| KEVIN MCALEER |
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Return of the mac…..The enigmatic Kevin Mc Aleer has decided to reform and for one night only will perform his classic comedy show “Turn it On” at the Olympia Theatre on Saturday 12th September. Regarded as one of the most influential comedians on the alternative comedy circuit this is a rare opportunity to see the master at work as he revives the man from Nighthawks that made him a household name. It’s twenty years since the Tyrone man lit up the screens of RTE2 with his pyschedelic folk tales of Kojak, Dana, Gary Glitter, the Woman and the Washing Powder, Closedown, and dozens of other cultural icons too nameless to mention. The tv sketches caught the imagination of the whole country, and led to several mind-bending national tours, and a best-selling EMI video in glorious VHS called ‘Turn it On.’ So why has McAleer decided to exhume the crazy old Nighthawks character after all these years? ‘Well they say “what goes around comes around”, and lately I’ve been snowed under with requests from fans with long memories, to dust off the old guy and put him back on a stage. I got out the old VHS over Christmas and had a look and thought “why not?” All I have to do now is remember the streams of nonsense he used to come out with.”
McAleer has been hugely influential for a whole generation of comedians, not just in Ireland, but in the UK as well. David O’Doherty, for example, tells how he decided to become a comedian after seeing the original Nighthawks show in the Olympia back in the mists of the Nineties: ‘I couldn’t believe how good it was.’ Stewart Lee is a huge fan- ‘probably the best piece of stand-up that I have ever seen’ is his modest verdict. People in every corner of Ireland these days reminisce nostalgically about the Nighthawks character and quote their favourite lines, in the same way that he himself used to look back on the ‘good old days of the Seventies’ when we ‘made our own entertainment by watching the television.’ The oddness of this phenomenon is not lost on McAleer. ‘I’m very tickled by the idea of looking back twenty years to a show based on looking back another twenty. Or something like that. I’m getting excited already. I’m looking forward to looking back.’ |
Olympia Theatre