Pat Shortt has revealed he no longer has his iconic ‘I shot J.R.’ t-shirt.
The Tipperary native’s maniac character, Tom, wore the T-shirt on the hit Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted for five episodes.
But Pat revealed he no longer has the t-shirt despite how famous it became after the show aired.
He said: “It’s the one thing I get asked around the world is do I have the original t-shirt. Of course not,” he said laughing.
“It went back into the wardrobe and went away,” he added.
“I did a tour of Australia recently and every radio station I went into, they represented me with an I shot J.R. t-shirt.”
Pat said he wondered if the younger generation would get how funny his iconic ‘I shot J.R. t-shirt worn by Tom on the series.
He also revealed he originally auditioned to play Dougal in Father Ted.
Pat appeared in a new podcast Talking Ted, in which stars of the iconic comedy share their memories of the show with hosts Joe Rooney - who played Father Damo - and Patrick McDonnell - aka singer Eoin McLove.
“I think I was reading for Dougal. I think the call was for Dougal and Tom and I think Ardal had only accepted it the day before I went down there so they told me when I was there that there was no point reading it, unless I really learned the lines but that they were most likely that was gone already to Ardal.
“We’d all be doing the comedy circuit together.
“I was delighted for Ardal but I didn’t know what he got. No one knew what was going on,” he said.
Pat said playing Tom was a “brilliant character”, whose accent was inspired by a Director at Rte who hailed from Monaghan.
“It was a brilliant character. At the time myself and Jon had done a programme on Rte… it was made around Tom and Gerry – the two characters we both had – and I worked with Tommy McArdle who was a Director in Rte. He was from Monaghan.
“When I did the audition for Tom, I was thinking what kind of a character would he be and I loved Tommy’s accent so I kind of used a bit of Monaghan… that’s kind of how I based the accent. Half Monaghan, half Tipperary.”
But he remembers the show got a slagging when it first aired by the Irish media, who compared it to Leave It To Mrs O’Brien.
“I got quite a slating I remember in the Irish media because there was a previous sitcom in Ireland called Leave it To Mrs O’Brien… it wasn’t that well received, and they were kind of associating me to that.
“Father Ted was fairly mad, and people just didn’t get it initially,” he added.
He admitted when he first read the scripts he thought it was “mental”.
The Talking Ted podcast is released on Friday with a new edition every fortnight.
