Even though their last video was one of the biggest selling Irish videos of all time (managing to outsell Father Ted by a startling ratio of three to one), Jon Kenny and Pat Shortt, aka D'Unbelievables, still don't have the profile and punch of many of their contemporaries. You could blame it on an RTE/Dublin 4 conspiracy, or the fact they've never had any real measure of success abroad, but in terms of bums on seats and box office receipts, they are, by a country mile, the most successful Irish comedy duo ever. Now signed to the Sony empire, their second video collection, D'Telly, is released this week and looks set to do well - their first video (D'Video) stayed at No 1 in the Irish video charts for 15 consecutive weeks. The two have just finished a mammoth three-year tour of their last stage show, I Doubt It Says Pauline and are currently going straight, with acting roles in Martin McDonagh's The Lone- some West, the final part of the Leenane trilogy.
Kenny, from Limerick, and Shortt, from Tipperary, first appeared on our screens with their lunactic re-enactment of a typical Irish country wedding in A Bit Of A Do in 1992. Not content with filling every conceivable venue in Ireland (a few times over), the show also played in Paris, Edinburgh and New York. This was swiftly followed by Pauline, which did similar - if not better - business for them. There will be a new show next year, they say, but until then it's D'Telly.
"It's the two of us playing these brothers who run a general shop down the country," says Jon Kenny. "Our names are Myles and Brendan Larkin and we're serious television addicts. In between serving customers in the shop, we rush straight back to the television and watch specially made-up programmes which feature ourselves." A wry commentary on modern televisual practices, the programmes they watch include parodies of American confessional chat shows, police investigation shows and daytime soap operas. With Kenny and Shortt hogging all the acting roles, it's a testament to the breadth of their acting ability.
"There's programmes on there like Away In A Home and The Ricki White- law Show, which are just our takes on the sort of programmes being made these days," says Jon Kenny. "A lot of the stuff is about the perception of what is real and what isn't on television, how people relate to television and how their emotions are mixed up by it. Myles and Brendan in the shop always pass comment on what they see before heading on to the next programme."
The only real point of reference in their work is Hall's Pictorial Weekly, given that D'Unbelievables' material is also firmly rooted in that same rural type of eccentricity. Performing together for 10 years, Kenny and Shortt have become masters at vernacular comedy and what's most impressive about the new video is their way of working with accents and regional colloquialisms. Also impressive is the very physical aspect of their performance and the way they introduce and integrate elements from harlequinade, mime and pantomime into their work - which obviously goes back to Jon Kenny's love of commedia dell'arte.
It's all a far cry from their current stint with the Druid company touring The Lonesome West around the country. "It's directed by Garry Hynes and again we play two brothers but in very different circumstances," says Kenny. "The biggest difference we found doing the play was that you must stick rigidly to the text - every word, pause and sentence must be adhered to. The play is really well written and we had to un-learn our tendency to improvise or mess around with the material. It's very, very different and in the same way, very, very exciting".
D'Telly is out now on the Sony label