The Irish Are Coming

You know when you’re late and you arrive and say ‘I’m so sorry. Traffic. Traffic was terrible. And there was a fire as well. A small boy – I had to give him an eye operation and all I had was a spatula and a banana.’ You should just tell the truth. You should just walk in and say ‘I knew you were here. I knew you were waiting. I was at home and do you know what I did? I had a bun. And it was delicious. Because I knew you were waiting. I’ll have a glass of wine – thank you very much.’

Moran says it all goes back to when he was young and ‘there were old relatives who would tell me stories and they might be funny or they might bore the arse off me’. He grew up in Navan, County Meath with a carpenter father and a mother who wrote poetry and taught him the importance of words from the word go. Like Dave Allen and Peter O’Toole before him, Moran raged against his religious education; he was ‘depressed by the priestly omnipresence’ and all the people telling him ‘stop it, don’t, put it down, sit down, be quiet’. He left school at the age of sixteen and drifted around for a few years, writing poetry and briefly, incongruously, working in a florist’s before, at the age of twenty, he ended up in Dublin’s Comedy Cellar – a small club above a bar – and caught the bug.

The act he developed was a meandering stream of consciousness – like Dave Allen, he’s the funniest man in the pub when it’s working well, but he’s much weirder than Allen. The oddness was also captured in a column he wrote for the Irish Times on random topics – recipes, insects, you name it; he’d take any subject and float off with it. After a couple of years doing the clubs in Dublin, he came across the water: ‘I had to make some money. I had to earn a living. So I thought “I’ve been having a great time playing with mud pies, but will anybody buy them?” And that’s why I went to London.’

He found it hard at first; the comedy circuit can be a thankless slog and he might not have continued if he hadn’t won the ‘So You Think You’re Funny’ competition at the Edinburgh Festival in 1993, followed by the coveted Perrier Award in 1996. After that it all started to happen for him and he got a role in a BBC Two sitcom How Do You Want Me, then co-wrote Black Books with fellow Irishman Graham Linehan (of whom more later). Bernard Black, the character he created and played in Black Books, is a droll, put-upon bookshop owner who’s not interested in much apart from smoking, drinking and reading – and somehow you get the impression he’s not much different from Moran himself.

According to Moran, there are differences between comedy in England and Ireland. In England, ‘you are the man who has a licence to say anything, which acts as an icebreaker for everyone in the room’. That’s not needed in Ireland where we’re used to our outspoken characters and the ice rarely needs breaking. Maybe that’s why Moran has been more successful in the UK than back at home. He relishes the fact that he’s seen as an eccentric. ‘In Ireland there’s great tolerance of “the character”. People say “Ah, don’t mind Jimmy – he always wears a bag on his head.” And in England these people are anathema, they’re pariahs, you cross to the other side of the street because they get in the way of your day and fuck it up.’ He’s happy to be the pariah, the one expressing himself in his own unique way. It gives him his edge.

Moran says it’s not the material that makes his act work, though: it’s about timing: ‘I understood there was a certain tension needed to make people laugh, so I created tension and built it to a point at which they laughed.’ He doesn’t tell jokes – he just opens his mouth and off he goes. On occasion he has bombed when the audience just didn’t get that stream-of-consciousness thing or his timing was off, and nowadays he’s focusing more on the TV work but still does comedy festivals worldwide. He’s settled in Edinburgh, with a wife and two children, but looks back nostalgically at the old days in Dublin when he was starting out: ‘The most fun I had, the most pleasure, was in the early Comedy Cellar days. And what matters to me is being able to still walk into the Cellar and make people laugh.’

FATHER TED: Irish lunacy

21 April 1995–1 May 1998

The show’s … not about paddywackery clichés. It’s essentially a cartoon. It’s demented. It has its own world and as much integrity as The Simpsons.

– Dermot Morgan

There was a time when mockery of the Church in Ireland was an offence deemed strong enough for placard-wielders to stand outside a cinema or theatre decrying the contents of the offending film or play (one they had likely not seen). The Life of Brian was banned in Ireland for donkey’s years and, more recently, the placards were out for The Last Temptation of Christ. In fact, where I work in RTÉ, the men and women of the placard have been busy throughout 2013 in all weathers decrying the presence of too much sex on our television screens. It’s a democracy, they are perfectly entitled to their placards and opinions; in fact, I quite admire their passion. At least they’re standing for something. In Father Ted, there is a famous scene that sees protestors waving signs, among them one that says ‘DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING’. It’s odd then that when Father Ted appeared on Irish television in 1995, there wasn’t a placard to be seen. What happened?

