The Irish Are Coming

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), 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

THE CHAT SHOW HOSTS

THE MINUTE MICHAEL PARKINSON comes on television you can tell he is a Yorkshireman, while the Davids – Dimbleby and the late Frost – sound a bit posher and more southern, and Jonathan Ross has a working-class geezer accent. The point is that, rightly or wrongly, you think you know straight away whether they are descended from aristocrats or brickies, went to private school or the local comprehensive, and say ‘toilet’ rather than ‘loo’. Conversely, when someone from Ireland comes on television in the UK, the accent is classless. You can’t tell how many bedrooms there were in their childhood home or whether their family employed servants or worked below stairs themselves. The fact that we don’t fall neatly into the British class system helps the Irish when trying to make it in the UK. It makes us neutral – which is a good thing when our job is to draw other people out. We don’t have any chips on the shoulder; we just want to ask questions because we’re curious.

The British perceive the chatty Irish chat show host as genial and unthreatening. Guests know they’re not going to be Paxmanned over the head or joked into a corner by one too many one-liners. A lot of modern chat shows have the host rat-a-tatting at guests, both here and in the United States (think Leno and Letterman) and the substance of the interview can get lost along the way.

Now, chat shows are a subject I know a bit about. The Late Late Show has been on RTÉ in Ireland for fifty-one years, making it the world’s longest-running chat show apparently. Gay Byrne presented it for thirty-seven years, Pat Kenny had it for ten, and I took over five years ago. I always say it’s not my show – the show is like the Tardis and I’m just the latest Doctor – but I was enormously honoured to be asked. It’s a big challenge because it is 100 per cent live every Friday night from half nine through to midnight, and it runs for thirty-eight weeks a year. We have everyone on, from politicians to pop stars, Hollywood royalty to the individuals making headlines in any given week. I always make it my business to go to the dressing room beforehand and look guests in the whites of the eyes so they can see I’m not too scary. Lots of celebrities are nervous because we’re live – and I know how they feel because I’m often nervous as well – but you just go out the other side of the curtain and have some fun.

With a show like that back home, why have so many of our chat show hosts crossed the water to grace UK TV screens? Well, the bigger audiences must have been a draw. It must be nice to get 8 million viewers rather than seven hundred thousand. Gay Byrne flirted with it for a while before deciding against a move, but many others have filled prime-time spots on British screens over the last fifty years. Most of them are seen as ‘charming’, ‘non-threatening’ and ‘affable’, words that are quite often associated with the Irish. But the influence of these charming men has gone far beyond a bit of superficial television, as I’ll explain with reference to some of our greatest TV exports.

EAMONN ANDREWS: Mr Congeniality

19 December 1922–5 November 1987

He let people be the stars.

– Val Doonican

Any broadcaster worth his salt knows that to understand the history of Irish broadcasting you need to acquaint yourself with the granddaddy of them all. Eamonn Andrews is probably the patron saint of Irish television, having been there from the beginning, and then for decades he spun the two plates of Irish and British presenting jobs. He was a monolithic figure who casts a long shadow in this field.

My first memory of him is as a big, good-natured man who clasped a large red book while proclaiming to an unsuspecting victim ‘This is your life!’ – at which point some dramatic music swirled out of the ether and the credits rolled on a show that was effectively a funeral for someone still alive. I was too young to notice or care that the man had a distinctly Irish accent but he was always considered ‘one of ours’ and the fact that his surname was the same as my mother’s maiden name (although there’s no relation) made me pay a bit more notice.

In the modern reception area of Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, there’s an impressive bronze statue of the broad-shouldered Andrews, arms folded. He looks authoritative and important and could be fierce if it wasn’t for a genial smile on his sculpted face. People pass him by on their way into television studios, mostly ignoring the presence of this broadcasting giant. But his story, that of a working-class boy from Dublin who conquered the British airwaves, is irresistible and too interesting simply to skip by in a hurry.

Andrews’s dad was a carpenter with the Electricity Supply Board but also a drama enthusiast, an interest that proved hereditary. A fan of Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy, young Eamonn Andrews was drawn to the gentle-giant characters of American cinema despite the fact that he was painfully shy as a child; according to his biographer Tom Brennand, ‘He was born to blush, to be embarrassed, to be pathologically shy, and he grew up almost too timid to speak to anyone.’ In fact, bullying became such a problem for the tall, slightly odd-looking boy at Dublin’s Synge Street School that he took up boxing. This was a clever move for two reasons. For starters, he was never bullied again, and secondly, although he didn’t realize it at the time, it would help to launch his media career.

A working-class lad, Eamonn attended elocution classes to make him sound less rough around the edges and started to get occasional work as a boxing commentator on Irish radio. His love of boxing and an interest in journalism dovetailed neatly in 1944 when he began commentating on and competing in the amateur boxing championships. The ambitious sportsman jumped straight from the commentator’s box into the ring before going on to win his final fight, becoming junior Irish middleweight champion in 1944.

By this time, Andrews was hungry for the limelight and wanted to broaden his horizons. To this end, he started to bombard the BBC. ