The Irish Are Coming

JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS: born to be king

Born 27 July 1977

My favourite actors, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton, they never fulfilled their potential. You’d see absolute brilliance, but they burned the candle at both ends … If you want to be in for the long haul, you have to be up to it. You can’t go out all night chasing girls and partying.

Hellraisers often fall into one of two categories. One kind tends to pursue the path of boldness, enjoying the notoriety and basking in the anti-glory that ensues. The other type is inclined to fall into the hell that gets raised. This species of hellraiser is more an accidental tourist to a land they didn’t particularly want to visit. It is into this latter category that Jonathan Rhys Meyers finds himself, more out of accident than design. A fine actor with a stormy relationship when it comes to booze, Jonathan is well aware of the moniker that has followed him around since he first hit the headlines for less than appetizing reasons. But rather than relishing the hellraiser label, like his predecessors Harris and O’Toole, he has battled it. If you want a career in the film industry today you have to clean up your act so they can get insurance cover for you. It’s all about the money. I’m in two minds whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing because our hellraisers tend to add to the gaiety of the nation. They’re more fun. I personally prefer a bit of roughness round the edges.

Colin Farrell looked set to inherit the hellraiser mantle for a while, with a sex tape, a taste for hard liquor and a long line of model/actress girlfriends, but he managed to go through the mill and come out the other side. I’ve met him several times and can confirm that he’s clean as a whistle, as well as being an extremely affable, articulate and witty guy. We talked about his relationship with the late Elizabeth Taylor in the years before her death – she got him to read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem at her funeral, where he was one of the only people there who was not a family member. He’s sober now but he’s still got that naughty glint in his eye and I think that must have been what attracted the woman whose great love was Richard Burton, one of the most infamous hellraisers of all time.

As to why men like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Colin Farrell and those who blazed a trail of destruction and staggering acting ability before them end up as tabloid headlines, the best place to look is at the beginning of their stories. For Meyers, it was in Dublin city that a premature baby named Jonathan Michael Francis O’Keefe was born and kept in hospital for seven months before being allowed to go home to his mother, Geraldine, on Valentine’s Day 1978. Within three years, the family had moved to Cork and Jonathan’s parents had separated. Abandoned by his father, he stayed with his mother in a council flat. Unhappy at school, Jonathan Rhys Meyers abandoned education – or, rather, education abandoned him when he was expelled at fifteen years old for truancy. His story around this time is one of poverty and neglect. Geraldine O’Keefe had a serious drink problem and whatever money came in from the state swiftly found a home in the local pub: ‘She drank her dole money all the time. The reason she had no money was that she was going out with a lot of other women who had no money, and you start buying drinks all round and it’s gone. So you have a lot of friends on Thursday when you have money, and it’s all happy. And Friday morning you wake up and have nothing.’

With little else to do, Jonathan headed for the local pool hall and it was there his life changed dramatically in every sense of the word as casting agents happened upon the sultry-looking young man with movie star looks and an attitude to match. An audition followed, he met a director, and within months he was starring in a commercial for Knorr, got paid £500 and thought: ‘What boy is not going to say, “I’ll do this”? I wanted to act because it was soft money.’ Soon afterwards, and by now a fully fledged aspiring actor, Jonathan arrived on the set of Neil Jordan’s biopic Michael Collins (1996), in which he played the assassin of the Irish revolutionary, and felt very much at home: ‘It was just the whole atmosphere, the whole buzz about it, the big cameras and, suddenly, it was kind of like, this is a pretty f**king cool job.’

Success didn’t come easily or quickly and Jonathan had to graft to get good parts. Countless auditions were coupled with ‘talk’ of major parts in films like Minority Report and Spider Man (and at one point, the next James Bond!), none of which came to pass – but there was good news as the roles started to trickle in. His presence was required and lauded in television projects like Gormenghast (2000) and movies that include Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Vanity Fair (2004), Matchpoint (2005) and Mission: Impossible III (2006). Jonathan’s star was on the rise, but as he has said himself, ‘Overnight success takes about ten years.’