It seems Irish comedy had come full circle from Dave Allen. When the sitcom about the three priests living with their housekeeper on Craggy Island first screened, most people didn’t particularly care that the Church was being mocked; not a question was raised about it. Twenty years earlier it simply wouldn’t have been countenanced, but attitudes to the Catholic Church had changed. First of all there were the stories about priests who had secretly had children, then it moved into deeper and more terrible waters with the news that some priests had been abusing children, so I suspect the powers that be felt they weren’t in a strong position to criticize. Unfettered by protest, one of the funniest sitcoms of the twentieth century came on screen to wide praise and much applause. Essentially, Father Ted did for the priesthood what Fawlty Towers did for the hotel business – made us not take it too seriously.

It all started when Irish writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews got together to brainstorm some ideas for comic sketches and characters. Both had form: between them, they had worked on Alas Smith and Jones and TheFast Show as well as writing material for Alexei Sayle and Harry Enfield. They came up with the idea for a comic documentary with each episode focusing on a particular Irish ‘type’ and the first episode featured a scheming but loveable goon called Father Ted. They pitched it to Hat Trick Productions and Channel 4 in the UK, and the response was that they didn’t want the mockumentary but they’d love to see a sitcom about Father Ted.

Off the boys went and dreamed up the idea for the show we all know and love. Three priests have been sent to Craggy Island in penance for past misdemeanours and they live there with their housekeeper, Mrs Doyle, who keeps trying to give them cups of tea and trays of sandwiches. The storylines tend to involve Father Ted getting himself into embarrassing scrapes then digging ever-deeper holes as he attempts to lie and cheat his way out of them. The script was good but it needed exactly the right cast to make it work. Fortunately, they already knew who they wanted in the lead role …

For Irish readers of my generation, 80s television comedy was defined and exemplified by one man: stand-up mimic and actor Dermot Morgan was a staple on RTÉ television. Our parents roared laughing at him throughout the decade of Thatcher and Haughey while just a few years later, nerdy students like myself sat by the radio to hear him on Scrap Saturday, Irish radio’s version of Britain’s Spitting Image (a show we could and did watch in Ireland too). Morgan had a way with voices and he hooked up with quality scriptwriters to sharpen the wit. The show poked fun at the great and the good to the point that it disappeared mysteriously one Saturday morning, never to be seen again. Morgan was gutted and called the decision to axe it ‘a shameless act of broadcasting cowardice and political subservience’. I was gutted too. It had mercilessly lampooned our political leaders and public figures in a way that’s very important in a democracy and nothing immediately stepped into the breach.

Morgan slogged long and hard on the comedy circuit in Ireland where one of his characters, Father Trendy, a ‘cool’ and ‘with it’ priest, remained a constant favourite. That’s why, when the producers of Father Ted called in 1994, he was more than ready for the challenge and stepped into the lead role with aplomb.

Father Dougal, the bumbling priest who is not overburdened with brains, was played by Ardal O’Hanlon, while the role of Father Jack, the potty-mouthed alcoholic, went to Frank Kelly. My favourite character, Mrs Doyle, was played by Pauline McLynn with such exceptional comic finesse that her catchphrases were soon in use nationwide.

‘Will you have a cup of tea?’

‘No thanks, Mrs Doyle.’

‘Ah, go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on …’

‘I won’t have a cup right now.’

‘You will you will you will you will you will you will you will you will you will …’

She’s every Irish mother of a certain vintage, constantly bringing in trays full of sandwiches that no one is ever going to eat, and I love her.

Top actors and comics queued up to be part of the joke: Graham Norton played the high-camp Father Noel Furlong in three episodes and Ed Byrne played a teenager mocking Father Ted on a telephone chatline. The show had that buzz right from the start and everyone involved knew it was going to be big. The first series quickly acquired cult status when it was broadcast on Channel 4 and it is still pretty much shown on a loop on RTÉ 2. Awards followed: in 1998 Father Ted got a BAFTA for Best Comedy, Dermot Morgan got one for Best Actor and Pauline McLynn got Best Actress.

Two more series were filmed before Morgan announced that he would be leaving the show for fear of being typecast. One night after the final day’s filming on the final series, he and his partner, Fiona, were hosting a dinner party in London when he collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. He remains one of the more poignant ‘what-ifs’ in his contribution to stage and screen on these islands.

The show couldn’t go on without Morgan (although an American production company is filming a US remake with priests set on an island off the New England coast). Like Fawlty Towers, it would never have time for the jokes to grow tired so will always retain its cult status.

Father Ted is probably the purest fusion of Irish and British comedy. Commissioned by Channel 4, it had an all-Irish cast, spent much time filming in the beautiful County Clare and had Irish writers. We would have complained loudly if the British had written a sitcom about three corrupt, scheming, totally unreligious priests. In the same way as only gay people can call themselves queer and only black people are allowed to use the ‘n’ word, we are the only ones allowed to mock ourselves in general but priests in particular. And the comedy in Father Ted is as Irish as it gets: very funny, very clever and spiritually satirical, with its post-ironic political incorrectness.

