The extraordinary story of two Irish daredevils who vied for the world record for the longest time spent buried alive is told in the engagingly idiosyncratic new TG4 documentary Beo Faoin bhFód (Buried Alive).

It’s an exhilaratingly quirky tale relayed with considerable charm – and you wonder why the tale of larger-than-life Tipperary farmer Mick Meaney and his more stoic Cobh, Co Cork, nemesis Tim Hayes isn’t better known. It would make for a fantastic movie – imagine Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell trading barbs from six feet under as these sworn rivals.

Meaney grew up “on the side of a mountain” in Tipperary but was moved to Kilburn, London, in the 1960s to provide for his young family (who remained in Ireland). There he met a cute Kerryman and former circus performer named Michael “Butty” Sugrue, who operated several pubs in the UK capital and was always on the lookout for new publicity stunts.

He saw in Meaney someone whom he could both make famous and take advantage of. Brave but perhaps guileless, in 1968 Meaney accepted Sugrue’s challenge − stay underground for 61 days with only a pipe connecting him to the world above. It wasn’t his first experience of burial: while digging a tunnel as a labourer, he had been caught in a landslide, so he knew what it was to feel the earth pressed all around.

The stunt was a moneymaking venture – though not for Meaney. Visitors to Sugrue’s pub, the Admiral Nelson, could talk to the subterannean adventurer via a connecting phone line – but only after stuffing cash in a tin. None of these payments found their way to Meaney or his family, as his daughter Mary recalls. “When you came to speak to Mick, you put money into a box for the family but the family never got it,” she says.

Back in Cobh, Hayes was sceptical about Meaney’s achievements. Having discovered his passion for sleeping in coffins while caught in the rain in Tokyo, Hayes had taken to burying himself in regulation-size coffins and felt that Meaney’s much larger casket was a “hotel” and tantamount to cheating.

The Guinness Book of Records recognised Hayes’s achievements, and for many years, he held the record for the longest stay in a standard coffin – 242 hours, 58 minutes. Meaney’s 61 days was, however, eclipsed in 1968 by a nun from Belgium who had parlayed her fondness for sleeping in a crypt into a 100-day stretch underground.

[ The story of the Irishman buried alive in KilburnOpens in new window ]

But even years afterwards, tensions between the two Irishmen endured – in a black and white interview, we see a much older Meaney challenging Hayes to a bury-off. It never happened – and their rivalry slipped through the cracks of history. But this engaging film has now put their story back into the spotlight – and what a bizarre and wonderful tale it is.

It is also a warning about the intoxicating effects of fame, as Mary Meaney explains. “Money didn’t bother him; money wasn’t his god,” she says of her father. “It’s a divine feeling. You want that feeling back the rest of your life. You want that spotlight back. That’s where the problem lies.”