Having ignored almost every award-winning comic or comedy writer going, RTE has finally emerged blinking into the changed "light entertainment" order with the new sitcom/sketch show Couched - its first nod towards modern sitcom sensibilities. Occupying a very different space from the relatively mainstream and orthodox likes of Upwardly Mobile, Couched is a brave and adventurous project, and unlike anything RTE has ever produced before. Reference points don't come too easily to hand for the new show. There are bits of Bottom and bits of The Fast Show in there, but the real inspiration behind the show is a development of the sort of humour that was first unveiled on the station's own late-night The End.
Coincidentally or not, The End was the first place where comedians Barry Murphy and Mark Doherty worked together on television. Murphy, a founding member of the seminal Irish comedy trio Mr Trellis, and Doherty, a relative but highly impressive newcomer to the gaggle of Irish comics, are both atypical in the sense that the work they do owes little or nothing to the boom-bang-a-bang school of comedy. Instead, they choose to charter fresh territories with their more "experimental" approach.
The sitcom part of Couched sees Murphy and Doherty in a type of Waiting for Godot scenario - two men stuck somewhere, not knowing how they got there or how they're going to get out. The conversation between them is oblique and skewed - with no background matter to help them out, they share intense, private words. The other part of the show is a series of sketches which are designed to work as "growers" - in the style of The Fast Show - in that the characters build up over time and more and more of the humour is revealed as each week goes by. There are also two mini-strands, the first of which is a series of spoof advertisements for generic commodities that are not usually advertised (these include coal and glass) and the second is a clever reworking of a New Faces style talent show, in which Murphy and Doherty work backwards in that they take material from an old RTE talent show and construct new routines to suit the words. Confused? Relax, it's easy once you know the rules.
"There aren't any rules," says Barry Murphy, "I suppose the only one we had going in was that the show was not going to follow the traditional stand-up route of joke, joke, joke. The scenes of us in `the room' were originally written in that way, but as we went on we started deleting the more obvious jokes, which may sound strange, but we were going after a more naked, skeletal approach where the humour depends on the characters. It's whimsical and I suppose, at first glance, a bit odd, but as it progresses people will begin to see what's happening and why. We said from the very beginning that we were aiming at a small audience, a few thousand, and if even half of those like it, we're happy."
And the sketches? "Anything that hasn't got me or Mark in it is written by Ian Coppinger and the idea behind them is to give the two people in the room something to look at on the TV. Again the sketches build up over time, so it's difficult to judge them from the first few shows because people come back in to them and they become more rounded. If it seems like we've thrown all known conventions out, we have still kept the rhythm and tempo of comedy in there - it's just done in a different way from what most people are accustomed to."
Where Couched works, and splendidly so, is in its daring and originality. Very much pushing at the parameters, the show owes nothing to anything else on television - with the possible exception of Murphy and Doherty's relationship sharing the odd similarity with that of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson - without the slapstick. The very premise of the sitcom end of the show is interesting in itself and the dialogue between the characters is as resonant as comedy dialogue comes. At times on the quizzical side of surreal, it still remains a substantial move forward - but whether or not the cult kicks in probably won't be apparent until the end of the six-week run.
`Some people seem to think it's something to do with smoking marijuana which puzzles me in a way - but maybe not, on reflection," is Mark Doherty's contribution to the great Couched debate. "The only obstacle people have to overcome with the show is that it's not like other forms of comedy which use the build/build/gag/ pay-off format, it's more character-based. Myself and Barry, when we're in `the room' develop this relationship where he's more cynical and more detached and he seems to run the room, whereas I'm a bit more energised and come up with all the things he comments upon. . . . In many ways the key to it is understanding that the two characters represent optimism and pessimism."
How did RTE receive it - it's not exactly on Leave it to Mrs O'Brien lines? "I think at the start there might have been a sort of `this is weird' feeling on their behalf," says Doherty, "but the more we explained what we were trying to do with the two characters and how we weren't following any format, the more they appreciated it. They really did give us loads of freedom and they trusted our judgment, which was a great help. What we had going for us was the fact that it wasn't offensive and that it could, in theory, appeal to a wide audience. I think, though, the jury will be out for longer than usual on this show . . ."
Couched is on Network 2 every Monday night at 11.05 p.m.