Soupy Norman was an eight-part Irish television programme broadcast by RTÉ. It was aired weekly on Thursday nights at 23:05 on the RTÉ Two channel, in ten-minute segments. The series ran from 24 May to 24 July 2007 . The show is a comedic re-dubbing of the Polish soap opera Pierwsza miłość (First Love), which has been running on Polsat television since 2004.
The main story of the show concerns Esther, a young girl from Buttevant, County Cork, who travels up to Dublin to study in college. There she encounters strong discrimination, for being a "culchie". She lives with Susan Costigan, "a woman with red hair", her daughter Kylie, her son Nathan (who becomes possessed by voices in the episode "Omen"), and her husband. Kylie becomes Esther's friend, and they are seen robbing items (such as a dog) in the episode "Margarita".
The series' other main characters are Esther's father, named Jack, and her grandfather, known as Daddy, who live in Buttevant. The grandfather is an extreme authority figure, as seen in the first episode "Buttevant", and constantly berates Jack, calling him a "great big disappointment". The two of them are mostly seen drinking vinegar (Jack thinking it was whisky), and being visited by Soupy Norman, the title character. Soupy is always inebriated, and only ever delivers rambling, nonsensical rantings to the two men. In one episode, he asks to marry Esther's sister. He refers to Esther as "that culchie bitch". The Soupy Norman sequences are always taken from the same scene from First Love, and are repeated every episode.
The series has a subplot of
Sean, a Dublin youth, trying to make a living in the city. He does this by applying for increasingly strange jobs, such as a builder, walking a dog with "canine leg disorder", running the "Red Car Bar" nightclub, and helping Satanic spirits.
In the final episode, "Straz", a character called Soupy Dave is contracted to kill Jack by his wife, using a number of surreal techniques.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soupy_Norman
