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20 years on
Before Ted: What was it like to work with Dermot Morgan?
The much-loved comedian died 20 years ago – we spoke to his former collaborators Gerry Stembridge and Barry Devlin.
“OUR ATTEMPTS TO collaborate always ended in us enjoying ourselves so much so that we wasted time and got nothing actually written.”
Gerry Stembridge and Barry Devlin tell similar tales of writing with Dermot Morgan – planned work sessions often went awry. Stembridge, co-creator with Morgan of the hugely successful radio satire Scrap Saturday, says they quickly found it was better to work separately and compare their scripts at the end of the week.
Devlin, who worked with Morgan on the Live Mic in the early 80s and produced some of his most popular parody records, says the comedian was never short of inspired ideas – getting him to write it all down, however, was sometimes a challenge: “You could never, for instance, get him to repeat a story.”
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