DARA O BRIAIN: the most Irish of them all

Born 4 February 1972

This is the first time in my lifetime that Irish people are able to go: ‘What? You’re going to England? Sure, it’s full of terrorists. Come to Ireland. We’ve no terrorists at all. They’re all playwrights now.’

As eras go, the early 90s weren’t that bad. Bill Clinton brought rock and roll and blowjobs to the White House. Ireland elected a woman as president and qualified for its first-ever World Cup finals. Nirvana, Blur and The Cranberries burst on to the scene as U2 continued to reinvent and give them all a master class in stamina. As a nerdy student at University College Dublin I found myself moving in varied circles that took in politics, history and the bar. As I did so, I found myself brushing shoulders (mine narrow, his broad) with a most articulate and very amusing science type who emerged as a star of the debating circuit. Holding court in whatever lecture theatre he performed in, Dara O Briain was always going to end up in a job where his voice would be heard.

Brought up in Bray, County Wicklow, the O’Briains spoke Irish at home and Dara attended an Irish-speaking school in a Dublin suburb. At University College Dublin, he studied theoretical physics but, between lectures, his head was turned by the banter and repartee that dominated college debating societies. It wasn’t long before the motion for discussion became irrelevant as the lecture theatres filled to hear the mile-a-minute science student divert the discussion to suit his observations. Story-telling and quick-witted comebacks were the order of the day rather than stand-alone gags and it was in these student lecture halls that Dara honed his skills and saw the potential of a career in comedy.

The next step was to gain some exposure and earn a few quid on the national broadcaster. A stint on children’s television and as a panellist on a satirical panel show was complemented by constant gigging around the world with much time spent in Australia and at festivals like Edinburgh, where his shows were attracting some very important interest.

Most of the subjects in this book simply outgrew Ireland. For a country that prides itself on the ability to talk and talk and talk, sometimes it feels like going around in circles and, for some people, the circles become too small and so a toe is dipped into the Irish Sea. Dara’s career went as far as it could in Ireland and he couldn’t resist the temptation to look over the hedge at a bigger field: ‘You’re sitting next door to a country of 60 million people which has Christ knows how many hundreds of comedy clubs and God knows how many hundreds of theatres. This country [UK] is uniquely set up because of the Victorian infrastructure of theatres to be really good for stand-up comedy and they’re receptive to it and they have a great tradition of it so it’s essentially like playing in the Premier League.’

The road to Britain was smooth with no concerns over potential obstructions like accents. The path had been well trod by Dave Allen, Dylan Moran was on the circuit, and Graham Norton already had his own irreverent chat show (see Chapter 3 (#u55fcc8a0-44d3-5fbb-b492-71f9b65e4369)), so Irish comedians were welcome and not lost in translation. One of the most striking things about Dara O Briain is that, unlike Dave Allen, he didn’t invent a new name for himself. Causing difficulty even for a home audience, it’s a name few would have predicted would be rolling off the tongues of the British audiences who flock to his shows. And, in fact, back in 2006 Dara explained: ‘Darby Brown, Dazzy B, Dusky Benderson … Don’t think that I don’t spend all day running through the incredible showbiz career I might have if I just ditched my own name.’ He told me: ‘It’s easier to become well known with a name like Jack Dee or Alan Carr or Jimmy Carr or Jo Brand. They’re all short, punchy names as opposed to some big convoluted thing!’ But to his credit, Dara has always done things a little differently.

Things really kicked off in the UK in 2003 when Dara took the helm of Live Floor Show on BBC Two. This was followed swiftly by a guest appearance as host of Have I Got News for You. After that, everything started to happen and in between countless gigs at venues all over Ireland and the UK, Dara was fronting shows like Mock the Week and partaking in popular series such as Three Men in a Boat, which saw him reconstruct the famous novel with Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath.

The material he chose for his stage show was quite different from Dave Allen’s day. There are very few Church-related gags in Dara’s repertoire, although he’ll still have a poke at authority figures such as politicians or bankers. The shadow of the Troubles was receding when he got to Britain in the late 1990s: ‘We arrived at the point where the worst effect it had on me is the time I couldn’t find a bin on the Tube and a bloke said “Oh, that’ll be because of your lot.”’ He learned to do his terrorism joke first, so it was out of the way and the audience relaxed – and also because it was very easy laughs. ‘There is a weird notion that terrorism is a difficult thing to write about. It’s the f**king easiest thing because the tension is already there so if you address it anyway, you release that tension and you get a laugh. We got credit for a darkness and a depth that we did not deserve.’ But now, post-peace process, it’s history; there’s no comedy in it any more.

