IRA – Blood and Porridge

December 5, 2023December 9, 2023

I’m sad to say, he must be on his way

It was not a great surprise that on November 30^th Shane MacGowan, singer, songwriter, musician, raconteur and front-man of much-loved Anglo-Irish folk-punk band the Pogues, breathed his last. The highs of his musical and song-writing creativity had always been offset by the lows of his industrial-strength alcohol and drug consumption, and that consumption had famously taken a toll on his health. Plus, he’d been wheelchair-bound since 2015, when an accident outside a Dublin recording studio resulted in him breaking his pelvis, and he’d spent much of the past year in hospital suffering from viral encephalitis. The writing had been on the wall for poor old Shane for a long time.

Then again, it was absolutely miraculous how long that writing had remained on the wall before the cantankerous old bugger took any notice of it and died. Indeed, back in the 1990s, the prospect of him making it to even the age of 40 had looked doubtful. This was when his drunkenness, drug-taking and general unreliability led to him being ejected from the Pogues. Also, late in the decade, he’d developed a heroin habit so severe that his pal Sinead O’Connor felt compelled to report him to the police before he killed himself with an overdose.

Yet in 2017, he celebrated his 60^th birthday. I remember thinking at the time, Wow, six words I never expected to hear together in a sentence: ‘Shane MacGowan’ and ‘celebrated his 60^th birthday’. As a 60^thbirthday-bash, MacGowan was honoured with a do at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, where some of his most famous compositions were played and sung by a series of notable musical icons and talents like O’Connor, Carl Barat, Nick Cave, Bobby Gillespie, Glen Hansard, Cerys Matthews, Glen Matlock and Imelda May. (Bono was at it too.) There can’t have been a single dry eye or lump-free throat in the building when, near the end, the birthday boy himself was wheeled onstage to sing Summer in Siam, from the 1990 Pogues album Hell’s Ditch, with his old mate Cave. He then brought the event to a close with a solo rendition of the venerable Scottish folk song Wild Mountain Thyme.

McGowan was not at the top of his game for terribly long. He appeared on the first five Pogues albums from 1984 to 1990 and on two albums by Shane MacGowan and the Popes in 1994 and 1997, and that was really it. But during that period his songwriting skills were extraordinary. On one level, his lyrics were shot through with a grim, unflinching realism, documenting the miseries that his characters, invariably Irish ones, had to endure: poverty, violence, oppression, imprisonment, addiction, homelessness and heartbreak. Tempering these were mentions of the things that offered their existences some fleeting rays of sunshine: their faith, music and song, enjoying a flutter on the dogs and horses, good company and good booze-ups.

Thus, 1987’s Fairy Tale of New York manages in its four minutes to encompass dying old men, drunk tanks, icy winter winds, broken dreams, violent domestic rows, being bedridden on a drip, winning on a horse that ‘came in eighteen to one’, the songs The Rare Old Mountain Dew and Galway Bay, ringing church bells, the New York Police Department choir, Frank Sinatra, singing drunkards… That’s a lot more ground than your average Christmas song covers.

© Stiff Records

At the same time, and despite his popular public image of slurring befuddlement, MacGowan was a fiercely intelligent type who littered his songs with references to Irish history, literature, religion and myth. For instance, The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn, from 1985’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, alludes to the hero of the ‘Ulster’ cycle of Irish mythology in its title and name-checks the following in its lyrics: famed Irish tenor John McCormack, famed Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, IRA man Frank Ryan who led a contingent of Irish soldiers to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, legendary and (literally) legless Dublin beggar and robber Billy in the Bowl, and County Tipperary parish Cloughprior, which is noted for its 15^th-century church and cemetery.

Meanwhile, Streams of Whiskey from 1984’s Red Roses for Me is about a dream where MacGowan meets the late Irish writer and hellraiser Brendan Behan, who once described himself as ‘a drinker with writing problems’. Its chorus could be MacGowan’s manifesto: “I am going, I am going, where streams of whiskey are flowing.”

