On the set of Special 1 TV, Mary Hannigantalks to the man who puts words in the mouth of Jose Mourinho and Wayne Rooney

IT’S NOT often Jose Mourinho has nothing to say for himself, instead he’s just lying quietly on his back on the desk, his brooding eyes examining the studio ceiling. You tiptoe past the Special One for fear of disturbing these moments of meditation, for fear he’ll suddenly leap up and declare: “Shut up. I’m fantastic. Be champions.”

But then you get a grip and remind yourself he’s a puppet so he literally has nothing to say for himself, that without some vocal assistance from Mario Rosenstock this Jose Mourinho will remain speechless. Still, you take no chances and tiptoe away.

Rosenstock appears with Wayne Rooney in his arms and carries him over for an introduction.

“Say hello to Wayne,” he says.

Eh, “hello, Wayne”.

“All right, there?” he beams, with Rosenstock’s help, from freckled cheek to cheek.

Eh, “How are things?” “Brilliant, like.” Good. Good.

He grins back so angelically you wonder how any referee could ever book him.

Fabio Capello, meanwhile, is having his facial “muscles” exercised by his puppeteer, the England manager having remained uncharacteristically calm while an arm was inserted in his nether regions, the hand moving up to his head.

Over in the corner Sven-Goran Eriksson – or “It”, as Jose refers to him – sits motionless on a chair, staring out at the River Liffey and the bustle on the city centre streets below. Sven, not for the first time in his life, appears friendless and alone. You say hello but he doesn’t reply, mercifully enough.

Truly, the set for Special 1 TV – formerly known as I’m on Setanta Sports – is no place for pupaphobes. Damian Farrell, luckily enough, isn’t one of them, instead he’s the “genius”, as Rosenstock describes him, who, with his team, brings Jose, Wayne, Fabio and Sven to life once a week on Setanta Sports.

“I was really looking around for an extension of what I do,” says Rosenstock of his eagerness to find a television format that would allow him bring to the screen some of the comic brilliance that has been Gift Grub for the last 10 years. Farrell, as it proved, was the answer.

Having trained at Jim Henson’s (of The Muppets fame) Creature Shop in London, worked with Sullivan Bluth Studios in Dublin and “with” Podge and Rodge and Dustin the Turkey, Farrell was no stranger to bringing madness to life.

His own animation company, Caboom, has made advertisements for Guinness, O2, Vodafone, Cadbury, Lucozade, Smarties and the ESB, to name but a few, and won international awards for a series of animated commercials for Barry’s Tea. His next challenge was like no other – to transfer to the screen Rosenstock’s largely surreal weekly take on the world of football, with the assistance of Jose and his guests.

Setanta snapped up the proposal, and I’m on Setanta Sports (a very distant cousin of You’re On Sky Sports!, the football phone-in show) was born.

The real Jose didn’t exactly help by departing English football in September 2007, but Rosenstock looked on the positive side of what was, initially, “a blow”.

“When he left everybody missed the guy – immediately, huge withdrawal symptoms. So I said, right, ‘let’s bring him back’. It looked like a PR coup. It looked like Setanta were saying ‘you think you lost Jose? No you haven’t – we’ve built a puppet and we’re going to give you your fix every week’.

“And Jose, the puppet, says it himself – ‘even if you don’t like me, you love me’.

“I still believe he’ll be back in England, his particular antics don’t go down too well in Italy. The Italians are surprisingly prosaic, you might think they’d be quite dramatic but when it comes to football, they’re quite conservative,” says Rosenstock.

“The football community in Italy is dominated by northern Italians and they’re much more Germanic, they like to talk tactics, the serious stuff, they don’t want to be listening to Jose calling a rival an idiot, and so on. There may be a Latin snobbery there too, the Portuguese might be seen as a lesser cousin of the Spaniards and Italians.

“I just think he’ll be back. Even though Inter are going well, his gig isn’t working there, the home of what he does is in England.”

Rosenstock and Mourinho do, of course, go back a long way. When the latter heard the former’s Gift Grub recording of The Special One – Jose and His Amazing Technicolor Overcoat he described it, on television, as “amazing”. It was, said Rosenstock at the time, “probably the best moment of my entire existence – I recorded it [the Mourinho interview] on DVD, VHS, MP3, KMS, BLS, BLT.”

