PEABRAIN  v  E. O BROIN by    Perkin Warbeck

Rory Mac, uncertain with the wearing of the greens, has run out of putters from time to Toome while more recently, and even more astonishingly, Pat Kenny ran out of patter.

This latter instance of demand and no supply occurred when Katie Hopkins, a surprisingly perceptive guest, branded her host, PK, a (gulp) peabrain.

The flatlining of Pat.

One could almost hear a digital clock go tick-tock in the five and a half seconds of dead air which ensued in the studio of Newstalk FM which is part of the Roaming Umpire, aka, Denis O’Brien’s Media Empire.

To mention Ireland’s supreme broadcaster and dead air in the same phrase is akin to linking, say, Glenda Jackson with the part of King Lear. What next? Leo Varadkar to play the part of Lady Macbeth?

Imagine !

Gore Vidal, the never boring commentator on American politics, once sagely observed:

-The What If of History is a futile exercise. In fact, the only exception one can think of is as follows: should it have been Nikita Khrushchev rather than John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated it is a nailed-down certainty that Aristotle Onassis would not have deserted Maria Callas for Babushka Khrushchev.

The topic under discush held the promise of another certainty: the response of a smarting smarty pants, the extremely piqued Pat to this attack on his enormous amour propre would not only be swift but would, gan dabht da laghad / sans doute involve a Shinner as the surrogate victim.

-Come in, Eoin O Broin: your number is up !

How to reconcile the Lord of the Live Mike with the Dialect of Dead Air is as difficult to make ‘Peabrain’ (please note the inverted mommas) Pat’s eleven years as a Christian Brothers’ boy tally with his contemporary status as a Shoneen out on his Owneen.

One could perhaps do worse that recall a curiously undervalued verse of poetry from George Russell. This George Russell (1867-1935) was the Lurgan- born poet with the spade-length physog and is not to be confused with another George Russell who hailed from California. The latter is considered a strong suspect in the notoriously unsolved Zodiac murders of the 1970s. Even though as well as being a poet George Russell, i.e., AE was also a mystic who also liked to dabble in the (gasp) signs of the zodiac.

-In ancient shadows and twilights

When childhood had strayed

The world’s great sorrows were born

And its heroes were made

In the lost boyhood of Judas

Christ was betrayed’.

Hmmm.

So, now to the lost boyhood of PK, surely as famous as JC in the post-Christian island of Ireland of today, going forward. Perhaps, the answer lies there. Prepare ye, therefore, for the Sorrowful Mystery. Please be down-kneeling, faithful reader.

Pat Kenny spent eleven years as a pupil, primary and secondary, in O’Connell Schools/ Scoil Uí Chonaill, a place of learning which gets a mench in the short story ‘Araby’ by James Joyce, that extra-Triestial figure who penned (social) science fiction,  in his collection called ‘Dubliners’ . This simple fact might have no little significance on a number of different counts.

-North Richmond Street, being blind was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, distant from its neigbhours in a square ground. The other house of the street, conscious of decent lives lived there, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The Araby referred to here is anything but the Christian Brothers School, but rather a bazaar of magic and delight set in the RDS, nowadays home of the Leinster Rugby lions, oops, the lionized Leinster Rugby club. The guys whom a matey Pat Kenny calls ‘the guys’.

James Joyce infamously attended O’Connell CBS for a measurably shorter time than PK; one week, in total, in fact. At the end of which Joyce Major earnestly earlugged him to the altogether more sedate and civilizing surrounds of nearby Belevedere College under the care of the SJ’s, growling in the process:

-No son of mine will be contaminated by the company of the Paddy Stinks and Mickey Mucks who attend a Christian Brothers’ School !

Only an inveterate wallower in debt and chronic rent defaulter with a background in the serried ranks of the Leeside snobocracy, consisting of would be Merchant Princes, like, could have come up with an epigram of that texture, boy.

Hmmm.

Pat Og Kenny was quite a whiz in school – at Sums. Good and all though he was his slightly older bro was even more of a whiz and was fast-tracked after a mere year in OC’S to the turreted environs of Gormanston College.

It may well not have been financially feasible for Kenny Major, being the keeper of the elephants in the Dublin Zoological Gardens, to fast track Pat Og in a similar fashion. Hence, an unimaginable sentence of eleven endless years hard among the P. Stinks and the Mickey M’s for the second son.

Could this have been a factor in the recent meltown of PK on his own show?

-Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! I started at the bottom like everyone else !