I loved the Pogues and enjoyed much of MacGowan’s later music with the Popes, even though I knew that, being a Protestant from a Unionist community in Northern Ireland, he probably wouldn’t have liked me very much. Mind you, I’m sure there were some staunch members of my family who reciprocated the feeling, viewing him as an unseemly Irish-Republican rabble-rouser. He once told an interviewer: “I felt ashamed that I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA, so the Pogues was my way of overcoming that guilt.” Later in life, while an invalid in Dublin, he sometimes had former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams drop by to visit him – “He’s a very easy man to talk to,” was MacGowan’s comment. Then again, he’d been known to wear a Union Jack-patterned coat and, if you’re to believe his widow, the journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, he watched The Crown (2016-23) avidly and shed tears at the deaths of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Diana. A Northern Irish Proddy I might be, but those are things I wouldn’t countenance doing.

In the summer of 1995 I was in New York when I learned that Shane MacGowan and the Popes were performing at a local venue. So I bought a ticket. The gig saw a mightily-inebriated MacGowan manage to sing all of two songs. He spent another fifteen minutes sitting at the edge of the stage clutching his head while the Popes played a couple of instrumentals. Then he disappeared. The band did a few more instrumentals, then followed their leader’s example and exited too. The crowd rioted. McGowan did not look like a man who had much of a professional future ahead of him. Or indeed, much of a future.

Yet he was in better form three years later when I saw him, with the Popes again, at the Fleadh outdoor music festival at London’s Finsbury Park. At least, he remained standing and remained singing for the entire set, even if he did have the dazed air of a man who’d just been returned to earth after being abducted and probed by aliens. And it was touching how, when the performance was done, the crowd kept chanting, “Shane-o! Shane-o! Shane-o!” until, finally, a big, appreciative grin spread across his bleary features.

And he was better still the next time I saw him, in the early noughties. He and the rest of the Pogues’ classic line-up – James Fearnley, Jem Finer, Cait O’Riordan, Andrew Ranken, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, the late Philip Chevron and the late Darryl Hunt – had got together for a Christmas tour and they made an appearance at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I was living at the time. Admittedly, MacGowan’s voice was weaker than it’d been during the glory days of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, but he seemed to raise his game whenever Cait O’Riordan sang onstage with him. And their rendition of Fairy Tale of New York, with O’Riordan taking the place of Kirsty McColl, who’d died four years earlier, was rather wonderful.

The whole event, shameless, nostalgic cash-in though it was, was rather wonderful in fact. Well, with a combination of the Pogues, Christmas and a few thousand boozed-up Geordies, how could it not be wonderful?

© Pan Books

In the meantime, in 2001, MacGowan and his missus Victoria Mary Clarke had published a book called A Drink with Shane MacGowan. A rambling mixture of memoirs, anecdotes, opinions and philosophy related by the great man and recorded and edited by Clarke, A Drink… is very entertaining, fascinating in parts and knowingly hilarious in others. I particularly liked the bit in it where MacGowan theorises why Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was such an existentialist misery-guts – it was because he was the only man in the whole of Ireland who liked cricket. Mind you, I suspect there’s some artistic license in MacGowan’s claims that he was drinking, smoking and betting on the horses when he was five years old.

Here’s a list of my ten favourite Shane MacGowan songs – ones he wrote and / or ones he sang.

The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn (from the 1985 Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash). Glasses of punch, whiskey, ghosts, banshees, angels, the devil, midnight mass, rattling death-trains, pissing yourself, getting syphilis, kicking in the windows of Euston taverns and decking “some f**king blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids…” Yes, this is the song that truly sets out the Pogues’ stall.

Sally MacLennane (from Rum, Sodomy and the Lash). Equally rousing and elegiac, this is the perfect song for bidding adieu to an old friend: “I’m sad to say, I must be on my way, so buy me beer and whiskey cos I’m going far away… FAR AWAY!”

© Pogue Mahone / Warner Music Group

If I Should Fall from Grace with God (from the 1988 Pogues album of the same name). And this is the perfect go-wild-on-the-dance-floor song for Pogues fans.

Thousands are Sailing (from If I Should Fall from Grace with God). Written by Philip Chevron, this paean to the millions of Irish people who migrated to North America in the 19^th and 20^th centuries receives much of its power from MacGowan’s vocals, simultaneously wistful and exultant. It just didn’t sound the same when, minus MacGowan, the Pogues performed it in the 1990s. Those who dismiss the band as propagandists for Ireland and all things Irish should note the disdain for the mother-country expressed in the lyrics: “Where e’er we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees, from fear of priests with empty plates, from guilt and weeping effigies.”

