entitled Let's Talk. Excellently refereed by Mark Carruthers, Let's Talk (BBC1, Thursday, 10.45pm) is primarily fascinating for the experience of watching people not talk to each other.

Large amounts of money are seemingly being wagered on whether Bill O'Herlihy manages to get through the World Cup on television without saying "okidoki". One wonders if some bookie would give similar odds on whether Jeffrey Donaldson would get through another Let's Talk without actually addressing Martin McGuinness, who is sitting beside him. In this long running double act, McGuinness perpetually addresses Donaldson and Donaldson replies by addressing the audience. Mr Donaldson might not like ever being compared to Charles Haughey, but the parody of him on Folks on the Hill (BBC 1, Friday, 10.45pm) is so incredibly – if unfairly – funny that it becomes increasingly hard to separate the parody from reality.

Personally, I'd stick to watching Folks on the Hill, on the premise that you will learn more from it than from the sterile set pieces of people pretending to talk.