That was very unfunny.
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Is Michael Ryan of Nationwide fame still alive?
I think so. His first wife died young I think.
You had to be there
1976 was the greatest summer of all time. About 75 days without rain and cloudless skies the order of the day…
Pairc Ui Caoimh opened to host the Munster football final on a day of sweltering heat that was followed by utter chaos in attempts to exit the city.
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I was down at that. Wasn’t that the one where Brian Murphy stepped back behind the line with the ball and the umpires gave a goal for a draw.
I think that was the day of the replay. The umpire gave a goal when Murphy was a solid foot if not two outside the line.
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He’d get cancelled if that was aired these days.
The scorer of the first televised point in Hurling passed away today.
Mick Kennedy. He was from Marlfield in Tipperary but spent years hurling with Dublin,Leinster and Faughs.
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RIP
Ted Howell - RIP
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Jarry won’t be troubling the Eurovision judges if this is anything t go by.
The undertakers must be descendants of the mythical P.O’Neill.
The number plate on the hearse is a cute move although some of their support team were overly enthusiastic by times as they attempted to interject themselves into the live footage shots.
The young wan in the mini-skirt will want warming up later on….
The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing
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This is very sad, but worth a read. RIP
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And the follow up interview a year later.
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Parents were first generation Irish. Won a scholarship to Cambridge.
Tony Slattery, mercurial comedian and actor whose improvisations lit up Whose Line Is It Anyway?
He brought an edge of danger to light entertainment, but in his 1990s heyday he became visibly exhausted by his punishing schedule
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14 January 2025 2:42pm GMT
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Slattery: cherubic good looks and abundant energy Credit: Eleanor Bentall
Tony Slattery, the comedian, who has died aged 65 after a heart attack, was a television performer prolific to the point of being unavoidable in the first half of the 1990s, before vanishing from view following a breakdown; in later life he was much admired for his courage in talking openly about his struggles with mental illness and his forlorn attempts to rebuild his career.
It was Slattery’s talent for comic improvisation on Channel 4’s extemporised panel game Whose Line Is It Anyway? that made his name. He proved no less quick-witted than his gifted fellow panellists John Sessions and Paul Merton, while cultivating a line in articulate vulgarity that drew more belly laughs from the audience than Sessions’s cerebral humour or Merton’s whimsicalities.
Possessed of deceptively cherubic good looks and abundantly energetic – walking on to the set made him feel like “a match carelessly tossed into a bunch of fireworks” – Slattery became the programme’s stand-out star, and he was launched into a seemingly constant procession of chat shows, quizzes, sketch shows, sitcoms and commercials, while also acting on stage and in film.
With fellow improv comedian Mike McShane, left Credit: Sven Arnstein/Avalon
At first he was praised for bringing an edge of danger to light-entertainment pap. When he hosted The Music Game on Channel 4 in 1992, The Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith hailed “the exhilarating Tony Slattery [who] does not seem to know the meaning of fear.”
Garry Bushell of The Sun was a dissenting voice, damning Slattery as a “classic Channel 4 man – smug, self-satisfied and middle-class”. Bushell was wrong in one aspect, as Slattery was the son of working-class Irish parents and had been brought up in a series of council houses in north London; but it was true that his comic style, reminiscent of that of his friend Stephen Fry, was recognisable as having been forged in the Cambridge Footlights.
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As the decade progressed Slattery became indiscriminate in the work he accepted. A cartoon in Private Eye depicted his answerphone message: “This is Tony Slattery – yes, I’ll do it.”
The real Slattery, critics opined, was disappearing from view as he settled for ever blander fare, including a stint as a team captain on the daytime antiques quiz Going for a Song. “Perhaps people did sense that, as a person, there was something about me that didn’t ring true. That inside this cheeky vaudevillian was something quite dark,” he reflected later on.
In Peter’s Friends with Alphonsia Emmanuel: the Telegraph’s critic wrote that Slattery ‘doesn’t so much chew the scenery as bite the lens off the camera and spit out the pieces’ Credit: Samuel Goldwyn/courtesy Everett Collection
The darkness would sometimes erupt into view. In 1994 Slattery was nominated for an Olivier Award for his performance in Tim Firth’s stage comedy Neville’s Island; at the ceremony he launched an expletive-laden personal attack on several leading critics.
As host of another awards bash, he announced sourly that the prize for “casting director with imagination” had been dropped owing to lack of nominees. In 1995 he received poor notices as the military drag artist Terri Dennis in a revival of Privates on Parade at the Greenwich Theatre. The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, who had praised his “very fine performance” in Neville’s Island, now found him “eerily devoid of warmth and panache”.
By this time Slattery was visibly exhausted by his punishing schedule – he had not taken a holiday in 13 years – and was seeking respite in drugs, spending as much as £4,000 a week on cocaine. To come down from the coke, he would drink two bottles of vodka a day.
His performances on Whose Line Is It Anyway? deteriorated and he was dropped after seven years on the programme. In 1996 he suffered a breakdown; for six months he refused to leave his Thames-side flat except to see his parents, ignoring letters and phone calls. He became convinced that he was being spied on through the electronic equipment in his house and threw much of it into the Thames, “with the river police shouting at me from their loudhailers”.
