‘sup?
Popular Wanderly Wagon street person Fortycoats.
He got off the gear his own show and an annual.
Collywobble writes:
Found this in the toy box Granny has for the kids yesterday. “Be me forty coats and me fifty pockets” exclaimed I when I found it. Designed by Don Conroy no less. Kids not impressed. No sign of a year…anyone?
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At a guess I’d say 1981
Back when RTE actually had a cross in its logo…JAY.SUS. Nowadays it just pretends not to be a Catholic propaganda station
1980. Was asking Broadsheet really more efficient than Googling it?
Ignore me. Googling it doesn’t work. Some time in the 1980s.
+1980
http://irishmemory.blogspot.ie/2014/05/johnny-forty-coats-1943.html
V interesting link, Vote, ta!
My late father, Jack Flanagan, was a reporter with the Irish Independent in 1943 and wrote several pieces about Johnny Fortycoat. You’ll find a copy of one of them at http://www.planware.org/johnny40coats.pdf
‘Twas all Slightly Bonkers
Totally
Aqualung came out in 1971
Im gonna say 1986
1984
1980 was the year of the epic battle between Fortycoats and Doubletree over the stalls of the old Dandelion market. 20 pounds’ worth of second-hand clothing destroyed in an afternoon. Now DT has a hotel named after him but FC is forgotten. The evil that men do lives after them but not the good it seems. SB, 29 June 2015.
Doubletree?
Doubletree Wellington.
Wellington, after Wellington Road, because that’s where he used to hang out.
And ‘Doubletree’??
He used to carry two trees on his back.
Why???
Because three was too heavy
Thanks… LOLing in the dentist waiting room…. :)
Apparently they provided context for the catchphrase “Wouldyalikeathreesome?” with which he would accost random women in the vicinity.
Treesome=threesome. Geddit?
And did they?
Like a threesome, that is.
No. That’s the other reason why he was called Double Three. He could never make up the numbers.
That doesn’t make sense. Double three is six.
I was being sarcastic.
Probably the ‘double’ refers to the two trees.
Going back to the two trees… how could anyone carry two trees at once?
Bonsai?
Or maybe they were bushes, which grew into trees in urban myth.
DoubleBush doesn’t have quite the same resonance, in fairness.
I don’t believe you.
That’s okay. You don’t have to.
Just wait until the book “Doubletree Wellington and 1916” comes out next year.
@ Clampers – are you extracting the Michael? Keep filling us in.
He was very poplar.
Haha. Well he was never short of a bit of wood, that’s for sure.
@theladyvanishes
Are you speaking from experience?
Totally unreliable hearsay.
But people have been convicted on less. Poor Fortycoats.
ah hear leaf it out
it’s all pine and well for yew to stalk
@theladyvanishes
Fascinating story. Is Doubletree still alive?
He was killed in a collision with a maroon-coloured 1978 Mercedes at the junction of Waterloo Road and Baggot Street in 1986. Near to Le Coq Hardi if any of you remember that place.
His evil essence still permeates that area. Strange things happen there because of the spirit of Doubletree.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/woman-killed-by-falling-tree-1.871106
https://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/11/01/a-rose-by-any-other-name-2/
Indeed. Previously a nightclub known as Annabels.
Doubletree makes bad things happen in good places.
And Fortycoats?
Fortycoats as he was is gone. He won’t return in that form. Maybe the precise opposite.
The precise opposite?
i.e. washed, cleanshaven, and with a capsule wardrobe of outerwear rather than the entire Dandelion stall?
This is freaking me out.
Who are you, anyway?
She did say she was Bonquers…
He Stoops to Bonk Her
https://twitter.com/SheilaPortobelo/status/437275970366894080
The first episode of the Fortycoats spinoff show was broadcast in January 1983, so Book One of Fortycoats & Co was most likely published later that year. So, it’s likely that the one above was published in 1984
https://stillslibrary.rte.ie/indexplus/image/2104/024.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2498600/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_lk3
Fortycoats & Co. (1982–1988)
Whatever happened to Brother Bilingus though?
I can’t remember what ever happened to Rory (who played the original Fortycoats) in Wanderly Wagon, I know he got written out of the series probably innocuosly despite rumours about the actor who played him. But how did they explain the character leaving? Twill play on my mind now this…..
Why would they bother their holes explaining an occasional character leaving a children’s TV show?
Wha’ rumours Murty?
82’83 BTW
For that annual
He left. I remember him leaving. The Wagon flew away, he waved them off, and then turned and put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and said goodbye to the audience. I kept waiting for him to come back. And he never did.
Bill Golding left after he heard someone referring to him as Rory while he was on stage in a Shakespearean (or something of that ilk) play because he wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and not just be known as that character.
I loved Wanderly Wagon until Fortycoats joined and I couldn’t believe they gave the character his own show, I thought he was the biggest gobdaw on the telly :-(
what is that Gorilla planning to do? (I think the long-coated schoolboy was called “Sofa Sogood”?)
Also, why is the snake attacking Captain Caveman?
Another vote for 1984, the year in which Fortycoats was at his absolute commercial and artistic peak – his imperial phase, if you will.
I was born in 1983 and we had this book. My brother is two years older than me and it was given to him so I would say around 1987.
I had this book as a child, I was old enough to be able to read it but I don’t really remember the TV show so I’m saying 1986 because I couldn’t recall read pheque all before then.
Or of course whoever found the book could just look at the date of the copyright in the inside cover.