Dermot Morgan should, by right, be celebrating his 60th birthday tomorrow. But fate has no respect for talent, and so, at the age of just 46, one of the great rowdies of Irish comedy was lost to us.

If it were in my power to bestow a gift on my departed friend today, I would send him clips of Lionel Messi’s five goals against Bayern Levercusen FC in this year’s Champions League. Why? The twin passions of Dermot’s life were football and taking the mickey out of Germans.

The pretext for slagging Germans, by the way, came as part of a marital package. He had abandoned teaching and was working in the RDS at the time, when, over a bale of hay during Horse Show week, Dermot fell for a pretty fraulein, Susanna, who had the ability to inscrutably skate through the deepest funny insults directed at her homeland.

A night with Dermot was a night with a cast of hundreds – all played by Dermot. He had a very broad canvas and sometimes a slosh of paint would do. But if finer detail was required, Dermot was never short of using a sharp shiv masquerading as a palette knife.

Dermot had all the right credentials to be “one of the lads”. He loved nothing better than to belly up to the bar in Dublin’s Berkeley Court Hotel, having watched Ireland eke out an unlikely victory over a fancied team. If rugby was the sport of the day, it was his sheepskin-coated IRFU alickadoo “Jim” who would come bounding out to play, in full flow, with asides thrown in from the colourful Scottish commentator Bill McLaren – “and there’s a bit of argy going on in the lineouts”.

If soccer was the game de jour, we would, via Dermot, be privy to the innermost thoughts of none other than Mick McCarthy, who was, in real life, one of Dermot’s closest friends. Then again, it might be Jack Charlton who turned up, receiving a lecture on the finer points of the game from Dermot’s Eamon Dunphy, all pursed lips and selfcoined aphorisms.

You’d nearly be afraid to go to the loo, because invariably he would send you on your way with a witty dart from his blowpipe and you knew that while you were gone, his impersonation of you would take centre stage until you returned to the safety of the group.

What makes Dermot’s passing still feel so obscene for me is that he had come to live in Churchill Terrace, just around the corner from me in Prince of Wales Terrace in Dublin’s Sandymount. From an address point of view, we certainly knew how to lord it over the plebs.

It was a wretched twist of fate that Dermot never got the opportunity to sink back into the armchair of contentment that goes with a job well done. He died within hours of filming the last episode of Father Ted, so he never got the chance to sit back and objectively analyse his work as an actor.

His casting as the straight-man feed to Ardal O’Hanlon’s bewildered Dougal was a stroke of genius by the writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews. But poor Dermot was raddled with self-doubt about his acting ability and, even worse, he was frustrated that he was speaking lines that had been written for, rather than by, him.

Two days before he died, his voice came fizzing down the phone from London to tell me he had just had a brilliant meeting in the BBC in reaction to his proposed series about the Germans who were interned as prisoners of war in the Curragh Camp in Kildare. His last words to me were: “I’ll see you next week.” Meanwhile, on home soil, his Scrap Saturday radio show was a miracle, a mixture of two genii, Dermot the Exocet missile and Gerry Stembridge, the man who could programme the targets, picking out the choicest harvest of venal government blackguards for Dermot to eviscerate and grind to dust with the mortar and pestle of his scabrous wit.

The most poisonous barbs of all were reserved exclusively for RTÉ, of course. To Dermot, RTÉ was his nemesis, but in truth it was just plain misfortune that nobody within the station, with the exception of Gerry Stembridge, ever managed to hamess Dermot’s great, maverick talent.

Dermot’s loyal retainer, John Fisher, had enough patience and enough love to absorb the chaotic trajectory of Dermot’s reckless rush to anger and in fact it was John who told me how one of the unique aspects of Scrap Saturday manifested itself in golf club car parks countrywide. There, every Saturday morning, lone drivers would pull in and sit in their cars, tune in and hang on every word of Scrap Saturday, before eventually dragging themselves away and heading for the first tee.

A love of bad puns and silly parodies were the basis of my early relationship with Dermot. I first got to know Dermot when I was living with my family in a gate lodge on Cross Avenue in Blackrock and he would call around to shoot the breeze.

He first came and knocked on my door as an acolyte, and for a while I revelled in his worship until I realised that it wouldn’t take Dermot very long to wipe my eye. But some aspects of our relationship depended on me retaining my status as the dominant partner. We had a chaise longue just inside the door of the lodge.

A loud knock on the door would herald his arrival and as soon as he was through the door, he would fling himself, full stretch, onto the couch and I would “shrink” him for the next two hours.

Another characteristic we shared was how united we were in the masterful manner with which we handled our pecuniary affairs. We shared a bank manager, Frank Dalton, a decent, generous man who ran the UCD Bank of Ireland. He truly eamed his soubriquet “Frank The Bank”, and I’ve no doubt he easily spotted our thin ploys to stave off the axe by promising him two tickets to The Late Late Show.

Dermot’s two boys, Don and Robbie, from his marriage to Susanna, have turned into fine young men, despite having to grow through the hardship of losing their hero dad too soon. And Susanna will miss him as much as the rest of us tomorrow.

His new partner Fiona gave him another shot at parenthood when Ben was born 18 years ago. Dermot really relished the peace and comfort this new relationship had brought to him. In Fiona, he found someone as brilliantly bonkers as himself, and yet together enough to keep the nose of the aeroplane always pointing upwards.

In their growing years, Ben and my grandson Fionn were close friends, and I vividly remember one day walking in on them, their backs turned towards me, as they sat engrossed in an episode of Father Ted. Fiona remains a close friend; she still adores Dermot, but without having to cry. When the gang get together, Fiona still carries Dermot with her and bits of him emerge at moments that we least expect.

The greatest legacy of Father Ted resides in the fact that there were a finite number of episodes, each one a classic, so the reputation of the show is assured forever, cocooned in a glowing, shiny orb that can never be broken. Like Dermot himself.

We’ll raise a glass to you tomorrow, my old friend.