The Irish Are Coming

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). 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:

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 The Fast 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.