- Culture
- 20 Mar 01
Here at Hot Press we like to bring you interviews with the most influential figures of our times. And in Ireland 1999 who is more influential than Ballydung bachelors PODGE and RODGE? STUART CLARK spoke to the zeitgeist-defining duo about the crucial issues: religion, sex, Mary Black and Jean Butler s minge . Also an entirely unfounded revelation about our esteemed editor. Pics: MICK QUINN.
HOW BIG S your lad?
I ve only just met Podge & Rodge but we re already getting down to brass tacks.
Whether it be social or sexual intercourse, we ve never been ones for foreplay, continues Podge who is the eldest of the Scare At Bedtime brothers by five minutes.
That wasn t the last time I got me hole before him, he chuckles. The only reason I m inquiring about your mickey is that you Hot Press fellas have a reputation for manual dexterity.
That Niall Strokes has his finger in a load of pies which is quite a turnaround given all the wanking he used to do at school, Rodge interjects. Sure, it s a miracle he hasn t had to undergo wrist replacement surgery.
It s plain talking like this which has elevated the Ballydung bachelors to the upper echelons of Irish opinion-makers.
I don t mind people holding on to me utterances, Podge remarks. Gay Byrne s had his held onto for the past 30 years and, apart from a bit of a limp, he s fine. He s an ungrateful old bugger, though.
How come?
We went on the Late Late Show before Christmas and gave him a beautiful present of a gravestone with both dates on it and he didn t seem at all impressed, the Dublin ponce!
If Podge & Rodge appear a trifle brusque at times, that s because their upbringing left little room for social niceties. Put into Ballydung Lunatic Asylum by their parents when they were just four, the lads were reared by a mad psychiatric nurse who became their Granny O Leprosy.
Our mother and father never came back for us, says Rodge matter-of-factly. Or at least, that s what Podge thinks. They did turn up when we were 14 but he sleep-slaughtered both of them. He had enough on his plate, what with puberty and everything, so I told him it was only a bad dream and the stupid shitehawk believed me.
With attitudes towards insanity becoming more enlightened, the old asylum was decommissioned and renamed Ballydung Manor. Claiming squatter s rights on their room, Podge & Rodge continue to live there accompanied by the aforementioned Granny O Leprosy and a cat.
People think there s something perverted about us sleeping together, but when we arrived at the asylum they only had the one bed spare, Podge explains. It works out fine because if either of us is entertaining a young lady, the other can watch from the wardrobe, if necessary.
A caring, sharing attitude which makes Podge and his brother ideal role models for the nation s youth.
I m not sure about us being role models but having spent our entire lives in a Bermuda Triangle of death and suffering, we know everything there is to know about breaking the law and getting away with it.
Can there be a finer education?
The Greatest Irishman Of All-Time
Podge: That would be a local conjurer and artist by the name of Anal McCaverty. Oh, he used to fascinate us when we were kids. You could give him any object and he d make it disappear up his arse! And you know where it would come out? His mouth! Now, you name me one other Irishman, living or dead, who could do that.
Rodge: He came to a terrible end, though. He shoved a whole three-piece suite two chairs and a couch up his arse but couldn t get them out of his mouth. He was walking home by the canal, fell in and got drownded. The water was only waist-high but there was such an influx of it up his colon that he sunk in seconds.
Podge: Yeah, the foam in the furniture got awful heavy and poor Anal McCaverty was dragged under. It s not the kind of way you d like to go, is it? A big suite up your arse.
Rodge: Oh, I don t know. It wouldn t be too bad if the sweet was one of them giant Gobstoppers.
Podge: They re erecting a statue of him next to the one we ve already got of Pol Pot. He had relations in Ballydung the Piss Pots.
Music
Podge: We wouldn t listen to that oul pop music at all.
Rodge: No, we d be far more into Mary Black and our own local boys made good, Fester & Ailin . They re playing in Mullinasnot on Tuesday night. #4 in and, with a bit of luck, you ll get a free fish supper.
Podge: They re on the Muff label which is an Irish subsidiary of Virgin. We ve got all their albums Down The Furry Glen, Fiddle With The Monks, Let Me In Your Back Door Sadie and their Christmas one, Fester & Ailin s Raging Horns.
Rodge: My favourite would be the song they had out last Halloween, Never Shove A Banger Up Your Arse . They re what you might call spokesmen for their generation .
The Arts
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Podge: I ve never seen such a bunch of arse in me life as that Flat Mickey and his Riverprance.
Rodge: The thing about it is, no matter how good you are with the old freeze frame on the video, you never get to see Jean Butler s minge. Not a trace.
Podge: We invested in one of them new fangled DVD yokes my God, they ve got some freeze-frame but even at one-eighth of a second you can t see as much as a spider s leg up there. I mean, why would you watch a pack of fecking gobshites traipsing around the stage, kicking their legs in the air and covered in sweat, other than for a bit of you know what?
Sex
Podge: I tell you, getting that Viagra down the eye of your cock is no joke.
Rodge: As much as I hate Dublin and all the Dublin ponces living there, they do have some marvellous sex shops. Before Christmas there, I managed to pick up some anatomically correct parts from two of my favourite actresses Sighorney Weaver and Gwyneth Porno. They were in Titty Titty Bang Bang which was one hell of a film. I wasn t so keen on the follow-up Shitty Shitty Bang Bang. Stuff comes out the other end for a reason, y know.