A major break came when Jonathan was cast as Elvis in a CBS mini-series (2005). Not only could he transcend the Irish accent and take on a plausible American one but he got the pelvic moves and facial twitches dead on. A Golden Globe quickly followed and the future looked bright. However, within a year, his mother Geraldine died aged just fifty. It was a traumatic time for the young actor and there were stories of dramatic bust-ups with his girlfriend and drinking bouts that ended badly. In a move that distances him from the old-school hellraisers, at the age of just twenty-nine, Jonathan checked into rehab. At the time, he told reporters, ‘I am not a hellraiser. I drank for a year and then realised it didn’t work for me any more.’

For a while, he replaced the pub with the gym but admitted it was hard to give up drinking, especially when filming in Dublin. He was a man in mourning, in the public eye and in trouble and in some ways there’s a deeper tragedy underlying Jonathan’s hellraising, one that lacks the sheen of the boozed-up glamour of O’Toole or Harris. Since then there have been a few messy and troublesome scraps in airports and more stints in rehab, but I can tell you that when he came on my show he was slurping nothing more intoxicating than the coffee. He was very calm and a proper gentleman in the Peter O’Toole mould, rather than the tabloid creature that has been created around him. He’s got money now but rather than investing in the fancy cars and bling, he’s bought himself homes in London, Dublin, Morocco and LA – which all sounds eminently sensible for a poor Irish lad made good.

It should be noted that throughout the whole torrid time, Jonathan was keeping the acting show on the road with arguably his most acclaimed performance to date as Henry VIII in the phenomenally successful mini-series The Tudors, a role that won him an Irish Film and Television Academy Award in the Best Actor in a Television Series category, 2008. It’s a role that he appeared to relish and one he was more than proud of: ‘People have said Henry VIII didn’t look like me. Fair enough. But no critic can tell me that how I play Henry isn’t right, because I play him a hell of a lot closer to history than people admit. He was an egotistical, spoilt brat, born with the arrogance that everything he had was his by right.’

Meyers was following in the footsteps of Charles Laughton, Richard Burton, Robert Shaw and Keith Michell but he took the role by the scruff of the neck and did it his way – including all the sex scenes, which he said were ‘like having sex in a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon’.

Jonathan’s own life story couldn’t be further removed from that of the most married monarch of them all but you can tell there’s plenty more to come from him. Although he’s already shown his versatility in going from the King of Rock’n’roll to the King of England, I personally think this actor’s best years lie ahead of him if he can keep the demons at bay.

He rejects the hellraiser label, saying: ‘I kind of like people having this idea that I’m this wild rebellious guy. But the reality is that I’m not, and I’m not quite sure I want to reveal how boring my life is. Of course, as a young Irish actor you’re tarred before you start. It’s the enduring cliché.’

What I think he’s got in common with the other Irish hellraisers is the ability to play edgy, troubled and explosive characters – perhaps because he’s got all that Celtic rage bottled up inside him. Let’s park this one for now as ‘work in progress’.

* * *

It’s curious that all three of the hellraisers I’ve featured here came from difficult backgrounds and fought to achieve their success. They’ve got an irrepressible, restless spirits and boundless raw talent. Perhaps that self-destruct gene can be channelled into creativity, supplying the high-voltage electrical power that each of them possesses as an actor. Of course, you don’t have to have an intense love affair with liquor to be a great actor – there are loads who don’t, some of whom I’ve featured in Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo). But the drinker’s unpredictability gives them an edge and makes you feel you don’t quite know what they’re going to do next – even when they’re sober.

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THE COMEDIANS (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)

IF YOU WANT TO SEE how much Anglo-Irish attitudes have changed over the last decades, just take a look at the humour. The Bernard Manning era when every paddy was an idiot and ‘How many Irishmen does it take to change a lightbulb?’ jokes were ten-a-penny have long gone. It would be like doing a joke about a Pakistani or a black woman or a gay man: it’s not only politically incorrect but can be illegal and every right-thinking person considers them bad taste. Of course, in Ireland we’re allowed our own self-deprecating humour but it’s got to be on our own terms. We’ll crack a joke about ourselves and call ourselves paddies – but the British are not allowed the paddywhackery now, and some Irish people even got a bit hot under the collar in the 1970s when Dave Allen dipped into it.