Pat Og used to board the number 23 bus at the Parkgate Street stop , contagious to the Phoenix Park. This is where Chez Kenny was located. And where an ambiance of grey matter was all pervasive back in the day; it would have been strange if Pat Og did not populate his nocturnal dreams with images of the grey elephants who make the Banipur National Park their natural habitat.

This may well account for the curiously absent-minded figure he used to cut in in the top deck of the double decker, among the other more raucous, Paddy S’s and M. Mucks. In retrospect this might be explained by his ambitious longing to occupy an even higher level in the bus; the roof, say.

There he might well have been imagining himself as a Little Elephant Boy perched high on the howdah, on the elephant’s back, in the plains of Munnar in Kerala. Putative West Brits like Pat Og do have this quirky tendency to look eternally towards the Orient where the never-ending Sun of Empah didn’t tend to set, going backwards.

Could the future Golden Boy of Broadcasting and Raja of RTE, ever have foreseen himself perched on high on the Golden Howdah itself which is traditionally used by the Rajah of Travanore at the Jamboo Savari (Elephant Procession) at the celebrated Mysore Dasara while seated on the top deck of the Number 23 CIE bus?

There is, is there not, a more than passing resemblance between the seat of the Big Elephant Boy in his eponymous TV3 Show and the Golden Howdah . Or is that just the unbiased musing of The Perkin’s inner West Brit-watching wallah?

Strange, all the same, how things become clearer when viewed through the Perspex of Retrospection.

So far, two aspects of the Orient have been name-checked – Araby and the unforgettable Elephant House in the Dublin Zoo. There is a third which was to enter the Lost Boyhood of PK, and perhaps the most influential of all. But first, another reference to Araby is called for.

The actual tenement house on North Richmond Street which served as Chez Joyce for a few months (before Joyce Major made a midnight flit with family in tow before the Bailiffs came a calling for the back log of three months’ rent) was occupied by the family of a classmate of Pat Og.

Not only that but said classmate was an even dabber hand at Sums that the whiz kid at figures himself. One knows this, because the same classmate went on to make a mark for himself in later life in Metereological Circles. Where one needs to have moved on a deal from the fingers counting and abacus stage After all, one is dealing with not just any weather, but Irish weather. Where accurate forecasting requires more than an average ability to count to three.

-So don’t lecture me about the company I keep !

Indeed, it wasn’t till the science laboratory entered the curriculum that Pat Og eventually came into his own: in an atmosphere of Bunsen burners, test tubes and periodic charts. The chemistry between this slaboratory, oops, laboratory and Pat’s inner experimental Alfred Nobel, proved to be, erm, dynamite from Day One.

Due in no small part to the legendary Christian Brother in charge of this particular subject:

-Gandhi.

(This was probably not his real name; no matter, as aide memoires go, nicknames can mix it with the best).

No east-leaning putative West Brit Pat in (but not on) the make could have wished for a more fortuitous turn of fortune.

-Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! Cheap shot !

And so, with the due back-passage of time, the Little Elephean Boy morphed into the Elephant Man of Media Land we have all grown to l. and admire.

But it was, oddly enough, another of Pat Kenny’s teachers who is, if anything, more apropos to the topic du jour. The mark of a real pro is his ability to keep his own views out of view; anything less and one is automatically relegated to the ranks of the rancid amateur.

Even a clearly piqued PK cannot complain that he had not the benefit of the being taught by the best broadcasting pro in the biz.

-Come in, Micheál O Muircheartaigh: your number is up.

(Actually, we caught MOM on a very good year: fifth class in the Primo. The Great One was studying for his final year of a night-class BA and used to enter the classroom each morning, with a pile of academic tomes under his oxter. He would then proceed to place them on his desk and tell us short-panted and snotty-nosed eleven-less year olds to ‘get on with it’, i.e, read and write what we pleased in an ambience of Gallarus-like silence. While he got down to the crucial business of studying for HIS exams. The best teacher one ever had, who was the very embodiment of Less is More or Less. There was another teacher at a later stage, the tertiary one – a daarlin’ word, Joxer – but he probably would not thank one for being name-checked. One does not wish to be deleted from the Guest Blog list of EB, going forward).

Speaking of short-pants, perhaps the most excruciating shame a schoolboy of that era, the Fabulous Fifties, could endure was for as little as half an inch of underpants to be visible below one’s overpants. A week of merciless mockery ensued at the tongues of one’s peers, young in years, old in sneers.