Podge: Yeah, there s no glass-topped coffee table in our living-room. We ve actually made two films of our own Schindler s Tits and Shaving Private Ryan which stars a local fellow by the name of Tom Wanks. The first 25 minutes of that would be particularly harrowing.
Rodge: We wouldn t be into any of that perverted stuff, though, like giving the woman pleasure. Why the hell would you want to be doing that?
Podge: Put it this way, I m known as the fastest gun in Ballydung. Other fellas will be doing all that eating and licking and munching while I m putting me trousers back on. That, of course, is presuming I managed to get em off before shooting me load.
Law & Order
Rodge: Let me straighten this out. The carol singers never came to our house. They must have gone missing up the laneway not near our front door at all.
Podge: There s one thing you have to know if you re in trouble with the police or thinking of murder. Always bury below six feet because the coppers, lazy gobsheens that they are, won t dig any deeper. Go to eight feet and you re safe. Not only that but there s a much stronger concentration of lime down there which makes the corpses rot quicker. We re blessed with the soil in Ballydung.
Rodge: We certainly are. Our parents came back to collect us when we were 14 and Podge sleep-slaughtered them. It s the same as sleep-walking except with the use of an axe, and I had to bury them down the garden. My Dad was a slaughterer and me mother was a slaughterer, so it s in the genes.
Podge: Our local fella, Garda Bent, is obsessed with crime. We told him one day we d been watching Men Behaving Badly and straight away he asked us for their names and addresses.
Religion
Podge: We ve Father Flange down here who s just returned from the missions in deepest, darkest Africa. He was there helping out the black babies and doing his voodoo training. Rome realises that with the number of people going into vocations falling, they ve got to diversify a bit. For instance, Father Flange has come back a dab hand at head-shrinking.
Rodge: We re sort of a spin-off from the Catholic Church. They have mass, we have virgin sacrifice. Some of the young people in the parish frown on this, so we ve started inviting foreign youth-hostellers in for a cup of tea. Not only do you have a sacrifice that can t be traced, but you re up a rucksack and a bicycle.
Podge: That reminds me, we ve got a ladies bike we re looking to off-load for twenty quid. The saddle s been wrapped in clingfilm so it s as fresh as the last time it was ridden.
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The European Union
Podge: I m very friendly with a Swedish woman who moved in down here, Miss Dominina. We ve a duty when foreigners visit Ireland to make them feel at home, so I often go over to hers in me bondage gear for a meeting of the nations. There s been talk of the EU bringing about zero inflation but I can t say I ve experienced it meself. In fact, I ve never known it to be so rampant.
TV3
Podge: If they want to improve their ratings, they should run a competition with a first prize of licking marmalade off Grainne Seoige.
Rodge: How about eating your lunch from under her desk? If you went to TV3 when it wasn t busy say 12 o clock you could sneak in there and munch away to your heart s content.
Podge: She s much better than that fella they have doing the showbiz news in drag, Larry Keane. It s the Adam s Apple that gives them away every time.
Rodge: There s a lot of that transvestism in the media at the moment. Everyone knows about big butch Barry Baskin, but did you realise that Carrie Crowley used to be Gareth Crowley. Has to shave three times a day or his make-up goes all lumpy.
Mary Black
Rodge: She floats my boat.
Podge: She batters our sausage.
Rodge: Podge doesn t like to admit it but she s mine really. We were always hoping she d have a sister for him rather than that brother of hers, Francis. We wouldn t be into that homotesticle thing at all.
Podge: Which isn t to say that we re not supportive of the homotesticle community. Ballydung has one of them Pride festivals every year and we re the first to cheer when our local gay fella, Pink Feeley, goes driving by on his tractor. There s no load in the world too big for him.
Rodge: Mrs O Dwyer makes Chocolate Penis Cake and we usually get a song from our own RuPaul, Dolores Keane.
Education
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Rodge: We didn t have to go to school at all with the kind of learning we got from Granny O Leprosy. Before we d even reached puberty, we were able to maim, kill, slaughter, gut a fish and fire a gun.
Podge: If you re lucky enough to get an Uzi from Santy, you should know how to use it properly and not be discharging willy nilly.
Rodge: Sure, I ve seen people s lives ruined by willy discharges. You shouldn t cock anything unless you re fully aware of the consequences.
Podge On Rodge
I know that people would be watching the show and thinking, That fella there is fiddling with himself an awful lot , which would annoy me cept for the fact it s a medical condition. This is a technical term you ll probably have to look up, but Rodge is suffering from Lumpy Lad. It s an awful itching he has down in the lower regions combined with an anal discharge that leaves the bed all poridgey.
He s been talking for years about marrying yer one Sadie from the abattoir and moving out, which is fine by me as long as he takes Granny with him. That d leave me free to shack up with Miss Dominina and replace his porridge with me getting me oats.
Rodge On Podge
I ve been subtly trying to move out for a while now, but he s a terrible man for putting obstacles in the way. It s the usual sort of thing threatening to saw me bollix off in the middle of the night and insisting on me taking Granny. The other problem is that I can t get married to Sadie until she kills her husband. I keep telling her, It s not fair on him to be fecking around with other men while he s still alive , but she won t listen. I think Bertie Ahern would get a lot more respect around the country if he was to do the decent thing and murder his first wife. It d be cleaner and keep the Godfearing folk of Ireland happy.
Podge & Rodge s A Scare At Bedtime video is available now.