'Gift Grub' has become must-hear radio - even some of those caricatured tune in. Mario Rosenstock, the voice of Bertie Ahern and Roy Keane, talks to Brian Boyd about how his comedy influenced the election.
Up at the top of the hit parade, battling it out with Nirvana and Coldplay, is a spoken word album, selling by the tens of thousands and responsible for a whole raft of new catch-phrases. Gift Grub features the startling vocal gymnastics of actor, Mario Rosenstock, who has created a virtual Irish village populated by caricatures of, among others, Bertie Ahern, Roy Keane, Michael D. Higgins and Eddie Irvine.
The album is a collection of "best bits" from the Ian Dempsey breakfast show on Today FM where, each morning, Rosenstock and producer Paddy McLoone run through their cast of characters to rapt listeners who e-mail in requests for their favourite characters. "It's a drive-time show, with a big mix of people listening," says Rosenstock, "so the comedy inserts we do aren't full-on polemicals, instead it's a range of characters in a range of different situations.
"It all started with us doing Bertie Ahern as a celebrity cook, hence the name of the album, Gift Grub, but we've broadened out since then and now the most popular characters would be Roy Keane, Eddie Irvine, Jaap Stam, Daniel O'Donnell and a host of others. Myself and the producer Paul McLoone do all the voices, with Ian Dempsey anchoring all the action, and we stress that we're not mimics, we're impressionists - it's not trying to get the voices down perfectly, more taking a vocal characteristic and bringing it from there. We're not after technical perfection, more a sense of the ridiculous."
The show's two main characters, Bertie and Roy Keane, are both voiced by Rosenstock and have taken on a life of their own outside the show, thanks to the catchphrases he has lumbered them with. Both subjects are well aware that every morning they are to be heard on the radio.
"I know that Roy Keane gets tapes of the show sent over to him and when the football team were travelling to Japan for the World Cup, one of the players put on some of our tapes and he was seen to laugh.
"With Bertie's, I was really shocked one night to see him being interviewed on TV3. The real Bertie spoke of how difficult it was to get up at 5 a.m. every morning so he could get in to the Today FM studio. And he actually went into our impersonation of him. With Bertie, it's a strange one, because we portray him as a bit of a bumbling character, although endearing in a sense. We really couldn't believe it after the last election, when people e-mailed in saying that they had voted for the real Bertie because of us - we couldn't really work that one out. We're not sure if our portrayal of him does him any 'harm' - he can't like everything we do to him - but then he's bound to say he likes it anyway. That's what you have to say."
Lightly surreal, the Gift Grub take on both Bertie and Roy is to create new dimensions to their characters and to place them in atypical situations, with a lot of the humour coming from how they connect with the English language. "The characters can come from anywhere though," he says.
"In one sketch, we introduced the character of Jaap Stam, ex-Manchester United player, and the way he spoke just worked so well, we decided to make him a regular. With Jaap, it's the sense that you know what he's trying to say, even if he can't quite say it. Other people, like Eddie Irvine, we portray as being a playboy and a misogynist - something which the female listeners seem to like, for some strange reason. With Liam Lawlor, we heard him once being interviewed and he referred to himself in the third person, so we used that as our jumping-off point. And with the voices themselves, it's honing in on a particular vocal tic and exaggerating that out of proportion, making a caricature of the voice."
Rosenstock says he can't remember a time when he wasn't able to mimic a voice, any voice. "It was always a party trick, and I knew that I had it in my arsenal as a way to get attention. When I was younger, I used to put on little playlets, doing all the voices. It was real 'look at me' stuff. What I really wanted to be was an actor though, and once I had been cast as Willy Lomax in Death Of A Salesman in a school play, when I was 16, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I really had pretensions to play leading men; I took the whole thing really seriously.
"I went to Trinity, with the intention of studying drama, but I found out if you did that, you couldn't get involved with Players (Trinity theatre group) so I did a different degree just so I could get involved with them and during one of the productions, I was lucky enough to get myself an agent."
After some theatre acting, and a long stint in Glenroe, where he played a young doctor, he rediscovered "the whole voices thing" about four years ago and put his mimicry talents to use on Today FM. Although the three Best Of albums from Gift Grub have sold around 85,000 copies, Rosenstock is loathe to bring his characters out onto the live circuit.
"I don't want to dress as Bertie or Roy, I think it's all in the voice, how you inhabit the character. It's not an Alistair McGowan-style thing where you work hard to actually look like the person. I have done the characters on stage, but I just come out as me and then launch into them. But I don't think a full show would work."
Like Harry Enfield and Steve Coogan before him, who both started off doing impersonations before creating their own characters, he says he has plans for the future - "plenty of them".
Gift Grub (The Best Of 2002) is released by EMI