As RTÉ celebrates its 100th anniversary, we're revisiting Irish TV's cult classics - the unsung gems that over the decades won their way into the hearts and minds of Irish viewers.
In a quiet corner of a Dublin pub on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, two stalwarts of the Irish comedy scene are quietly chatting over pints. Suddenly, the ambient chatter is rudely interrupted. "And just before he said that in Polish, he screamed something across to another employee - but we couldn't make anything that made sense fit," says Mark Doherty. "But what fitted perfectly was this: 'WHOOOOAHHHH!’"
As startled patrons return to their drinks, Barry Murphy produces something that he found in his shed during a recent clear-out: a note from a Polish TV production company that reads ‘Dear Barri [sic], As agreed, please find enclosed tapes of ‘The World According to the Kiepskis’ and ‘First Love’. I look forward to hearing from you once you have had the occasion to watch the tapes. Kind regards, Corinne.’
Murphy laughs when I suggest that this ‘With Compliments’ slip should be in a museum, but it marked the beginning of a cult Irish comedy show that is still beloved by a legion of devotees: Soupy Norman.
The show, which was broadcast on RTÉ in 2007, was a re-dubbed and re-edited version of Polish soap First Love and told the often surreal story of a young girl from Cork called Esther, who left her father and grandfather (aka ‘Grandmaster’) in Buttevant and moved to Dublin for university. There, she encountered a series of odd characters and odder storylines, from a girl who is forced to ‘paint her head a different colour’, to dog-stealing, exorcisms and constant culchie-bashing. One of the subplots involved a woman ordering a hit on her ex-husband because he beat her in a staring contest, and each ten-minute episode ended with the same scene (albeit dubbed differently) of Buttevant’s local drunk Soupy Norman stumbling into Esther’s father’s kitchen, angrily spouting slurred, nonsensical gibberish. It is, without a doubt, one of the sharpest and funniest things ever shown on Irish television.
Its creators and writers Murphy and Doherty had previously worked together on TV shows Couched and The End, but had been "talking about doing something a bit longer form". The pair wrote to numerous foreign production companies, asking them ‘Can we take your programme to overdub it?’ And nobody replied," chuckles Murphy. "And then one Polish company came back and went, ‘You want to buy the thing? Yes.’ [But] we were never certain if they quite understood what our intentions were."
"There's still a kind of a mentalness to Soupy Norman that is attractive to people."
"The only time we were certain that they understood, it was finished at that stage," adds Doherty. "They contacted Mike [Keane, of production company Midas Productions], and had watched the whole thing. They really liked what we'd done, and they said, ‘We'll give you more tapes, more footage, more episodes, if we can broadcast what you've done with Polish subtitles’." He laughs hard at the very notion. "I would have retired if that had happened."
Watch: Polish soap First Love, the original source material for Soupy Norman
The duo settled on the Polish soap, which is set in Wroclaw and has been continuously broadcast on Polish channel Polsat in 2004 - essentially, it’s the Polish equivalent of Fair City. They self-financed a two-minute taster of what they wanted to do with it, and Doherty showed it to their friend Arthur Matthews (of Father Ted fame), who in turn, showed it to Armando Iannucci. At the time, Iannucci was working on Time Trumpet (2006) and agreed to take the two-minute clip for the show. They later pitched the possibility of a full series to Iannucci, but "he didn't get back in time. And in the meantime, we pitched it to RTÉ, and they accepted it," says Doherty. "I’ve seen some punter quotes saying that it was Armando Iannucci’s idea, and then RTÉ picked up on it, which wasn’t true."
The show was commissioned by RTÉ’s then-Head of Entertainment, the late Kevin Linehan, "a forward-thinking friend of ours that we had worked with a few times," while Mike Keane was the "guy who babysat the whole project" and ran the production facility where they did all the dubbing.
Once they had the green light, there was the small matter of writing the storyline. If you’ve ever seen Soupy Norman, you’ll be aware of its often hypnagogic quality, where storylines take eccentric turns and characters swing wildly from one topic to the next. It’ll come as no surprise to learn that they were written in an unorthodox manner: Murphy and Doherty would scan each episode to find characters’ mouth movements that might fit a certain English-language word, and then write the storyline backwards around that word or scene. To add to the stress, Doherty’s wife had just given birth when they got the commission - so they got a cheap rate at the Burlington Hotel and moved in for a week.
"And my poor wife was around the corner with a screaming baby," he recalls, laughing. "We worked all day, every day; the two of us with laptops and DVDs, very old school. We just watched it with the volume down, mostly, thinking ‘What could they be saying?’ And in one scene, if it looked like your man said ‘slippers’ or ‘Mitsubishi’ and then we saw there was a car, we’d go ‘Okay, this episode is about a Mitsubishi’.
The pair enlisted several of their Irish comedian friends to provide voices, including Mario Rosenstock, Tara Flynn, Sue Collins and Murphy’s Aprés Match colleague Risteard Cooper, while his then 11-year-old son Luke provided the voice of DJ Tiny Bob/Mrs. Costigan. They both have their own favourite lines and characters - Murphy especially loves erstwhile fish salesman/hitman Soupy Dave, and is particularly fond of the scene where Esther is belittled for her "culchie nonsense" in the episode Prodigirl. They both speak fondly of the Christmas special, too; a hilarious take-off of The Late Late Show, where they overdubbed the voices of Jimmy Magee, Pat Kenny, Father Brian D’Arcy, Brian O’Driscoll and singer George Murphy, having first sought permission from all of them.
Judd Apatow asked for recommendations of things to watch once, and Chris O'Dowd said 'Soupy Norman’
"I think Ronan Collins appears playing the drums at one point, and I had to ring him as well and say ‘Is it okay if we just throw you in?," he chuckles. "The great thing is when you go into such detail about comedy, people go ‘I don’t care. Go on, just go on.’"
Soupy Norman has attained a cult following, but at the time it was originally broadcast, it was somewhat lost in the schedule; Doherty says that it was so bizarre that RTÉ just "didn't really know what it was, or what to do with it". Over the years, however, they have been pleasantly surprised by the audience that it has found.
"There's a lot of comedians that like it a bit too much," says Doherty. "But comedians are weird. Adam Buxton loves it. I remember getting an email out of the blue from Stewart Lee, so somehow he had found it. So I know it's done the rounds."
"And Ed Byrne absolutely loves quoting it," adds Murphy. "When you get normal people in their 50s doing the quotes, that's very odd. Judd Apatow asked for recommendations of things to watch once, and Chris O'Dowd said 'Soupy Norman’, and then a few other people rowed in afterwards talking about it. So it's got something. It really does."
Doherty shakes his head, smirking at one recent memory. "I had to change my car about two years ago, and a fella on the street said to me ‘Nice wheels. Not bad for a fella from Clonmel’ before driving away. And I went ‘.... What?’."He laughs. "It was only when I was driving away, I went ‘Ohhhh.’"
The episodes have languished on YouTube over the years - having been removed numerous times after clocking up hundreds of thousands of views - but there are no plans to do another series. Murphy’s main wish is that it is seen "in the way it was intended", i.e. with the voices perfectly synched, while Doherty maintains that it "always belonged on YouTube" rather than another streaming network or platform.
"You had to be mad to do it."
"But of course, I'd like my daughter's friends to find out about it, and to share it," he says. "Also, it was very short and snappy - and now, nobody shares anything longer than eight seconds, or they get bored. So there's lots of little moments in it that could be passed on for a laugh.
"With AI, you can make people say anything now," he adds. "But there's still a kind of a mentalness to Soupy Norman that is attractive to people. I think there's an unpredictability to it. It's quite a surreal thing. So I think we might get another two weeks out of our careers than most people who will be replaced by AI in the morning, because it's so mental. You had to be mad to do it."
Murphy, meanwhile, bats away any notion of a Soupy Norman revival. He shakes his head and takes another sip of his pint. "I think it's enough to walk down George’s Street, and for somebody to walk past me and say, ‘Have you gone deaf with the soup?!’ once every eight or ten months." He allows himself a smile. "That’s enough for me."
Enjoy more RTÉ TV Cult Classics here
