rte

Mark E. Smith’s Guide to Writing

Via @glinner

Published: Irish Times, September 11 2010

‘Shturdy, reliable fellas…’

The YouTube videos are crude and derivative. They are written and performed by rank amateurs, a fact that is glaringly apparent in almost every scene. The editing is shoddy. Plot structure is sometimes nonexistent. And the picture presented of life in rural Irish towns is as bleak and depressing as anything penned by the late John Healy.

Oh, and the nine Hardy Bucks’ Storyland webisodes also happen to be some of the funniest comedy shorts this country has ever produced. Read the rest of this entry »

Stradbally, September 5 2010: 4.12pm.

They didn’t show the All-Ireland hurling final at Electric Picnic for some reason this year. So on Sunday afternoon, my friend Conor and I made the long trek back to his car, which was parked in a stubbly field somewhere about three miles away, to listen to Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s commentary on the car radio. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy crap, is this the most casually homophobic article you’ve ever read or what?

When I read this piece by Ian O’Doherty yesterday morning, I shrugged my shoulders and just kinda assumed someone else would kick up a fuss about it. But that didn’t happen. Now I’m no fan of outrage, but last year Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir was widely pilloried for a column she wrote following the death of Stephen Gately. And truthfully, that article contained little more than a few massive logical non-sequiturs and some spiteful innuendo.

On Tuesday – coincidentally, the morning after RTE’s acclaimed Growing Up Gay documentary was screened – a columnist in our biggest selling daily newspaper branded gays “sexual deviants”, and clearly equated homosexuality with paedophilia and bestiality. Read the article after the jump. It’s about a thousand times more ignorant and offensive than anything Jan Moir wrote. Yet no one seems to have batted an eyelid: Read the rest of this entry »

EOIN BUTLER: KING OF COMEDY

Well okay… that might be a slight exaggeration. This is a stand-up comedy routine I performed at the International Comedy Club in Dublin earlier this month. It was filmed as part of a Vodafone marketing campaign, the point of which still kind of eludes me… but anyway. To paraphrase Blackadder, my routine starts badly, trails off a bit in the middle and the less said about the end the better. Read the rest of this entry »

HUSSEIN IN THE MEMBRANE [UPDATED]

Recently, I received an interesting email concerning my interview with Dr Latif Yahia, a.k.a. “Saddam’s son”, the controversial, Irish-based Iraqi exile fêted by RTE, BBC, CNN and Fox News. It comes from his ex-wife. “Hi Eoin, just had a read of your blog – very funny!” she writes. “I read your article with ‘Dr’ Latif Yahia and I’d just like to say fair play to you for seeing right through him. Let me point out a couple of things…” Read the rest of this entry »