In 1989 I went to Ireland for the first time. I don’t know why it had taken so long. Some parts of the world you make a conscious effort to visit and others have to wait until fate delivers you there.
When the moment arrived for me to set foot on the Emerald Isle, it was as a result of a badly written song. An Irish friend from London, Seamus, had urged me to compose a piece for him and his mate Tim to sing at an International Song Competition which was held each year in his home town. Qualification for the final, he explained, was a formality provided I agreed to do a twenty-minute stand-up comedy set for the audience whilst the judges were out. Seamus wanted to perform a humorous song, and had asked me to come up with something that would ‘set it apart’ from the other mundane entries. In the event, what would set it apart would be a quite significant drop in standard.
The song I had written was called ‘I Wanna Have Tea With Batman’. Now I consider myself to be a good songwriter (in spite of my only commercial success being a one-off hit record called ‘Stutter Rap’ by Morris Minor And The Majors), but this song was…how can I put it?…yes, that’s it—poor. To their credit, Seamus and Tim conjured up a performance to match it.
In an extraordinary gesture which was at best surreal and at worst embarrassing, they dressed as Batman and Robin. At least that’s what they had aimed to do, but a limited costume budget had left them in borrowed tights, miscellaneous lycra and academic robes doubling as capes. They resembled a couple of children entered for a fancy dress competition by uninterested parents. Seamus seemed unconcerned, his theory of comedy being that if you had an ‘outrageous’ outfit, that was enough; and then he announced his master stroke that one of them would carry a teapot and the other a kettle.
One had to admire his courage, for he was performing in front of his home town and everyone he had grown up with was there. Friends, family, teachers, shopkeepers, barmen, drunks and priests were all rooting for him. If one was going to let oneself down very badly—and Seamus was most definitely going to do that—it would be difficult to imagine an assembled throng with which it would have more resonance.