The only major consideration for the twenty-first-century Irish comedian is how Irish or how British his material can or shall be. Most comedy can be universal but in Ireland we’ll munch a packet of Tayto rather than Walkers crisps, and if you’re talking politics most British people don’t know how to pronounce Taoiseach, never mind have a clue who the latest one is. Dara gigs in both countries and he’ll riff about the same type of subjects but just change the Irishness of the references as appropriate. He’s one of life’s comedy riffers. You can throw anything at him and he’ll riff away, like the perfect jazz guitarist in a band.

Broadly speaking, he’s an observational comic, looking at life today. He’s not looking at Ireland as a country or playing up being an Irish lad in the UK – even though he’s possibly the proudest Irishman of all the émigrés in this book. He was brought up to speak fluent Irish, in a very Irish household, and you can sense the Irishness in his bones. As a prolific tweeter, he allows his fans (and naysayers) close to him in a technological sense and, on occasion, this has allowed detractors to criticize him if he says anything that they deem un-Irish. Dara reckons ‘It is generally a bedroom Republican, it’s teenage nationalists going “Ahh, I thought you were Irish.” I did find if you transferred the language to Irish, it ends quite quickly.’

It’s a good ploy when challenging a critic of one’s Irishness to simply ‘out-Irish’ them with a passing phrase in the mother tongue. But this type of criticism does rankle with Dara, who says, ‘I think it’s exceptionally rude, particularly in a time of more emigration, to turn around to anyone’s that emigrated and say “You’re not Irish now.” I think it’s an immature trait.’

When we met in London for the purposes of this book, we talked at length about the Irish in Britain and Dara said the move wasn’t so dramatic for him as it was for generations before him. As he settled into his new home he found that the Irish had assimilated into British society and weren’t seen as different any more. ‘Cheap flights and access to the country just wiped that out … if anything, you have to remind them that you’re Irish.’

Up to this point, those who conquered the UK did so while being defined by their Irishness. Dara was the first man for whom it really doesn’t matter. He’d be funny if he was Scottish or Dutch or Kazakhstani. However, that doesn’t mean that he has forsaken his nationality or sense of loyalty to Ireland. Listening to him talk, I get the sense that he has a recalibrated patriotism that allows him to rule Britannia and honour Hibernia at the same time:

Because I work so often in Ireland I’m still quite Irish in some ways. [Graham] Norton has assimilated better. He’ll appear in the Radio Times in a Union Jack waistcoat to do the Eurovision, which I would find uncomfortable, I’d find that weird. I tweet about following Ireland in the football and on Mock the Week I still talk about ‘your’ football team even though, nominally it’s ‘our’ government because I live here and pay my taxes.

I tried him with the critical question: who does he support when he watches the World Cup? As part of his recalibrated patriotism, Dara has no time for those who shout for whomever England happen to be playing against: ‘You kind of have to lose that here [in the UK] because it’s emotionally perverse to wish ill on your loved ones and friends that they should be unhappy. I don’t cheerlead for the English football team but I’m not basking in their misery.’

Always in demand for his brand of what he describes as ‘frippery, quippery and off-the-cuffery’, Dara is ensconced in Britain as a permanent fixture on television and the comedy circuit. It’s been an odd route but he got there. As he said in 1999, ‘given my education, I really should be a teacher in Carlow Institute of Technology or somewhere, teaching first years how to differentiate’. Mathematics’ loss has been comedy’s gain, so it all adds up in the end.

* * *

We’ve got many other stand-up comedians who’ve crossed the water but the three comics I’ve covered in this chapter are, for me, the ones who’ve really raised themselves above the rest – and Allen and O Briain were especially ground-breaking. We’ve noted the progression over thirty years of comedy from addressing Irishness and seeing the funny side of things like Catholic guilt through to not giving it so much as a passing mention. From feeling a need to lighten the atmosphere by cracking an Irish terrorist joke through to cracking jokes about the terrorism in England. From lightbulb jokes about dumb paddies through to Dara O Briain, who’s by far the cleverest man in comedy on either side of the Irish Sea.

One thing the comedians I’ve chosen have in common (and this is true of most Irish comics) is that their material is not about jokes, it’s about telling stories or just talking. In Ireland, one of the things we do better than anyone else is talk. We have a certain flair when it comes to words, a love of vocabulary and quirky turns of phrase. The gift of the gab, the blarney, call it what you will, is one of our national traits. That’s why it’s hardly surprising we’ve made a name for themselves in the UK in jobs where chatting is a prerequisite. And that’s why the Irish have given the UK quite so many of the household names I’ll talk about in the next chapter, ‘The Chat Show Hosts’ …

3 (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)

THE CHAT SHOW HOSTS (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)