He says he loves his new-found anonymity, but broadcaster turned property-developer Mike Murphy is back in the spotlight with a new documentary, writes Kevin Courtney
YOU CAN JUST picture the scene. A beach in Florida. Sun beating down on the palms. A group of well-heeled men of a certain age are lounging by the pool, sipping their pina coladas while bikini-clad women frolic in the water. Each gent takes his turn to recount how he made his fortune - oil, stocks, cattle-ranching, that kind of thing. Then they all turn to a tanned-looking, well-filled-out Irishman who looks totally at home in this sub-tropical idyll. "So, son, what's your story?" asks one.
"Oh, I was one of Ireland's top broadcasters," replies the not-so-young man, nonchalantly. "I became a household name playing candid-camera pranks on TV, then I presented the most successful arts show on radio, becoming a patron of the arts, and finally I walked away from it all and became a millionaire property developer."
Mike Murphy didn't win the Lotto, but, in the business we call show, and in the serious business of high-stakes property development, the former RTÉ broadcaster from Ranelagh has been on a lifelong winning streak. He didn't become as big as Gay Byrne - he was the cardinal to Gay's pope - but in his career as a property tycoon, he has surpassed all his former RTÉ colleagues, and now lives much of the year in the luxurious, sun-drenched comfort of his Naples, Florida home with his second wife, Annie.
It's a long way from his first home in Ranelagh, where he grew up, but the journey there has been generally smooth, entertaining and, somehow, inevitable.
Murphy was the chameleon of Irish broadcasting, a man who could quickly shed his old skin and don a new mantle as the times dictated. When the nascent Radio Éireann needed an announcer who could imitate the stuffy, properly-enunciated manner of the BBC broadcasters across the water, Mike duly obliged. When the newly established RTÉ Television needed a sports commentator who knew his way round a playing field and a scoreboard, Mike was waiting on the subs bench. When it needed a cheeky chappie boy-next-door type to deliver Bruce Forsyth-style light entertainment to an eager viewing public, Mike manfully danced into the spotlight. And whether or not RTÉ Radio needed a serious arts show presented by a man with a genuine passion and understanding of the arts, and who could deftly communicate that passion to his listeners without coming across as trite or inane, Mike Murphy was very much the man in the frame.
So, who is this ever-changing chap who evolved from light entertainer to heavy-hitting tycoon with hardly a second glance back into the past?
The first of a two-part documentary made by Tyrone Productions, The Lives of Mike, to be shown on RTÉ Television next Tuesday, will thrust Murphy back into a prime-time television slot, and refresh our memories of the man who was Irish television's second-best-known personality back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Murphy is our affable host, showing us his childhood home in Ranelagh, bringing us into his old school, Terenure College, revisiting old haunts in Dublin and letting us glimpse his lavish lifestyle in Florida, where he now spends much of his time in blissful anonymity, free to enjoy his vast riches without being accosted for an autograph.
REWIND TO IRELAND in the 1950s, and there you'll find a teenage Mike Murphy, enduring his parents' constant arguments at home and losing interest in academic subjects in Terenure College. There's footage of Murphy in public therapy with Uncle Gaybo, recounting a row with his dad in which a knife ended up quivering in a wooden door. Young Mike found solace in sports, and in dressing up in costume for the school's Shakespearean plays. Years later, fronting his own TV show, The Live Mike, he would don various disguises and go out on the streets of Dublin playing pranks on hapless members of the public. One of his victims was his own father - Freud would have had a field day with that.
He dropped out of school without doing his Leaving, and his dad, a car dealer, got him a job as an apprentice draper. But Terenure College had instilled a love of drama in him - the school also taught such eminent Irish actors as Bosco Hogan, Lorcan Cranitch, Michael McElhatton and Donal McCann.
In his spare time, Murphy acted in the Dublin Shakespeare Society (he recalls playing Edward, the bastard son of King Lear), and then toured Europe with Brendan Smith's acting company, performing plays by George Bernard Shaw.
It didn't take long, however, for Murphy to realise there was no money in theatre, so he pitched up in the GPO, from where Radio Éireann was broadcasting. He worked as a gofer for the station's publicity department, lugging records down the corridor and writing scripts for the station's sponsored shows. One day, he was asked to present the Colgate-Palmolive show, and thus began his move into the upper echelons of Irish broadcasting.
He married Eileen Dixon in 1965, and when RTÉ Television set up shop in Donnybrook, Murphy set out his stall as a man for all seasons. He used his love of games to nab pole position as a sports presenter. He presented a music show, a rather poor imitation of Top of the Pops. And he compered the National Song Contest, which in those days was the big-time.
With his all-singing, all-dancing, all-acting-the-mick show, The Likes of Mike, Murphy had arrived, and was well on his way to becoming a household name in two-channel land.
"I was never particularly ambitious," he informs us in the documentary. "It was a very unusual career and life, and a very colourful and interesting one. Fame did not rest easily on me."
Still, Murphy continued to push the envelope of Irish broadcasting, emerging as Ireland's answer to Bruce Forsyth or Noel Edmonds, and becoming a fixture of weekend prime-time television.
There's Mike in a circus cage trying his hand at lion-taming. There he is disguised as a French rugby supporter, annoying Gay Byrne as he's trying to do a piece to camera. There he is presenting his own travel programmes, Murphy's America and Murphy's Australia. There he is presenting Winning Streak on Saturday night. And suddenly, there he isn't.
In 2002, Murphy walked away from his television career, and never looked back. But this wasn't career suicide - Murphy was already in the middle of a brand new game. He had already been successfully presenting The Arts Show on RTÉ Radio since 1988; such was his aptitude for the arts that he was taken seriously by the arts community even while still gurning for the masses on teatime TV.
He had also begun a property portfolio that would bring him the kind of riches that even the top broadcasters would envy. He credits his parents with sparking his interest in property. During his childhood, his family moved house no fewer than 17 times, and the ease with which they could just sell, up sticks and set up somewhere else stayed with him. Perhaps that's also why he finds it easy to change career and don a new professional guise.
As a director of the multimillion Harcourt Developments, Murphy is now a major player in the international property market, with commercial interests in the US, Ireland and the Bahamas. Also on the board of directors are developer Pat Doherty and Andrew Parker Bowles, former husband of the Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Built into the foundation stones of Murphy's business is a continued interest in the arts, and a willingness to put his money where his taste lies. He is known as a generous patron of the arts, and he ensures that his many developments will provide opportunities for young artists to have their work prominently placed.
Park West, the residential, business and industrial centre near Dublin's Heuston Station, is a case in point. When developing the complex on the site of an early Christian burial ground, Murphy ensured that high-visibility artworks such as Bastard Son of Sisyphus, a spectacular staircase waterfall by Orla De Bri, and The Irish Wave, a tall mobile sculpture by Angela Conner, were woven into the overall design.
When Wesley Boyd, writing in this paper in 2006, lamented the lack of nameplates honouring our great writers and artists on the streets and roads of Ireland, Murphy wrote to The Irish Times to point out that the thoroughfares in City West boasted such names as Yeats Way, Beckett Way, Heaney Avenue, Friel Avenue, Banville Avenue and O'Casey Avenue.
AN ACRIMONIOUS SPLIT from his wife Eileen, with whom he had four children, attracted a lot of tabloid publicity at the time. Murphy now lives with his second wife Annie in Florida, from where he oversees a property empire that reaches around the world.
He says he doesn't miss the limelight - in fact he has been revelling in his new-found anonymity, and rests assured that few people under 30 remember the cheeky fella with the microphone and the funny pranks. Still, there's always last year's DVD featuring a selection of Murphy's classic spoofs to remind them. The DVD, entitled I'm Mike Murphy from RTÉ, was so successful that a second volume is to be released on November 7th.
So why star in a high-profile documentary about himself so soon after espousing the joys of a life off-camera? The Lives of Mike, an entertaining enough documentary, provides a glimpse into a naive and more professionally forgiving era of broadcasting, but it's hardly as timely or as burningly topical as, say, the upcoming three-part documentary on Bertie Ahern. Perhaps this inoffensive, affectionate tribute presages another twist in Murphy's life story.
Given the worldwide economic upheavals of the past year, property is no longer the sure bet it once was.
Earlier this year, Harcourt became embroiled in a legal battle over a €500 million development in Las Vegas. Perhaps Murphy anticipated the downturn, and is already on the lookout for other ways to bolster his wealth and feed his hunger for new challenges. Whatever guise he takes, you can be sure he'll have the last laugh.
CV MIKE MURPHY
Who is he:Mike Murphy, veteran broadcaster who was second only to the great Gaybo in the public mind.
Why is he in the news?A new two-part documentary, The Lives of Mike, tells the story of the man behind the silly disguises.
Most appealing characteristic:You never know when he's going to show the hidden depths behind his affable manner and easygoing wit.
Least appealing characteristic:You never know when he's going to knock on your door and pull a hidden camera prank on you.
Most likely to say:Ha, Ha, fooled you again, Gay! Least likely to say: can I have my old show back, please?
The Lives of Mike is on RTÉ 1, on Tues at 10.15pm