Down All the Days (from the 1989 Pogues album Peace and Love). A tribute to the severely-palsied Irish writer Christy Brown, who had to “Type with me toes, drink stout through me nose, and where it’s going to end, God only knows,” this also contains the memorable lines, “I’ve often had to depend upon the kindness of strangers, but I’ve never been asked and never replied if I supported Glasgow Rangers.”

What a Wonderful World (a 1992 duet with Nick Cave, available on the 2005 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album B-Sides and Rarities). MacGowan and Cave’s amusing, but still tender and respectful, version of the Louis Armstrong classic is the song I want played at my funeral.

God Help Me (from the 1994 Jesus and Mary Chain album Stoned and Dethroned). Considering what MacGowan was going through at the time, this melancholic, low-key collaboration with the usually abrasive, feedback-drenched Scottish alternative-rock band the Jesus and Mary Chain is probably aptly titled.

That Woman’s got me Drinking (from the 1994 Shane MacGowan and the Popes album The Snake). This features one of the best choruses ever: “That woman’s got me drinking, look at the state I’m in, give me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten bottles of gin!”

Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway (from The Snake). Gerry Rafferty’s rumination on a relationship that’s gone wrong is reworked by MacGowan and the Popes in their own inimitable manner. I wonder what Rafferty thought about the subtle change made to the lyrics at the very end of his song. The Rafferty version simply concludes, “Her father didn’t like me anyway.” The MacGowan one concludes, “Her father was a right c*nt anyway.”

Fix It (from the 2010 Alabama 3 album Revolver Soul). You hardly hear MacGowan on this effort from celebrated London blues-country-electronica-trip-hop-acid-house outfit the Albama 3. Here and there he spectrally moans one simple, plaintive line. But his spirit infuses the song, making it rueful yet ultimately soaring.

And no, I haven’t put Fairy Tale of New York on this list – because I’ve heard it so many times I’m now a bit sick of it. After the sad news of November 30^th, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s this year’s Christmas number one.

© Elektra / Wea

November 30, 2021

Great British crime movies of the 1970s

© Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer

I’ve been busy lately and unable to post much on this blog. Here’s a reposting of something that first appeared here in 2019.

During the 1970s, when I was a kid and when I absorbed cultural influences like a sponge, crime movies made in the United Kingdom were rarer than hen’s teeth. That’s hardly surprising. During that decade, the British film industry practically died on its arse.

And yet, as a kid, I got the impression that 1970s Britain was so crime-ridden it was dystopian. It was a place where every bank and security van was in constant danger of being attacked by beefy men with sawn-off shotguns and stockings pulled over their heads. Where every street was the potential scene of a violent punch-up and every road was the potential scene of a destructive car chase. Where the police force scarcely seemed any better than the villains, its ranks composed of hard-boozing, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed thugs wearing kipper ties. Really, at times, I must’ve been too afraid to leave my house.

This is because 1970s British television was awash with crime and cop shows, often violent and populated by low-life characters on both sides of the law: for example, Special Branch (1969-74), Villains (1972), New Scotland Yard (1972-74), The Sweeney (1975-78), Gangsters (1975-78), The XYY Man (1976-77), Target (1977-78), Out (1978), Hazell (1978-79) and Strangers (1978-82). Impressionable kids like me would act out things we’d seen on TV the night before, so that at breaktimes school playgrounds reverberated with shouts of “You’re nicked, sunshine!” and “You grassed me off, you slag!” and “We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner!” My parents were happy to let me watch such programmes. As long as I wasn’t watching that horror rubbish, which had been scientifically proven to be bad for you.

I suppose that many British directors, writers and actors who would have plied their trade on the big screen, if Britain’s film industry hadn’t been moribund, found themselves plying it on the small screen instead. This helped inject some uncompromising cinematic rawness into the domestic TV crime genre. But the cinematic counterpart of that genre seemed non-existent.

Well, almost non-existent. A few crime movies did get made in 1970s Britain and these exert a fascination for me today. Only two of them ever achieved a degree of fame and the rest are virtually forgotten, but I find all of them cherish-able. Here are my favourites.

© MGM EMI

Get Carter (1970)

Everyone knows this 1970s British crime film, although I don’t recall it getting much attention until the 1990s, when thanks to Britpop, Damien Hirst, etc., the ‘cool Britannia’ scene took off and Get Carter’s star Michael Caine suddenly became a retro-style icon. Ironically, Caine’s nattily dressed Jack Carter and Roy Budd’s edgy jazz score aside, there isn’t much in the Mike Hodges-directed Get Carter that feels stylish. The drab, monochrome terraced streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne – if the film’s premise is that Michael Caine has returned to his hometown to sort out trouble, whatever happened to Caine’s Geordie accent? – the shabby pubs, the seedy racecourses, the shit clothes and haircuts, the Neanderthal attitudes… It’s depressing, actually. It’s a provincial Britain where the Swinging Sixties have truly burned themselves out – if the Swinging Sixties ever reached provincial Britain in the first place.

Caine gets all the acting accolades for Get Carter but the film wouldn’t be what it is without its excellent supporting cast: Alun Armstrong, Britt Ekland, George Sewell, Tony Beckley and playwright and occasional actor John Osborne. Best of all, there’s Ian Hendry as the film’s weasly villain, Eric Paice. “Do you know,” Carter tells Paice at one point, “I’d almost forgotten what your eyes look like. They’re still the same. Piss-holes in the snow.” Hendry was originally meant to play the virile Carter, but by 1970 his fondness for the booze had taken its toll and he was demoted to the secondary role of Paice, which supposedly caused tension and resentment during filming. Thus, Caine may have enjoyed the irony of the film’s climax, which sees Carter force-feed Paice a bottle of whisky before clubbing him to death with a shotgun.

Villain (1971)

Villain has Richard Burton, no less, in the role of a gay, mother-fixated and paranoidly violent gang-boss who, against the counsel of wiser heads, gets himself involved in a raid on a factory’s wages van that ultimately causes his downfall. Meanwhile, trying to stay in one piece is Ian McShane, playing a smooth but unimportant pimp who has the unenviable job of being both the object of Burton’s affections and the victim of his sadistic rages.

Villain also has a wonderful supporting cast – T.P. McKenna and Joss Ackland as fellow gang-bosses, Del Henney, John Hallam and (alas, the recently-departed) Tony Selby as henchmen, and Nigel Davenport and Colin Welland as the coppers doggedly trying to bring Burton to justice. (Interestingly, McKenna, Henney and Welland all turned up in the cast of Sam Peckinpah’s troubling Straw Dogs, made the following year.) The film suffers from having too many sub-plots, though the one where McShane helps Burton escape the law by getting a sleazy Member of Parliament who’s used his pimping services to testify for him is memorably believable and nauseating. Played by Donald Sinden, you never hear which political party the MP belongs to, but you can guess.

Sitting Target (1972)

Ian McShane had to suffer some dysfunctional relationships in early 1970s British crime movies. No sooner had he finished being Richard Burton’s lover / punchbag in Villain than he had to cope with being best friend to a psychotic Oliver Reed in Sitting Target, directed by the underrated Douglas Hickox. With McShane in tow, Reed escapes from prison early in the film, determined to catch up with his wife Jill St John and give her what’s coming to her. Reed doesn’t want revenge on St John, as you might expect, for her terrible performance as Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever (1971). No, it’s because he’s discovered she’s betrayed him for another man. The film’s big twist, when we find out who that other man is, isn’t altogether a surprise.

Sitting Target has many pleasures, including Edward Woodward playing a policeman assigned to protect St John against the marauding Ollie. But nothing quite matches the thrilling early sequence where our two anti-heroes, plus a third convict played by the always-entertaining character actor Freddie Jones, bust out of prison in desperate, skin-of-the-teeth fashion.

The Offence (1972)

Okay, Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (which I’ve previously devoted a whole blog-entry to) isn’t really a crime movie. It’s a psychological study of a macho but troubled police officer (Sean Connery) going over the edge when a hunt for a child-killer, and the provocations of the suspect the police have pulled in for questioning (Ian Bannon), push too many buttons on his damaged psyche. But the film has that grim 1970s aesthetic that more conventional British crime movies of the period are so fond of – drab housing estates, anonymous tower blocks, serpentine pedestrian bridges. Its supporting cast also includes strapping character actor John Hallam who, although he’s probably best remembered as Brian Blessed’s Hawkman sidekick in 1980’s Flash Gordon, was a fixture in crime movies at this time. So, I’m putting The Offence on my list.

© American International Pictures

Hennessy (1975)

I’m also conflicted about adding Don Sharpe’s Hennessy to this list because it’s about terrorism rather than crime. Indeed, its story of a former IRA explosive expert (Rod Steiger) who decides to destroy the British government and the Queen by blowing up the state opening of parliament after his wife and child are killed by the British Army, makes it the first movie to tackle the issue of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. However, as the final film on the list is choc-a-bloc with IRA men, and as Richard Johnson gives a lovely performance as the weary, dishevelled, cynical copper – is there any other type in British crime movies? – trying to thwart Steiger’s plan, I thought I’d give it a mention.

The film is admittedly patchy but it has a top-notch cast that also includes Lee Remick, Trevor Howard, Eric Porter, John Hallam (again), Patrick Stewart (bald as a coot even then) and a super-young Patsy Kensit playing Steiger’s ill-fated daughter. The climactic scenes set in the House of Commons, involving the Queen, landed the filmmakers in hot water because they used real footage that Buckingham Palace had approved without knowing it was going to end up in a film. Also, the film’s subject, an incredibly touchy one at the time, meant that Hennessy scarcely saw the light of day in British cinemas.

Brannigan (1975)

Brannigan – also directed by Douglas Hickox – is the joker in this pack. It features John Wayne as a tough American cop who arrives in a London of bowler hats, brollies and historic landmarks that exists only in the imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters, and who then causes mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town. This involves such memorable sequences as Wayne doing an Evel Knievel-style car stunt where he hops across Tower Bridge while it parts to let a ship pass below. And Wayne triggering a cowboy-style brawl in a pub near Leadenhall Market. And Wayne roughing up a minor villain played by the cinema’s greatest Yorkshireman, Brian Glover. (“Now would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”) If you’re in the wrong mood, Brannigan is the worst film ever made. If you’re in the right mood, it’s the best one.

© United Artists

The Squeeze (1977)

Barely had John Wayne swaggered through the London underworld than another Hollywood star did too in Michael Apted’s The Squeeze – Stacy Keach, although playing an English private eye with an industrial-strength drink problem. During occasional moments of sobriety, Keach investigates the kidnapping of his ex-wife (Carol White). She’s remarried a posh security officer (Edward Fox) tasked with overseeing the delivery of large sums of money. Keach finds himself tangling with a kidnap gang planning to force Fox to help them mount an armed robbery.

The Squeeze suffers from being overlong, with too much time spent wallowing in Keach’s alcoholism. But its good points outweigh this. I like its depiction of late 1970s multicultural London and its sympathetic portrayal of Keach’s Jamaican neighbours. Also, Stephen Boyd (who died soon after the film’s completion, aged just 45) and David Hemmings give good turns as the villains. Allowed to use his native Northern Irish accent for a change, Boyd disturbingly plays a well-heeled crime-lord who dotes over his own family whilst having zero empathy for the family he’s threatening to destroy with his kidnapping scheme. Meanwhile, Hemmings is good as a pragmatic career criminal who doesn’t share his boss’s sunny optimism about things.

And connoisseurs of 1970s British popular culture will be fascinated to see anarchic comedian Freddie Starr play Keach’s best mate, a reformed criminal trying to make a living as a taxi driver. Indeed, such is Starr’s loyalty to Keach that he saves his neck three times at the end of the film, including by running the villains off the road in his taxi. Starr, who died in 2019, was from all accounts an unreconstructed arsehole in real life. Therefore, remember him this way.

Sweeney II (1978)

The greatest of all 1970s British cop shows, The Sweeney got two movie spin-offs, Sweeney! In 1977 and Sweeney II. I don’t think Sweeney!, which involved Flying Squad heroes Jack Regan (John Thaw) and George Carter (Dennis Waterman) in an espionage plot, is much cop, but Sweeney II captures the spirit of the TV series. It has Regan and Carter on the trail of a gang who spend most of their time living it up in Malta as wealthy British ex-pats, but who return to Britain from time to time to stage vicious, take-no-prisoners bank robberies. As well as marrying bloody, sawn-off-shotgun-powered violence with some off-the-wall humour, Sweeney II manages to be topical too. London’s real Metropolitan Police force was investigated for corruption in the late 1970s. The film reflects this with the character of Regan’s commanding officer, played by the excellent Denholm Elliot, who’s facing a long stretch in prison on account of being “so bent it’s been impossible to hang his pictures straight on the office wall for the past twelve months.”

