The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In review: A turkey with all the trimmings. End this craic attack

It boggers belief that the 2 Johnnies are still a fixture on our airwaves, clogging up late-night telly with boil-in-the-bag banter and single entendres as subtle as a hurley across the knuckles. It’s like being locked in an immersion cupboard while someone forces you to listen, ad infinitum, to Pat Shortt’s Jumbo Breakfast Roll song.Half an hour into the latest season of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In and I’d have confessed to any infraction imaginable to make it stop. Knowing all the words to Killeagh, bingeing Mrs Brown’s Boys box sets, holding out for the day that Tubs is back on the Late Late. Yes ... Yes ... that was me. Just let me out.Horrific but, alas, familiar. Across the past decade, Tipp’s answer to Ant and Dec have ruthlessly commandeered the schedules to become the biggest phenomenon in Irish broadcasting since Dustin – which is apt, as the latest series of Late Night Lock In is a turkey with all the trimmings.All the trimmings but also, surely, an expiry date approaching faster than a souped-up Subaru doing doughnuts outside your local forecourt. Since they sprang from Tipp a decade ago, they’ve turned into a two-headed one-stop shop of cliches about small-town Ireland. A land of infinite chicken fillet rolls, where “craic” (sorry) is always on tap and the traditional dress, passed down the generations, is a county jersey with the collar up. How much longer can they keep it going?READ MOREAs they return for yet another series of Late Night Lock In, it remains hard to say who should be more insulted: licence-fee payers, or those of us who actually grew up in the sort of small towns they have so lucratively lampooned and know that they’re basically performing Townie Ireland karaoke.[ The 2 Johnnies – what you get if you feed Ant and Dec a Tayto sandwich after midnight – are taunting us nowOpens in new window ]How have they come so far with what is essentially just one joke – that Ireland outside of Dublin is a land of jolly bumpkins who thrill to potato picking and junior hurling and where the ultimate lifestyle accessory is a straight-from-the-showroom Massey Ferguson? The buck surely has to stop with RTÉ, which is all too happy to pander to the idea that this is how the unruly hordes outside Dublin conduct themselves.Jonathon McMahon and John O’Brien are no doubt well aware that they are selling a caricature back to the people being caricatured – behind their smiles is the steeliness of stone-cold pros who are playing a role, but if they were ever to break character, the jig would be up. The sheer, existential horror of what they do is unleashed in the latest Late Night Lock In, where we are invited to chuckle at a man with what sounds like a pretty average Louth accent – and you’ve got to wonder whether RTÉ would dare do the same with someone with, say, a working-class Dublin accent. There would be uproar.The 2 Johnnies did not invent any of this – merely weaponised it. They represent the nadir of a decades-long trend of Irish people laughing at Irish people, first pioneered by D’Unbelievables – though the crucial distinction is that D’Unbelievables did so with humour and affection. In contrast, the 2 Johnnies reduce it to elbow-in-ribs frat-bro inanity. They are also clinging on to the coat-tails of the “Irish mammy” industrial complex, whereby anything “uniquely” Irish – fretful mothers, local sports organised on a parish-by-parish basis and chicken-based snacks – is regarded as innately and eternally amusing. Not for any inherently funny reason but merely by the simple fact of its existence.[ The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In review: It’s harmless fun but before long you just want it to endOpens in new window ]All of this will no doubt go down a treat in Montrose, where people genuinely seem to believe that’s what the rest of Ireland looks like. Anyone who has moved from outside Dublin to the capital will have witnessed this desperate delusion first hand: there is no experience more surreal than being condescended to by a Dubliner who thinks that moving to the city is the equivalent of relocating to Tokyo or New York and that you should be staggering around starry-eyed.Those of us who grew up as actual townies will see the 2 Johnnies for what they are – cheeky panto banterers. But the chicken fillet roll has gone cold, the immersion has indeed been left on all night and Mammy is reaching for the wooden spoon. The 2 Johnnies have had their fun but now, finally, can they leave us in peace? Time, surely, to end the craic attack and give other Irish comedians a chance to shine.