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Hello and welcome to Marshall Matters with me, Winston Marshall at the Spectator Buildings in London.

Today I'm joined by comedy, legend, multi-bafter winning, creator of Father

Ted, Black Books, the IT crowd and writer for Brassai, the day-to-day, the Farshow, and other shows.

Graham Linnan, Graham, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Thank you. Thank you for asking me. So I watched these shows growing up. This is very special for me.

But what I just learned is that actually you started in music. Yeah. How did you get from music to comedy?

Well, I was a music journalist in a magazine called Hot Press in Dublin,

and Arthur Matthews, who went on to write Ted with me, was the art layout guy. And this was a time

when magazines, the way they printed the magazine was, like, if you made a mistake, you had to

cut out the word and post it over the copy and then photocopy or something and send

it off. So this was pre-computers. So the last weekend before publication was grindingly slow and

boring. And author and a man named Paul Woodfull, who we nicknamed Paul Wonderful, used to kind of carry on a comedy routine between themselves

that would just have us all in stitches.

And I really kind of fell in love with Arthur especially.

What was the routine?

They had a few.

One of the things they did was they pretended to be inner city Dublin tequando instructors and they

they had a joke that when te quando comes from two words two Korean words tei meaning head or

intellect and quondo meaning too batter you know and they had stuff like this. And also, Paul was in a band called

the Joshua trio that Arthur drummed for, and every so often author would, when Paul was

doing a costume change, I think it was, Arthur would come out from behind a drunk hit and put a

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