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Although it was released at the start of the 1980s, John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday was made in 1979 and so I’m classifying it as a 1970s film. It definitely feels the end of a particular era with its tale of an old school London gangster (Bob Hoskins) convinced he’s about to make a mint in the brave new world of Thatcherite London where everything is up for sale to the corporations and developers. That’s until one day when he suddenly finds himself tangling with a ruthless foe, the IRA, who make him look hopelessly out of his depth.

The final scene sees Hoskins become a prisoner in his own, hijacked car and get driven to his doom – an IRA man played by a youthful Pierce Brosnan snakes up from behind the front passenger seat to hold him at gunpoint. Although Hoskins doesn’t speak, the succession of emotions that flit across his face as it dawns on him that he had it all, but now he’s blown it all, make this the most powerful moment in British crime-movie history.

March 17, 2021

The comedian with nine-and-a-half fingers

© BBC

I’m still too busy with work commitments to put any new material on this blog. However, here is a slightly updated version of something I posted a few years ago. Appropriately for today, March 17^th and St Patrick’s Day, it’s a tribute to the greatest Irishman of the late 20^th century.

16 years after his death, I still regard the Irishman Dave Allen as the best stand-up comedian ever. Allen was known to many British TV viewers during his heyday in the 1970s as ‘the comedian with half-a-finger’, although he once pointed out that he was actually ‘the comedian with nine-and-a-half-fingers’.

When I was a kid living in Northern Ireland and when the Dave Allen Show (1968-86) was at the height of its popularity on BBC1, he was the undisputed King of Comedy for me. I didn’t always understand the jokes and stories he told his studio audience, though my parents invariably guffawed at them. However, I loved it when the glass of whisky he sipped from at the side of his chair – despite being a ‘stand-up’ comedian, he spent most of his time sitting down – reached a low level and he said, “It’s time for some sketches.” Those sketches were packed with slapstick and surreal absurdity and were perfect fodder for a ten-year-old. After they’d shown the sketches and the programme returned to Allen in the studio, his whisky glass would be full again.

However, when I look back at the show now, I realise the sketches have weathered the passage of time least well. Rather, it’s the sections where Allen simply sat and chatted to his audience, marvelling at life’s ridiculousness and telling jokes, anecdotes and yarns, that seem timeless now. These tapped into a tradition of storytelling he was familiar with from his boyhood in Firhouse, Dublin, where his father worked as general manager of the Irish Times.

Allen’s formative years were schizophrenic ones. From all accounts, he had a loving and cultured family at home, but he received his schooling from a succession of priests and nuns who had no compunction about beating their young charges and threatening them with eternal hellfire. “People used to think of the nice, sweet little ladies,” he once said of those nuns. “They used to knock the f**k out of you, in the most cruel way that they could. They’d find bits of your body that were vulnerable to intense pain… The priests were the same.”

It’s fair to say that during his professional career Allen got his revenge on the Catholic clergy who’d persecuted him in his schooldays, both through his verbal routines in the studio and through his sketches, which provided a seemingly inexhaustible supply of gags about priests, nuns, monks, altar boys, bishops and, occasionally, the Pope himself.

Taking pops at organised religion and at any kind of authority (for Allen was no fan of politicians either) was brave for a stand-up comedian on British TV in the 1970s, when the safe targets were considered to be mothers-in-law and ‘wimin’ generally, and blacks, Pakistanis, homosexuals and, indeed, Irish people. However, in the history of British comedy, Allen wasn’t just important for his anti-authoritarian streak. Although some of material consisted of traditionally structured jokes and punchlines, some of it too was based on his observations of everyday life and its absurdities. In fact, he was doing observational humour long before the Alternative Comedy boom of the 1980s turned such humour into a stand-up staple.

Allen’s mocking of Catholicism earned him a TV ban in the Irish Republic. This made me feel almost privileged to be living in Northern Ireland, where I could watch his show on the BBC. Also, of course, I felt privileged to be a Northern Irish Protestant, so that I could laugh at all those gags about the Pope doing stripteases and performing somersaults down the aisles of Vatican chapels, bishops lusting after sexy nuns, priests sprinkling holy water over their ironing, altar boys breaking wind, confession boxes turning into dodgem cars, etc., without suffering Catholic guilt and fearing I’d be damned to eternal hellfire. Though in the interests of religious equality I should say that I remember him cracking a lot of jokes about the Reverend Ian Paisley too.

