The radio show that never was

Talk about a dream team. Arthur Mathews, who (with Graham Linehan) wrote C4's Father Ted and BBC's Big Train, coming home to roost with a cracking radio show.

Mathews created Morning Arousal with his old collaborator Paul Wonderful - best known nowadays as spoof republican balladeer Ding Dong Denny O'Reilly (occasionally on a stage near you with the Hairy Bowsies, and regularly on the John Creedon show on RTE radio). The witty journalist Damian Corless also contributed to the script, the acting talent included Deirdre O'Kane, Risteard Cooper and Patrick McDonnell as well as Wonderful, and Kevin Burns of RTE was producer. RTE commissioned the pilot. And then turned it down.

Morning Arousal, which has been described by Mathews as Liveline meets Chris Morris, must be one of the funniest radio shows never heard. The snappy pilot is essentially a spoof of Irish radio programmes, from phone-ins to archive shows to "sensitive" interviews, the fast-moving whole interspersed with jingles and gizmos, and hosted by Luneen Keogh (O'Kane). It's an extreme version of a broadcasting style that is recognisable and distinctly Irish. And it's very funny.

The pilot features such items as a caller phoning in to discuss with Luneen the suggestion that a symbol should appear in the corner of the screen to indicate whenever a homosexual is on television; this week's mystery noise; and book of the week (housewife Phoebe, 67, enjoyed JG Ballard's Cocaine Nights but thought there ought to have been "more about dinners, or having a meal or something like that"). For the most part it's lunacy, as opposed to hard-hitting satire. Morning Arousal was designed to fill that awkward Saturday morning "humour" slot once occupied by Scrap Saturday and latterly by Short Circuit, The Usual Suspects and, more interestingly, Pat McCabe's current dark offering about an Irish serial killer.

To be fair to RTE, Morning Arousal might not fit comfortably into that Saturday 10.30 a.m. timeframe. There is, for example, a sketch about paedophile priests. Interviewer Luneen is talking to four priests recently released from prison. "I've been on a long and difficult journey," says one. "I decided to contact other paedophiles in the priesthood who had been through my experiences."

Another priest picks up the theme. "An awful lot of shame, a lot of guilt, a feeling that I'd let a lot of people down. Apart from the prison sentence, we feel we had to find a way to express our grief."

Luneen: "And how did you do that?"

Pause

Priest: "By forming a jazz group."

Luneen: "And you're going to play something for us now?"

Priest: "That's right. We're going to play George Gershwin's Fascinating Rhythm. A one-two, a one-two-three-four . . ."

There's also a hint of bestiality. Hardly comfortable humour. But Mathews, for all his personal oddities, remains at the cutting edge of comedy - he and Linehan have worked with some of the finest talent on British television: Paul Whitehouse, Harry Enfield, Steve Coogan and arch-mediaspoofer Morris.

Ann Marie O'Callaghan, editor of Radio 1, doesn't want to discuss details of a particular pilot. "It's a normal pattern of commissioning - we make pilots all the time. I listened to it, and Paddy Glackin (executive producer of weekend radio) listened to it, then we gave it to a cross section of senior producers in Radio 1 and decided not to go with it. Reaction was quite negative. There were bits we liked but there were not enough elements we liked to go with it. We rarely like everything with a pilot. I would love to have Arthur Mathews working with us and hopefully we will in the future. I'm more than happy to talk to them.

"I'm very open to different types of comedy shows in that slot, which I see essentially as a comedy/entertainment slot. But we didn't think it was suitable for our audience."

Helen Shaw, head of radio at RTE, comments that at any time the station might have half a dozen pilots in development. She says Morning Arousal was not found strong enough to move forward with - that a lot of work needed to be done on it. She stressed it was nothing to do with the material, that RTE is in no way uncomfortable with provocative material and, indeed, welcomes it. But to move from pilot to "on air" a show needs to be strong, she says.

Mathews enjoyed doing the pilot hugely and working with the others - "I would have liked to spend a summer in Dublin working on it". It was a pilot, he says, and there are small things they would change, but for the most part they were very happy with it and don't want to make it into a different type of comedy. Paul Wonderful says: `I thought all my birthdays had come at once when Arthur was going to do this. My God, this man. I can't understand it. I would have thought that to have Arthur Mathews writing for them, especially because of the stick they got over Father Ted, that they would have been jumping at the chance, even from a PR point of view. You could compare it in a musical sense - if U2 said they wanted to do some work in Ireland and then it was turned down. I think that's not an unfair comparison."

Mathews himself shrugs off RTE's rejection - "no one's been killed". But Graham Linehan, Mathews's co-writer on Father Ted, currently in London having finished work on Black Books for Channel 4 (with Dylan Moran), is enraged. "It annoys me so much," rants Linehan. "It's better than a lot of pilots made in Britain. I'd understand if it wasn't funny. RTE don't know how to develop new talent or develop what's already there. And there's a certain kind of Irishness that is never really reflected on RTE."

"RTE is terrified of letting people speak with their own voices, rather than have an uncle and an aunt sitting on a stage swapping anecdotes - nonsense and light laughter after a church social type of thing. They've got to grow up - no, grow down (in age) along with the rest of the country.

"We spent a lot of time defending RTE over Ted - we never offered it to them because we didn't feel they had money or expertise to do a sitcom. It annoys me that after the lesson they supposedly learned with Ted they're making the same mistakes all over again.

"I'm angry for Arthur - he wants to do comedy for Irish audiences. He feels his Irishness very keenly in ways that I don't - I'm obsessed with American films and British TV and music. I don't have that huge sense of being Irish that Arthur does. His parody of Irish broadcasting could have been The Day Today or On The Hour" (the BBC Radio 4 and TV ground-breaking comedies).

The problem appears to be that the series isn't what RTE was looking for in a new comedy. "We were disappointed - it was not what we wanted," says O'Callaghan. But it seems strange to commission Mathews and Wonderful to write the pilot, because what they'll create will inevitably be fantastical madness - anyone familiar with the work of either will see the pattern, see the idiosyncratic concerns with oddity.

"What they want doesn't seem to be what I do. And this is closer to what I do than anything I have ever done," says Mathews, observing how uncompromisingly Irish the pilot is, and how there were things in Father Ted that had to be "de-Irished" for a more international audience.

Mathews and Wonderful are now exploring other options for making the series.

A little bit of me wonders if Mathews and Wonderful have managed to have the last laugh. Think about it. A famous Irish humourist, who has in the past derived much fun from the imponderable doings of RTE, produces a script that goes into the studio but which RTE then refuses to broadcast. He is genuinely disappointed at the rejection of a proposal he thought was good. So now it exists as a kind of underground tape just for Arthur's mates and a few like-minded people. To Arthur Mathews everything is funny. And he is, after all, a friend of Chris Morris. Does the whole situation constitute the greatest joke yet?