Slattery in Coronation Street with Lynne Pearson, 2005 Credit: Television Stills
Eventually, a friend broke into his flat and forced him to seek medical help. He saw a psychiatrist, who told him: “I can feel more rage and anger coming from you than I have done in approximately 20 years of clinical practice.”
Although he kicked his cocaine habit he continued to drink heavily: one attempt to go cold turkey caused a seizure that left him with some cognitive impairment. Bouts of depression and ill health thwarted his efforts to revive his career.
As he approached his 60s Slattery became more visible again, taking part in a stage version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and touring an autobiographical show. In May 2020 he was the subject of a BBC Horizon documentary, What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery?, which showed him trying to establish definitively whether, as he suspected, he was bipolar.
A raddled figure, unrecognisable from his heyday but still eloquent in spite of his halting speech, he was seen talking for the first time about a secret he had suppressed for decades: as an eight-year-old schoolboy he had been raped by a priest.
Trauma-focused therapy was recommended, but Slattery was less keen to follow advice to reduce his alcohol intake: “What would life feel like without [its] blunting effects? You’d see the bleakness of life for what it really is.”
Stephen Fry, Slattery, Paul Shearer, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Penny Dwyer in the BBC television show The Cambridge Footlights Review, February 1982 Credit: Don Smith/Radio Times via Getty Images)
After the broadcast he reported that he had received several offers of representation from agents, as well as overtures from publishers interested in his life story. In the event, however, he rapidly disappeared from public view again, and the memoir that Simon & Schuster scheduled for publication in 2023 did not materialise.
The youngest of five children of Michael Slattery, a labourer, and his wife Margaret, Anthony Declan James Slattery was born in Stonebridge, north London, on November 9 1959. His parents had moved to London from Ireland after the Second World War; as Tony recalled, “the Anglo-Saxon traits of reserve, stuffiness and routine didn’t really exist at home. The Gaelic influence was stronger, in terms of honour, volatility, ebullience and the way in which moods could turn on a sixpence.”
He developed his facility with language at school: “The central tenets of grammar and correct speaking were drummed into us at Gunnersbury from very early on, using lots of Jesuitical tension, irony and power games.” Tony was sporty as well as clever, becoming the England under-15 judo champion at his weight.
Jennifer Saunders, Hugh Laurie, Emma Freud, Slattery, and Stephen Fry, London, 1991 Credit: Dave Benett/Getty Images
He won an exhibition to read modern and medieval languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was in a Cambridge Mummers production of the Jacobean comedy The Roaring Girl that he met Stephen Fry.
“Tony… had the look of a young Charles Boyer and the habits of an ill-trained but affectionate puppy,” Fry recalled in his memoirs. “Every night, in his role as some kind of foppish lord, he would put a larger and larger feather in his hat. By the time we came to the end of the first week it was brushing the ceiling.”
Fry invited Slattery to join him in the Footlights, and in 1981 they were part of the company, along with Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, that won the inaugural Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe for the revue The Cellar Tapes.
After graduating he developed a double act with the pianist Richard Vranch, but after being pelted with bottles at the notorious Tunnel Club he largely abandoned live stand-up. In 1986 he appeared in the West End musical Me and My Girl, and on television he presented the children’s programme TX and had bit parts in The Lenny Henry Show, Boon and The Bill.
Although normally a reluctant self-promoter, he sensed that he would be a perfect fit for Whose Line Is It Anyway? and badgered the producers until he was admitted to the line-up in 1988.
In 1992 he appeared with several of his old Footlights colleagues in Kenneth Branagh’s film Peter’s Friends; the Telegraph’s critic judged that he “doesn’t so much chew the scenery as bite the lens off the camera and spit out the pieces”. His other films included How to Get Ahead in Advertising, The Crying Game, Up ‘n’ Under and Carry On Columbus.
After his breakdown Slattery worked only sporadically, bringing a certain screen presence to guest roles on Coronation Street, Casualty and other series. From 2007 to 2009 he was a regular in the ITV drama Kingdom, starring Stephen Fry – one of only a handful of his showbusiness friends, he reported, to have stood by him after his career imploded.
Slattery with Stephen Fry for Horizon: What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery? Credit: Sundog Pictures
Slattery claimed to have been engaged while at Cambridge until he found his fiancée in bed with another woman. For many years he batted away questions about his sexuality: “It’s up to [journalists] if they want to spend time worrying about what I do with my genitals – if I do anything. They could be in a safety deposit box in Geneva for all they know.”
In fact, he had been in a relationship with the dancer and actor Mark Michael Hutchinson since 1986, when they had met while appearing in Me and My Girl. Slattery chose to make this public knowledge only after his parents had died.
Latterly they lived in a rented two-up two-down in Edgware. When the Horizon documentary was broadcast, there was an outpouring not only of affection and sympathy for Slattery, but admiration for Hutchinson as his years of dogged support for his partner were revealed to the public. Hutchinson survives him.
Tony Slattery, born November 9 1959, died January 14 2025
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Paul Danan from Hollyoaks and Love Irelands