The 2 Johnnies are just taunting us now. They were the first certified culchies to be allowed on 2FM (don’t come annoying me with “facts” about how this isn’t true), and then they left it all behind to seek their fortune elsewhere (their podcast/their live shows/the hellish badlands beyond Dublin). Now they flout the law with a televised lock-in (closing time is 9.35pm in the country), called The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In, every Thursday on RTÉ2.
Of course, I call the police to inform them of this infringement of our licensing laws, but by the time they get to the bar from the capital it’s shut and they’re all laughing at us. “Grrr! I hate these Double Jonathans!” (That’s jackeen for 2 Johnnies.)
I don’t want to be alarmist, but, just between you and me here beneath this leafy tree in Dublin 4, I sometimes think regional folk think we’re a pack of eejits in Dublin. Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe. (Full disclosure: I am, myself, a culchie. But I know my place. I’ve been in the Irish Times offices for more than a decade, so I’ve developed views on sea swimming, traffic-calming measures and schools rugby. “Hoity-toity, hoity-toity.” That’s what I sound like when I speak.)
Now that the national broadcaster is falling apart, the culchies are at the gates. Just last week I was reviewing Love in the Country, a show in which RTÉ seems to be literally trying to help them breed. Patrick Kielty is a culchie. And now this. In the past the rural masses were happy with the occasional news story and Nationwide, a programme in which an RTÉ person in a safari suit leaves Dublin in a barge to point at things. Is it for this that Gay Byrne fought in 1916? So that people who don’t wear a suit to appear on television – and whose use of consonants is, frankly, treacherously random – might treat Dubliners like big eejits?
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Much like when the British left and we restructured their civil service to create our own, the 2 Johnnies have been built in the craven image of Ant and Dec except with sliotars and Pearse’s blood sacrifice and Monster Munch in their cultural memory rather than subservience to the crown; Morecambe and Wise; and the Savile report. The 2 Johnnies are basically what you get if you feed Ant and Dec a Tayto sandwich after midnight.
And what of their hinterland? Who are their people? Watch the camera pan across the bar – RTÉ has given the 2 Johnnies a bar – and it’s clear from the Easter Island heads and the GAA jerseys and the hooting and the accordions and the relatively affordable mortgages (you can see it on their faces) and the sense they might vote for absolutely anyone, the mad bastards, that we are not in Montrose any more.
I initially assumed that this was some sort of charity video about the suffering of people beyond the Pale. “Somewhere beyond the M50,” I sang to the tune of Over the Rainbow while weeping. (I’m very empathic.) But it quickly became clear to me that these people are ... happy? And that they are as happy, idiomatically speaking, as pigs in shite.
Studio audiences aren’t meant to be happy! Studio audiences are meant to look as if they were abducted from their homes and just woke up there. (That’s been the classic RTÉ audience look for decades.) But The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In, in the spirit of Nighthawks and TFI Friday, feels like an actual pub featuring people enjoying themselves. After the RTÉ scandal there are, I suppose, worse ideas than giving two wily provincials the last of its funds to run a bar. I think it was the Future of Media Commission’s main proposal, actually.
I suddenly have a hurley in one hand (I don’t even own a hurley!) and a chicken-fillet roll in the other (I don’t even believe in hens!)
The show is deeply silly yet strangely compelling. They go around the audience looking for hidden talents, presumably as a way to drum up regional investment. A man plays an accordion held behind his back. A man snorts air from his nose in time to some techno. A woman licks her elbow.
“That’s a skill and a half, lads,” one of the Johnnies says.
“Give it a go, you dry shites,” another of the Johnnies says.
They interview a glamorous pop singer named Lyra who says things like, “I swear to God I am bate into everything I wear.” They have a fake fashion show, to see if Lyra can tell “couture” from “manure”. They quiz two people on their knowledge of their local areas, with input from the cursed residents of their respective towns. One of the contestants is an actual, honest-to-God priest who has brought a choir with him. They get the audience to see if they can tell who among some Corkonians at a silent disco is dancing to The Spark by Kabin Crew and who is dancing to Richie Kavanagh singing “Did you ever get a ride on a tractor?” I believe this is called the Leaving Cert.
They also get the Irish Olympian Rhys McClenaghan to demonstrate his gymnastic skills on top of the bar and ask him if he ever bruised his “Rhys’s pieces”. Everyone sings along to Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, which is, somehow, the most culchie song I have ever heard and which I now suspect is secretly about the fight for Irish freedom. (The “sex” on fire is probably the GPO.) Everyone also sings along to a song the Johnnies wrote about the episode, and it all ends with All Folk’d Up playing Las Vegas (in the Hills of Donegal).
And I ... I like it? I like the 2 Johnnies. I feel something change within me. I stumble around my sittingroom. “Raaagh!” I say. Raaagh!” My face reddens. I can’t stop winking and lifting my index finger to acknowledge oncoming motorists. I suddenly have a hurley in one hand (I don’t even own a hurley!) and a chicken-fillet roll in the other (I don’t even believe in hens!).
I claw away my hoodie to reveal a GAA shirt underneath. (I don’t know much about sport, so it just says “GAA shirt” in Times New Roman.) “How’s she cuttin’?” and “Now we’re suckin’ diesel,” I say to my wife, who is from Dublin and so is appalled. “No!” she screams in horror. “No!” And then I do the pointy open-mouthed thing that Donald Sutherland does in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except I just say, “’Tis yourself!”
Also on RTÉ this week (RTÉ One, Sunday) was The Unreal, an excellent new children’s drama in which a family leave Dublin with terrifying results. (“This describes all trips outside Dublin,” my wife says.) In a mobile home in the mountains, a child finds an old video of a 1980s children’s TV show featuring a red-haired menace who emerges from the television to cause trouble. It’s written by Rodney Lee and directed by Bonnie Dempsey, and is really good: funny, warm and genuinely spooky. All episodes are already on RTÉ Player lest you need to counteract the regional boosterism of the 2 Johnnies or just want to prepare for Halloween.
