28 December 1985
Nothing ages as badly as comedy, and some comedy was just bad to begin with. So, I get in the ring with this comedy record from Dermot Morgan’s pre-Ted, pre-Scrap Saturday years with plenty of trepidation. Fortunately, ‘Thank You Very Much Mr Eastwood’ is still in much better shape than the boxer-manager partnership it features.
Morgan was generally a political satirist who, unlike the now-disgraced co-writer of the most famous project he worked on, punched up instead of down. ‘Thank You Very Much Mr Eastwood’ isn’t satirical in the least; Barry McGuigan’s habit of effusively praising his manager in post-fight interviews is instead a pretext for Morgan to roll out some fond celebrity impersonations. That cabaret-country sound is gentle anyway, and gives the idea of Barney Eastwood as a mysterious yet benevolent J.R. Ewing. For the kids of today, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II can represent most of the other slow-witted US presidents and elderly popes we’ve had since, and Bob Geldof still pops up now and then around Band Aid. It also helps that Morgan had written this as an actual song with a catchy chorus. That title became something of an Irish pop-cultural meme at the time, but Dermot Morgan would go on to leave a far bigger comic legacy than just this record.