Predictably, Allen also earned the ire of clean-up-TV campaigner Mrs Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, Britain’s equivalent of the Moral Majority. She once described one of Allen’s sketches, involving a post-coital conversation between a husband and wife, as ‘offensive, indecent and embarrassing’. Incidentally, when I did some research on Mrs Whitehouse recently, I discovered that in 1977 her organisation gave an award for ‘wholesome family entertainment’ to Jimmy Savile.

Allen was said to have received death-threats from the Provisional IRA for putting the nose of Ireland’s Catholic establishment out of joint. However, Danny Morrison, the former IRA man and editor of the Republican News, has claimed that Dave Allen was actually a big hit with his old terrorist colleagues, especially when they were incarcerated. “Dave Allen was a major hit with Republican prisoners. We all loved his show. We particularly loved his anti-clerical material. You have to remember that Dave Allen was a subversive in the Seventies. He was anti-establishment, and you couldn’t get more anti-establishment than us, so we identified with him.” So it sounds like during the 1970s the inmates of the Republican section of Long Kesh were laughing at those stripping and somersaulting Popes, lusty bishops, sexy nuns, comical priests, farting altar boys, bumping confession boxes, etc., as heartily as us Protestants were.

As well as his comedy shows in the 1970s, Allen hosted a documentary series where he would track down and interview eccentrics, oddballs and people who generally lived their lives not giving a toss about what other people thought of them. Though they aren’t remembered today, Allen’s documentary programmes created a blueprint for later programme-makers like Louis Theroux. Unlike Theroux’s trouble-seeking, if-I-give-them-enough-rope-they’ll-hang-themselves approach, however, Allen was genuinely interested in and respectful of his subjects’ eccentricities.

Dave Allen should have thrived during the 1980s. After all, this was when a younger generation of comics made British comedy less about traditional joke-telling and more about lampooning authority and observing life’s absurdities, stuff Allen had been doing for years. But his TV appearances became less frequent. He did, however, enjoy an acclaimed run doing a comedy show in London’s West End. I heard people claim at the time that Allen was such a genius he went onstage each evening without any script and simply talked about whatever came into his head. From what I’ve learned subsequently, things weren’t quite so freeform. Allen worked with scriptwriters and those writers sat in the front row of the audience holding up cards with keywords written on them, to keep his mind running in the right direction, if not exactly on track.

Dave Allen made his final TV series, of purely stand-up material, in the early 1990s. I know some fans of his shows twenty years earlier who felt uncomfortable with these later performances. Allen, now noticeably greyer, saggier and wrinklier, sounded a lot more acerbic than he had when he’d been perched on that 1970s chair with his whisky-glass, his slapstick sketches and his congenial Irish charm. The routines were more observational than ever but were invested now with an old man’s cantankerousness, with Allen venting his spleen on monosyllabic teenagers, supermarket queues, dog-lovers, retirement and the aging process generally.

One of Allen’s most memorable tirades at this time went: “You wake to the clock, you go to work to the clock, you clock in to the clock, you clock out to the clock, you come home to the clock, you eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock, you get up to the clock, you go back to work to the clock… You do that for forty years of your life and you retire. What do they f**king give you? A clock!” As the F-word was still a big no-no on British television at the time, questions were raised about him in the House of Commons.

And that was pretty much it for Allen’s public appearances until his death in 2005. His later low profile was due partly to ill-health and partly to his desire for a quiet and stress-free retirement. And he managed to take with him to the grave the true story about what’d happened to his missing half-finger, although over the years he’d teased reporters, interviewers and audiences with tall tales about it. He once told Clive James that his brother had knocked him on the jaw while he had the finger in his mouth, causing him to chomp it off. And I seem to recall him telling a journalist for Loaded magazine that it’d been devoured by his own arsehole one night when that orifice was feeling particularly hungry.

Here’s some Youtube footage of Allen, a self-described ‘practising atheist’, subjecting the Book of Genesis to his own, inimitable scrutiny.