Thirty minutes beforehand the heart beat increases and hide, and nothing else to do but worry. When you finally get out there, the 200 people in Kinnegad, the 1,500 in a Dublin theatre or the five million viewers of a television programme expect a lot and you have got to deliver. It's not a job, it's a vocation that has to be exercised. Each and every time.
People anticipate, expect and demand. You're selling them a commodity called entertainment with all the forceful purpose of a door-to-door salesman and if they buy, the reward is a lot more than monetary. Each and every gig is like a first date, wondering if the audience will go all the way with you. It's no coincidence they're called one-night stands.
"It's no life," says Ardal O'Hanlon, who as Dermot Morgan's co-star, can more than empathise. "You get up in the morning, thinking `why I am doing this? I'm no good at doing this, I'm not funny' and that feeling stays with you the whole day of the show, only it heightens in direct proportion to the hours left before you go on stage. Then you go out and do the gig, and if it goes well, you come off thinking `this is great, they liked it and what's more, they like me'. You would think you'd learn from experience, but you don't and this happens each and every time you do it."
It's easy to summon up some "Type A personality trait/obviously very driven, could never switch off" run of cliches to explain and understand the sudden, early death of Dermot Morgan. But it's only half the picture. The fitful fights against broadcasting companies, authority figures and the Irish culture of satirical humour are well-documented but Dermot Morgan also fought against himself. He never quite knew what to do with whom and where to the best effect. It was there in his head, he had talent and a purpose to that talent: he wanted and needed to puncture pomposity, bait liberal sensibilities, ridicule the worthy and, latterly and most literally, to make a holy show of himself.
If comics don't have any purpose outside of fulfilling some Freudian notion of ego-deficit, then Morgan would have stopped and started with his early contributions to The Live Mike. He was, though, blessed with enough raw material for a few lifetimes - the Christian Brothers, the GAA, Irish politicians (particularly Fianna Failers), bishops, priests, pro-lifers, government handlers, Euro commissioners, referendums, presidential elections and tribunals. His job would never be done.
Amid all the tributes from politicians during the week, it was only Ruairi Quinn who focused on how Morgan contributed to the "modernity of the nation". In a world of joke-book comics dressing up in leprechaun suits and telling gags about "O'Reilly and Murphy", Morgan was doing what any satirist worth his Swiftian heritage would do, by annoying, irritating and making ridiculous those who patently deserved it. Whereas the ancient Greeks used to make them drink poison and Stalin used to liquidise them, we have always inoculated ourselves against satirists by joining them in the Shelbourne bar for a drink, wearing our sense of humour on the sleeve of our ill-fitting suit and priding ourselves as to how we can take a joke with the best, or worst, of them. While Morgan did flirt with the mainstream, he was also capable of training his sights on a target and pulling the trigger to devastating comedic effect. Yet the satirical advances he made were somewhat lessened by how he was welcomed by the enemy - just like the Spitting Image syndrome, Irish politicians didn't feel they had "arrived" until they had been done by Morgan.
He was very much "of Ireland" in that his source material was located here and he spoke the vernacular. He thrived on the idiotic utterance of the backwoods politician and the flagrant hypocrisy of our religious leaders and in a goldfish bowl environment, he was the lord and master of his terrain - which was why his material didn't travel abroad and his international success came from acting, not performing.
While on one level he was an outsider tilting at establishment windmills, he was also a Merrion Row insider who got to perfect the voices of his political targets by dining with them. The same duality informed his relationship with RTE - while he was scarred by his experiences with the station, he also revelled in his "outlaw" image and was thrilled in a sense that his material was deemed "too hot to handle".
Unlike today, throughout the 1970s and 1980s he ploughed a lonely furrow and his was a lone comedic voice as he travelled the uncharted waters of contemporary political satire. While collaborators such Gerry Stembridge did share his barely disguised sense of outrage at what was allowed to pass for civilised political behaviour in this country, nobody was as earnest as Morgan at pulling away the veils of smug self-righteousness. While others learnt to let go of their anger or sublimate it in different directions, Morgan had the ardour of a trainee compulsive, which is primarily why he was willing to walk away from a hugely successful show such as Father Ted (which also gave him financial stability) to channel his abilities back into live performance and his own scripts and go once more into the breach. His ego, drive and talent wouldn't have had it any other way.