`And did she like sandwiches? Ah sure who wouldn't, now, with the options you have these days, cheese and all kind of meats and that, sure even coleslaw's a fillin' on its own . . .

"There's too much coleslaw though, isn't there? I mean, there was a woman on from Clontarf, yeah, go on, but coleslaw you can have on its own or you can have it with chicken, which I find is great, although other people who don't like it just scrape it off, you know, if you have a scraping device you can scrape it off." - The Three Joes Sketch, Apres Match.

And so it went absurdly on. One of the most surreal, arguably most laugh-out-loud pieces of comedy seen on RTE occurred in a five-minute slot after a Euro 2000 football match last Sunday night.

Depending on your sense of humour, the idea of having three Joe Duffys in all their Liveline glory banging on inanely about cats and teabags and sandwiches in a comedy sketch is either lunacy or genius.

With the Apres Match phenomenon gaining more mainstream viewing support after each soccer tournament it graces, the former assessment seems increasingly appropriate. Those who have missed it up to now should tune in for the last instalment of this championship, to be aired on RTE 1 after the Euro 2000 final tomorrow night.

One of the Liveline crew yesterday described the Duffy sketch as the funniest thing shown on RTE, "but it has become really hard not to slip into three-Joe mode during our meetings," she says guiltily. Duffy himself says he was mortified when called down to watch it after putting his children to bed.

"I watched it through my fingers - my expression was like the Dutch captain's after he missed his penalty. I think they are extraordinarily talented and all I would say is that I look much better than that on radio," he says. (It was grey jumpers ahoy for the three Joes).

All the Duffyisms (go on, go way, you're not serious, the woman calling from Clontarf and that unmistakable high-pitched laugh) were executed with the astonishing accuracy viewers have come to expect from the Apres Match team of Risteard Cooper, Barry Murphy and Gary Cooke. Since Euro 96 they have been lampooning the great and not so great "celebrities" associated with football punditry, the media and more especially RTE.

Few have emerged unscathed. The roll call includes Eamon Dunphy, John Giles, Bill O'Herlihy, Frank Stapleton, Colm Murray, Kevin Myers, Kevin Keegan, Jim Beglin and Mick McCarthy. Some have been less enamoured of their antics than others.

The real indication of the show's success (apart from the fact that ratings for Euro 2000 get a boost about 10 minutes before the end and an expectant silence falls in pubs when Apres Match comes on) was one night last week when the show didn't go out. Instead, an empty set appeared with a joke message suggesting RTE would not be able to show Apres Match "for legal reasons".

"The reaction from the public was incredible, they actually believed it had been pulled," says Tony Whelan, editor of Euro 2000. "People were ringing up saying have RTE lost the run of themselves? . . . They were really angry". Other calls were from journalists looking for a scoop. One newspaper even ran "the story behind the story" a couple of days later. Apres Match's megacult status was assured.

Apres Match has been allowed to seep gently into the national comic consciousness, appearing sporadically first in Euro 96, then France 98 and now Euro 2000.

The seed was sown in the mid-90s when stand-up comedian Barry Murphy enlisted the help of his friend, actor Risteard Cooper, for some sketches on a late-night TV show, The End. "Myself and Barry used to imitate the pundits and commentators while watching football matches at home," says Cooper, who takes off Bill O'Herlihy, David O'Leary and Mick McCarthy on the show.

Murphy put a proposal to RTE sport to transfer its sitting-room amusement to the screen after the analysis sessions on Euro 96 and Apres Match was born.

"Soccer is not rocket science," says Cooper, and Apres Match set out to pillory those pundits who acted as though it was. Gary Cooke, an actor and stand-up comedian, whose list of characters includes John Giles, Joe Kinnear and Brian Kerr, was recruited later.

Euro 96 introduced the character most associated with Apres Match, former Ireland centre forward and soccer pundit Frank Stapleton. Frank's Euro Ting saw Murphy do Stapleton with a wooden box on his head. More recently Stapleton has chatted to Kevin Keegan about the importance of "metaforms" in soccer and "downlanding" things on e-mail.

But the really clever thing is that those of us who wouldn't know Frank Stapleton from Frank Spencer can still get the joke. The characterisation is so authentic, and as precisely observed as anything on the BBC's superb Royle Family, that Stapleton could be a figment of Murphy's (clearly overactive) imagination and he would still work.

It is also interesting that this kind of comedy excellence has emerged from RTE's sports department, in much the same way that a few years ago, the biggest adult laughs on RTE could be found in the children's department with Zig and Zag. The message for budding comedians could be to infiltrate another RTE department, gardening say, where the space to develop successfully seems assured.

In fairness, RTE mandarins have left Apres Match pretty much alone, except for some concerns in the early days. (The group head of sport Tim O'Connor is said to have something of an "anarchic" sense of humour.) RTE personalities are among those most slagged: a recent sketch showed Cathal Goan being chased around Montrose for an explanation about how he lost the Champions League to TV3.

The character of sports newsreader Colm Murray has taken on a life of its own and like other Apres Match victims, Murray is said to be quietly miffed about the portrayal.

What's next for the Apres Match players is unsure, but a TV series of their own seemed likely until recently. The pilot for an eight-part series Apres Winfrey, was shelved amid fears by its creators that the content would be compromised - perhaps the more predictable format of Bull Island was more appealing to those in RTE. The lads are likely to pop up after the UEFA Cup which will, unlike the Champions League, be aired on RTE and, after a successful outing at the Kilkenny Cat Laughs festival, they are taking their show on the road.

Meanwhile, the workshop/improvisation activities that form the cornerstone of their creative process continues. The idea for the Joe Duffy sketch came when they were listening to Liveline and the broadcaster was talking to a woman (possibly from Clontarf) about the burning issue of whether to buy the five-pack or the seven-pack of rashers. It is worth mentioning at this point that one of the Apres Match team, Risteard Cooper, has a bacon story of his own.

For some years, he has played the part of the wistful emigrant in that ad for rashers, blathering on about how it was "breakfast time back home". The ad is exactly the type of sentimentality ripe for send-up by the Apres Match team and Cooper says they are not ruling out using it as material in the future. Crack on, lads, crack on, as Mr Stapleton might say.

The Apres Match team are playing Vicar Street in Dublin for seven nights from August 4th to August 11th.