Modern moment

John Butler recalls being seduced by Mike Murphy

John Butlerrecalls being seduced by Mike Murphy

When I first heard the news I was standing in the driveway of my good friend Niall's house, and he only told me because I had just spotted their new family car. It was a baby-blue Toyota Corolla, and I was now staring at the gleaming chassis incredulously, slack-jawed in amazement. Don't get me wrong. I was 14, and I had seen plenty of new cars, but Niall had just dropped a bombshell about this particular car that I was struggling to absorb.

"My family won it on Murphy's Micro Quiz-m last week." Niall kicked a tyre with his desert boot and shrugged with false modesty, but I couldn't believe it. They had appeared on Murphy's Micro Quiz-m! Let me now freeze that scene in time and offer some context. This was a Tuesday in the middle of the school year in 1986. As the title suggests, Murphy's Micro Quiz-m was a quiz show hosted by Mike Murphy on RTÉ, and, in it, two families would compete for a glittering array of prizes, the biggest of which was a baby-blue Toyota Corolla.

The show followed a well-established format for the most part. In the picture round, a photograph of Sydney Opera House would appear on screen. A family member would buzz. "Bzzzz." Upstairs, a studio director would bark into his microphone, and, downstairs, an RTÉ cameraman would awaken. He would grip the handles and zoom us awkwardly towards the blushing visage of whichever family member had pressed the button. The answer? "Australia".

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Cut to Mike, beaming, holding a mic.

"Well done Cathal. Australia it is. Five points to the Morelands. At the end of that round, let me see, the Hoseys have five and the Morelands have . . . 95!"

But this wasn't just a quiz, or even a Quiz-m. This was a Micro Quiz-m, and the round which lent the show its strangely technological title was the one in which two children from rival families played a computer game against each other for points, and a prize. This eerie foreshadowing of the Celtic Tiger, wherein our fate was decided by a young, educated and technologically savvy workforce, was, for kids nationwide, the highlight of each show.

Watching at home, you would struggle to comprehend just how bad the kids on the show were at computer games. I mean, how were they misspending their youths? Had they even played Frogger before? And during this round, parents on couches around the nation wondered whether, in the future, computer games or conventional education would be judged as the biggest waste of money.

My friend Niall had a brother and a sister, and back in his driveway I had the most burning question formed and ready to go.

"Who played in the computer round?"

"Who do you think? I did."

Niall gave the thumbs-up and went inside to put on the frozen French-bread pizzas. I couldn't believe it. How could he be so calm? As we ate lunch he told me that, in addition to the car, the family had won cash and an AT Cross pen from Ballinasloe. Niall had slain some worthless foe in a ZX Spectrum game that was apparently a lot like Defender. They drove the car home that very night. The show would go out sometime in the next month.

We put on our PLO scarves and walked back to school, and the whole way back I tried to figure out how to get my own family on that show. I had a chip shop across the road from my house that had arcade versions of both Defender and BombJack. I had spent plenty of evenings in there with other kids from the neighbourhood, listening to The Cure and lining up coins on the glass, awaiting our turn. Back then you only played computer games in siderooms in pubs, or in hastily erected gamesrooms at caravan parks, the same seedy milieu as snooker and darts.

The computer hadn't yet penetrated the family livingroom, and, to be honest, we weren't to know it would. We weren't wasting our money in the chipper because we felt it would best prepare us for the working world. But, like Flann O'Brien's bicycle, the computer was wily, and it too would find its way into our homes, near the fire and the sandwiches on the sideboard, during some wet night in the near future. Now it has pride of place, where the television set used to be. It may not occupy that physical space, but if you had to grab your computer or your TV in the event of a fire, I bet you'd choose the former.

I watched Murphy's Micro Quiz-m the following Sunday night, and the Sunday after that. In that entire season I didn't miss a show. And each Monday I would come into school and Niall would pre-empt my disappointed queries with some piece of news he had just received from the mandarins at RTÉ.

"Yeah, they've moved us down to April now."

It wasn't until I saw the show had been cancelled the following autumn that Niall finally came clean. They never appeared on the show. His dad just happened to buy the car at the time the show was giving them away. Perhaps he had seen it on the show and liked the look of it. It certainly was very modern. And when I had asked Niall about it, he had seen the gap and he had gone for it.

It was the perfectly executed practical joke - simple, brazen and ingenious. I held my hands up then and I still do now. But watching that show was no hardship, let me tell you. The lessons it taught have served me well. And Niall, if you're reading this, I'd still take you at BombJack. Any time, any place.

John Butler blogs at lozenge.wordpress.com