One, curiously enough, has no recollection whatsoever of Pluperfect Pat Og ‘s ever being shamed thus.

Perhaps, this lack of a shame-learning curve might go a ways (a daarlin’ phrase, Joxer) to explaining the absence (complete) of shame on the part of Hibernia’s Highest-paid Professional Poohbah of Political Commentary coming over – both pre-Eoin O B and post-Eoin O B – as an incurable Am.

An Am, of course, being one who is not obliged to take a pledge to camouflage one’s predge.

It is not that the ‘professional’ path of Pat and that of of Mícheál O’Muircheartaigh did not later cross in the rarefied atmosphere of RTE. Where MOM showed the goms of sporting commentary how to do it.

Some of MOM’s commentating phrases have infiltrated the national discourse. Three will suffice:

-He bends, he lifts, he strikes the sliotar eighty yards over, over, over the bar: that was Cork’s Sean Og O hAilpin, whose mother hails from Fiji and whose father hails from Fermanagh, neither a noted hurling stronghold.

-Some forwards are consistent; some forwards are brill-ant; but only one forward is consistently brill-ant: Mícheál Kearns of Sligo.

The third phases was uttered in leprechaun; not only is Mícheaál O Muircheartaigh a Lord of the Language but he is also a Tiarna na Teanga:

-Dá n-imreodh Setanta féin cleas chomh draíochtúil leis an ceann atá Jimmy Doyle o Thiorbaid Arann tar éis a imirt, ní mhalartodh sé a ainm go Cúchulainn go deo.

(As Robert Front once observed: ‘Poetry is what gets lost in the translation’, so one will dare not attempt to translate the last phrase).

PK, incidentally, after eleven years incarcerated by the Gaelic Gaolers of the Christian Brotherhood, is much given these days to strutting his monoglot stuff as a (gulp) Proud Graduate of the critically-acclaimed Gregory Campbell Academy of Applied Linguistics.

Just as AIB are known by a different name north of the Black Sow’s Dyke ditto with the GCA of AL south of the Black Sow’s Dyke – the soi-disant Know Nothing Party. Which self-deprecatory designation is a source of unbridled merriment to its instigators. Truly, will they, in time, hear the Chimes at the Midnight Court of Cultural History.

-Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! Cheap shot ! Cheap Shot ! Cheap Shot !

(Each pipsqueak a pinprick into the Voodoo Troll- Doll of Katie Hopkins aka, Eoin O Broin).

Luimneach, led thoil:

MA BHI RIAMH

Cé nach raibh úr-smaoineamh aige le fada

Is Merc é, dar leis féin , i lár na sean-Lada

Tiocfaidh a lá

Cé gur gá a rá

Gur i R.A.D.A. fos, atá sé, Ag Feitheamh le Tada.

(Translation not warranted: see above).

But, of course, it is the contrast between the Ultimate Broadcasting Pro (Mícheál O Muirchearthaigh) and the go-to Spinach and Gammon Amateur of Audio-Visual Hackery, which concerns us here..

One example will suffice as to MOM’s natural, non-pareil professionalism.

During the Eighties when Kerry were to All-Irelands what earthquakes are to Haiti – Micheal O Muircheartaigh doubled up as a GAA commentator on RTE with a part-time labour of love. This entailed training the handful of Kerry players domiciled in Dublin during the week.

Come Sunday, and match day, it was the innate, sophisticated professionalism of the commentator supreme which came to the fore, always.

Even a listener with the combined acuity of a Maigret, a Poirot, a Marlowe, a Holmes and an Inspector Bucket of Bleak House himself would not be able to tell which county Mícheál O Muircheartaigh hailed from as he went about the business he was being paid to do – to commentate imparitally betwen Kerry (and it was always Kerry, the dirty rotten lousers) v A.N. Other County.

Croke Park is located sur la rive gauche of Le Canal Grand, accross from O’Connell School, situated sur la rive droite.

Could it be that a particular graduate of the latter ecole never lent an ear to these commentaries?

Surely not, Shirley.

Only a peabrain would suggest otherwise.

Come, the full stop: and so the moment of truthiness has arrived,

As the Perkin’s crafty inner fake-art jury of one, after due consideraton, has decided unanimously to award He who has continued to prove the old adage that while Blondes have more fun, Blands get more mon, and for consistenly throughout the year with his persistent Tate-crimes against the Art of Professional Broadcasting (both Public and Private) such as his abiltiy to morph a bicycle pump into the wand of the Wizard of Boz O’Brien :

-The Gurner Prize 2016