Culture That Made Me: Ciarán Murphy of Second Captains picks his touchstones
Ciarán Murphy of Second Captains. Picture: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times
Born in 1982, Ciarán Murphy grew up in Milltown, Co Galway. In 2004, he joined Newstalk radio station, working for almost a decade on the Off the Ball show.
He is a co-founder and host of the successful Second Captains podcast, which originated in 2013. His book This is the Life: Days and Nights in the GAA is published by Penguin Ireland.
I loved Fantasy Football League [presented by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner on BBC Two] growing up. Much of it has aged badly, but it was brilliant and something totally different. It opened your eyes to the idea that sport is part of the culture, and it embraced culture like, say, Elvis Costello was a manager on it one time. The Premier League had just started. There was a brashness about British culture at that time. Britpop was the music we were listening to. TFI Friday was on. There was an arrogance about Fantasy Football League too. It couldn't not be attractive to a football-mad teenager in the mid-’90s.
The Godfather Part II is probably the best movie ever made. You can drop into any half hour of it, and it's incredible – the descent into hell for one person. Al Pacino’s performance is ridiculous. The juxtaposition of Vito’s rise to power and Michael's losing his grip on his humanity. It’s so good, so smart, so operatic, the sweep of it is incredible. Every shot is a poster. Little Vito looking out at the Statue of Liberty in quarantine and all the rest. It's beautiful in every conceivable way.
I loved Sam Pekinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. A lot of people know the movie because of the soundtrack. Bob Dylan is in it, and he's terrible. It’s supposed to be the nineteenth century, but he just plays Bob Dylan!
There's a scene where Slim Pickens, a great actor in westerns, is shot. He's dying, sitting on the riverside. 'Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door' kicks in. It's the most beautiful scene. It's not the greatest movie ever made, but it's so good, and worth watching given Kris Kristofferson died recently.
I used to read voraciously, but there were a couple of years in my mid-teens when football was a big deal, and I wasn't reading at all. My mam, who was a librarian, brought me home Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and it reignited my love of novels again. I loved the writing, the floridness. It blew my mind. It’s raucous and epic and crazy and brilliant, and it turned me onto the magic realists.
My mam gave me a copy of John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun when it came out around 2002. The writing is so sparse and powerful. Nothing actually happens in the book, but it's an evocation of life for a year around a lake. It has universal themes of life and death and circularity and nature. He's an incredible writer about nature and about Ireland. There’s a scene where a neighbour dies. The main character has to dress the body and prepare it for the funeral. It’s incredibly emotional – this thing that has to happen to allow the rites of Christian burial to happen. It's so touching. The whole book is a beautifully observed portrait of what rural Irish life is like.
I love George Plimpton’s collection of participatory journalism sports books. The Bogey Man is about him playing on the PGA golf tour as an 18 handicapper. It’s so good, so funny like, for example, his description when he’s playing badly: “I often sense as I commit myself to a golf swing that my body changes its corporeal status completely and becomes a mechanical entity, built of tubes and conduits, and boiler rooms here and there, with big dials and gauges to check, a Brobdingnagian structure put together by a team of brilliant engineers but manned largely by a dispirited, eccentric group of dissolutes – men with drinking problems, who do not see very well, and who are plagued by liver complaints.” Anyone who's played golf with a handicap around 18 like myself knows exactly what he's talking about.
We interviewed Conan O'Brien on the Second Captains last year. I’ve always had a big grá for Conan.. His TV show is so good, so antic, so surreal. I find him hilarious.
He's incredibly smart. He obviously has a gigantic ego to be on American TV at his level, but it's subsumed into what's good for the show. He was brilliant to interview, a thrill of a lifetime.
There were gold medallists in Paris who didn't have a better Olympics than Evanne Ní Chuilinn. She had an incredible couple of weeks.
She's criminally underused by RTÉ. She asks all the questions you want, but pitched in a perfect way. She’s got humour. She’s upbeat. She's brilliant.
The Thin Blue Line is a documentary by Errol Morris from 1988. It’s about a miscarriage of justice in the United States, involving Death Row. It’s so good, so rigorous. It’s chilling and brilliant and devastating to watch.
Gimme Shelter is about the Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont. Basically, it’s the tolling of the bell for the death of the ’60s in an hour and a half documentary. The Stones are brought face to face with footage of the murder [a fan]. That scene alone is incredible because they're talking around it, not minimising it, but they're defensive about it, and then they're brought to silence by footage the documentary maker made at the gig itself. It's mad. It’s hippies meet the Hell's Angels and it gets incredibly dark.
A book probably everyone's seen in bookshops is 1001 Movies You must See Before You Die. Someone bought it for me about 20 years ago. There's something weird and not right about handing off your film selection to critics, but at the same time this book has thrown me so many good movies. The number 1001 is just big enough to think at some stage before I turn 80 I might watch every one of these shagging movies. Would I ever have heard of a movie like, say, The Barefoot Contessa, from the 1950s if I hadn't sat down to idly flick through this book?
This is a movie podcast hosted by Karina Longworth. They did an incredible series on the Charles Manson murders. They've done a ton of series over the last 15 years, but that one in particular sticks in my head. It's one of the most chilling things I've ever heard. One episode in particular, I remember where I listened to it – it was that good.
When it comes to podcasts, it would be remiss not to mention the Irish Examiner’s two GAA podcasts because I really enjoy Anthony Daly’s hurling show and Paul Rouse’s The Gaelic Football Show. I listen to them all the time.