He was, famously, then invited to Chelsea to meet Mourinho and the players, word of which merely served to heighten his reputation as the Special One’s pre-eminent impersonator.

“One of the more puzzling ones was just before Chelsea played Barcelona in the Champions League. I got a call from Hector at Radio Barcelona. He told me everyone there loved the Special One song and he asked me to go on radio that night and do an interview as the Special One.”

“I said, ‘but I don’t speak Spanish’. He said ‘it’s okay, we have an interpreter’. I said, ‘Eh, that comedy just isn’t going to work’, but I did it anyway. It took 15 minutes to get through the thing. The questions were asked in Spanish, then translated in to English, my English replies as Jose were then translated in to Spanish. So there they were, getting an Irish guy to do an impression of a Portuguese manager in English on a Spanish radio station.”

If Mourinho is the show’s guv’nor, Rooney – who looks a little like a cross between Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman and Dennis the Menace, with a hoodie – is its genius. “And that’s what we decided to make him, not this cruel, Shrek-like figure that is usually his caricature,” says Rosenstock.

“He’s a genius footballer, so we decided to make him a genius at literally everything. And the best thing is that he’s completely unaware of his own genius.”

True enough, Mourinho and Eriksson were left dumbstruck by that genius when Rooney completed his Rubik’s Cube puzzle in seconds, sang Ave Maria and then performed keepy-uppies blind-folded. Rooney didn’t blink. The boy is, after all, a bit special.

When, in January, Mourinho announced that I’m on Setanta Sports was ending, Rooney and the show’s fans were inconsolable. “Nelson Mandela” rang the show to plead with Mourinho to change his mind, as did Willie Nelson. Rafa Benitez and Arsene Wenger called too, but only to celebrate the show’s demise.

“I am running out of credit – can you call me back,” Wenger asked Mourinho. “You’re on a pay-as-you-go phone? Typical stingy voyeur.” There followed online petitions . . . “Best thing on TV by far and you want to get rid of it? Pathetic.” “What a way to treat your fans. You disgust me Setanta and I have already cancelled my subscription.” “Shame on you Setanta for not caring about your viewers.” “Damn it Setanta Sports! What the hell do you think you are doing, cancelling one of the best programmes you’ve ever had? I thought Setanta Sports was a channel of champions not losers?”

There were more angry phone calls to the station, and more threats to cancel subscriptions. It was, though, as Rooney noted, a rebranding “ruse” – “a cheap marketing ploy, more like,” muttered Sven – with Mourinho explaining that he was now “syndicating myself senseless”. “That’s Machiavellian, that is,” said an admiring Rooney.

So the four puppets (four and a half if you count the mini Cristiano Ronaldo puppet Rooney often produces from under the desk) remain in business.

“Spitting Image would have had a couple of hundred puppets and they could imagine and do any situation they wanted. We can’t, we’re slightly constrained by budgetary issues, which means we have to come up with more ideas,” says Rosenstock.

“But it’s been a lovely union between ourselves and Setanta, they’ve given us a free rein, Tony Whelan [director of programming] has been very supportive and creative. I love it. Every week is a buzz,” he says.

Between the demands for material from Special 1 TV and Gift Grub on Today FM, Rosentock’s “antenna has to be constantly moving around”.

“I’m scripting all week, looking at stuff,” he says, before he has to record the five-minute Setanta show for Friday morning.

Once he’s done, Farrell and his team of puppeteers – uncomfortably positioned under the studio desk – take over, working Jose, Wayne, Sven and Fabio to match Rosentock’s words.

It’s a gruelling process, “very technical and stoppy-starty”, says Rosentock. Farrell, the politest of perfectionists, regularly declares, “that was great . . . but can we try it one more time?”

“He sees each gag around 20,000 times, it’s exhausting,” says Rosentock. “I call him that night to ask how it went, and he says something like ‘hkhsa hioydg hkgadgk’. So, really, I have to wait until Saturday evening [after Setanta’s coverage of an English Premier League game] to know. I’m usually scared, but, as I said, Damo, like Wayne, is a genius, he makes it work.”

“Is Wayne there?” shouts Farrell.

“He’s in the toilet,” comes the reply.

Rooney emerges, attached to his puppeteer, smiling as usual. Although there were tears the time he analysed ET for the show. “The lad ET, you can’t coach that sort of thing.

“He’s over the moon – very emotional scenes here.” Genius.