Perhaps it’s because it’s not too long ago that the Irish were seen as Punch magazine cartoon images: the potato-eating famine refugee, the drunk navvy or the balaclava-clad terrorist. As recently as the 1980s and maybe the early 90s these were the stereotypes propagated, particularly in right-wing elements of the media. Every Irish comedian who came over to Britain from 1967 to 1997 had to drop in a few gags about terrorism just to get it out of the way because otherwise it was the elephant in the room. But the peace process changed everything, virtually overnight. It changed the acceptability of being Irish in Britain, it changed the nature of comedy and it changed the portrayal of Ireland in the media. Neil Jordan’s 1992 (pre-peace-process) film The Crying Game was revolutionary enough for showing an IRA man falling in love with what he thought was the girlfriend of a British soldier. But now in 2013 we see Gillian Anderson in The Fall, which is about a psychopath running around Belfast killing women and there’s not an ArmaLite or a terrorist cell in sight. It’s a huge cultural, political, historical shift in the right direction.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, comedians had torn up their jokes about terrorists, drunken builders and women with twenty-five children. All that is a clichéd bore. We don’t laugh at Irishness any more; we laugh at what’s genuinely funny – and that’s what’s made it possible for us to enjoy the ironic post-peace-process sitcom Father Ted. Maybe in the past we would have been a bit more sensitive about the three priests banished to Craggy Island for their misdemeanours but now it’s just pure comedy and we’re all laughing together.

It’s not that the Irish are po-faced when it comes to humour. On the contrary, we use it to end an argument, to alleviate sadness or to poke fun at ourselves, but all self-references must be on our terms. And if there’s one thing that’s always been fertile territory for Irish humour, it’s having a dig at authority. As a people we’re instinctively, unfailingly anti-authoritarian, probably because of all those centuries of resisting British authority. It’s bred into us from an early age; it’s in the water. The first comedian I’m going to talk about in this chapter is the one who first made his name for attacking the biggest authority of the twentieth century: our very own Catholic Church (those of a sensitive disposition may want to make the sign of the cross before reading on).

DAVE ALLEN: the funniest man in the pub

6 July 1936–10 March 2005

I’m bothered by power. People, whoever they might be, whether it’s the government, or the policeman in the uniform, or the man on the door – they still irk me a bit. From school, from the first nun that belted me …

I remember as a young boy, pyjamas on, sitting on the couch beside my dad and watching him as he chuckled while watching a man on the television. The man was roughly my dad’s age (ancient) and appeared to be drinking a whiskey with one hand, occasionally smoking and repeatedly removing non-existent lint from his trousers. It was Catholic Ireland so when this mild-mannered man dressed up as a bishop and started doing fart jokes, I realized we were witnessing a bold man – a very funny, bold man.

The comedy that struck a chord in our house when I was growing up ranged from The Muppet Show through to Tommy Cooper via Dermot Morgan and Basil Fawlty and on to Dave Allen. As a family, we appeared to enjoy anarchic yet droll humour that was rarely vulgar but always clever with a twist of mischief. Dave Allen embodied all of these traits. It was dad humour. Everyone’s dad loved him. He was that intriguing paradox of being gentle but cutting, intelligent but accessible. You didn’t need a degree to get his jokes – just an ability to share his observations.

Allen was born in Dublin and his dad, Cullen, was a journalist and celebrated raconteur who often shared a bar counter with Irish novelist and wit Brian O’Nolan (aka Flann O’Brien aka Myles na gCopaleen). His mum, Jean, was a nurse who happened to be born in England. With a story-telling father and an English mother, it’s perhaps no wonder Dave Allen ended up sitting on a stool on British TV telling funny stories for a living.

His Irish background would very much inform his future career and the substance of his routines, so many of which revolved around the Catholic Church and a questioning irreverence towards that institution and all who sailed in her. He was a pupil at Beaumont convent school, which was run by nuns whom he described as ‘the Gestapo in drag’. Unhappy as he might have been at the time, these nuns would go on to inform much of Allen’s later comedy: ‘I arrived at this convent, with these Loreto nuns, and the first thing that was said to me was: “You’ll be a good boy, won’t you?” And I went: “What?” So they said: “When you come in here, you’ll be a good boy, because bold and bad and naughty boys are punished!” And I’d never seen a crucifix before. All I could see was this fella nailed to a cross! I thought: “Shit! I will be good!”’

He went on to Terenure College in Dublin, another Catholic school which, he recalled, combined cruel corporate punishment with ominous talk of sex and its association with the Devil himself. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Allen was expelled and left school altogether at the age of sixteen. A few journalistic jobs followed (clerk at the Irish Independent, writer with the Drogheda Argus) before he decided to try his luck in London, having run out of options at home. His attempts to get a job on Fleet Street came to nothing but he was more successful at Butlin’s, where he got his first taste of audience approval as a Redcoat. Sitting telling jokes and stories between the evening’s acts suited him right down to the ground and he decided to focus on comedy full-time. First he changed his name from the alien linguistic mouthful David Edward Tynan O’Mahony to the less complicated Dave Allen (a stage name that cannily secured alphabetical top-billing). He was still Irish – just not quite so much.

It was the early days of television and Allen seized the opportunity when he appeared on the BBC talent show New Faces. He toured with the singer Helen Shapiro and by 1963, he was joined in the support-act dressing room by up an unstoppable force of nature called The Beatles. It was in Australia where he got his biggest break when he hosted Tonight with Dave Allen – a show that ran for eighty-four episodes. (In an odd romantic twist I can’t resist mentioning, Allen was linked to the feline singer Eartha Kitt who appeared on the weekly show twice. The pair were seen holding hands in public but nothing was to come of it and the story died. Shame, really.)

Back in the UK in 1964, with an Australian wife in tow instead of an American sex kitten, Allen built up a reputation as host of Sunday Night at the Palladium and as resident comedian on a show hosted by another Irishman abroad, Val Doonican (see Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)). By 1967, he was established enough to go it alone when he started hosting Tonight with Dave Allen on ITV and it was here that the character we all came to know and admire emerged with barstool, half-smoked cigarette and a glass of what we all presumed was whiskey. The drinking and smoking put you at your ease. You felt you could sit there and have a dialogue with him. He’s like the funniest man in the pub. Now, of course, the funniest man in the pub can sometimes be the funniest man in the pub and he can sometimes be the pub bore, but Allen really was the funniest man in the pub and you wanted to sit there and listen to his stories all night, perhaps with a glass of your own in hand.

A mixture of monologues and sketches made the BBC take notice and it was on this channel that The Dave Allen Show and Dave Allen at Large dominated the comic airwaves between 1968 and 1979. Allen’s experience of a Catholic education and life in a near-theocratic society informed his material, and sex and the demonization of it by the Church loomed large too. The confession box was a regular target. Allen described it as akin to ‘talking to God’s middle-man, a ninety-five-year-old bigot’. Back home in Ireland, though, few in authority saw the funny side of Dave Allen’s jokes and in 1977 his shows were banned on RTÉ. The Church was still a very big noise at the time, and perhaps viewers were writing in saying ‘Get this filth off the air!’ But it did him no harm to be banned in his home country; it all helped to build the anti-authoritarian image we know and love.

As Allen’s star ascended in London and beyond, there were typically Irish rumblings emerging from the auld sod where he was being chastised for mocking Irish people in his routine. Reporting on an awkward-sounding encounter with the comedian, writer (then Irish Times journalist) Maeve Binchy wrote:

Yes, of course he gets attacked by people for sending up the Irish, oh certainly people have said that there’s something Uncle Tom-like about his sense of humour, an Irishman in Britain making money by laughing at Irishmen, but he gets roughly the same amount of abuse for laughing at black people, at Jews, at the Tory Party, at the Labour Party, at the Pope, at vicars. People become much more incensed if he makes fun of someone else’s minority group than their own, he thinks.

The point was that the Irish didn’t want to feel the British were being given ammunition with which to mock them; the patronizing attitudes during those centuries of hurt were still too keenly felt.

It was in the mid-70s that Allen’s irreverence became a national talking point. Dressed as the Pope, the comedian pretended to do a striptease on the steps of the Vatican to the tune of ‘The Stripper’. Protests followed, with letters and calls to the BBC complaining about the disrespectful scene. And the complaints, as so often can be the way, were the making of him. Allen returned to Australia to film four shows for which he was paid AUS$100,000 and when he got back to England, he sold out in theatres across the land. It wasn’t just the Church that bore the brunt of his humour: he took a dim view of politicians, and Protestant Northern Irishman Ian Paisley was a frequent target. Anyone in any kind of authority was fair game.

By the 1980s, Dave Allen’s casual story-telling technique and some of his reference points were seen as out-dated by a new set of brash, fast-talking, so-called alternative comedians whose style pretty much reflected the era. It was the shouty political comedy of Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle and Ade Edmondson audiences wanted to watch – for a while at least. Allen announced his official retirement but staged a brief comeback on the BBC in 1990 and on ITV in 1993 that led him to explain: ‘I’m still retired, but in order to keep myself in retirement in the manner in which I’m accustomed, I have to work. It’s a kind of Irish retirement.’

The comeback was restricted due to poor health but there was time for Allen to lob one more grenade at the establishment when he told his now infamous ‘clock’ joke: ‘We spend our lives on the run. You get up by the clock, you go to work by the clock, you clock in, you clock out, you eat and sleep by the clock, you get up again, you go to work – you do that for forty years of your life and then you retire – what do they f***ing give you? A clock!’

Unbelievably, some ‘high-minded’ members of the British parliament took the BBC to task for lack of taste because of the use of the F word in the punchline. The Beeb kowtowed but Allen was unapologetic: ‘I’m Irish and we use swearing as stress marks.’

Slowly, his career was coming to an end but not before he received belated recognition by the bright young things of British comedy, who wisely awarded Allen the lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards in 1996. Looking back on his career, Allen wondered aloud where his comedy came from and ended up thanking a comic deity for the nuggets that fuelled his career: ‘I don’t know if there’s somebody out there, some god of comedy, dropping out little bits saying, “Here, use that, that’s for you, that’s to keep you going.”’ Personally, I think his Irishness was the root of his material; it gave him the anger and anarchy.

The British public heard Dave Allen’s last performance on BBC Radio 4 in 1999 before he retired fully and indulged in his favourite hobby, painting. He had already given up the sixty-a-day smoking habit, telling friends: ‘I was fed up with paying people to kill me; it would have been cheaper to hire the Jackal to do the job.’ But it still caught up with him and he died of emphysema in 2005 while his second wife was pregnant with a son he would never meet (he had two children from a previous marriage).

Towards the end of his life, there was a renewed respect for Dave Allen with comedians like Jack Dee, Pauline McLynn, Ed Byrne and Dylan Moran citing him as a significant influence. On hearing of Allen’s death, Eddie Izzard described him as ‘a torchbearer for all the excellent Irish comics who have followed in recent years’.

There have been Dave Allen revivals on the telly recently and when I watch them I can see exactly what my dad saw in him in the 1970s. It’s observational comedy that hits a nerve, that makes you go ‘Yeah, I agree, I’m right with you there.’ It’s surprising how little has dated, even in these days when the Church doesn’t have such a fierce hold on our souls. I’d like to take this opportunity to say to Dave Allen what he always said to us at the end of his shows: ‘Goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you.’

DYLAN MORAN: telling it like it is

Born 3 November 1971

Real life is fine. But you can only take so much of it.

Like Dave Allen’s, Dylan Moran’s stage persona enjoys a drink and he slurs and staggers as if he’s already had a couple of sharpeners: ‘A comedy club always seemed to me the extension of a pub so there’s no reason not to have a drink in your hand.’ The character he creates is like the embarrassing drunk at a social gathering saying the stuff that everyone else is thinking but is too polite to say. It’s a very Irish thing, according to Moran: the congenital drunk in the corner of the Irish pub will suddenly burst out ‘You’re all talking shite and I’m going to tell you why. For the next hour.’

In his stage show, he has some great ‘telling it like it is’ skits: