Radio 4
1997 (two programmes)

During and after the Second World War, the Irish humorist Brian O’Nolan (who also wrote under the name Flann O’Brien) wrote some of the most sublimely funny pieces ever created in the English language — although much of his early material was in Irish — for ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, his column in the Irish Times, for which he adopted the pseudonym ‘Myles na Gopaleen’.  These two programmes featured dramatisations of some of his best material, performed by a group of Irish actors and adapted by the acclaimed writer and critic Owen Dudley-Edwardes.  A ‘cruiskeen lawn’, by the way, is no kind of a lawn at all, but in Irish a ‘full jug’.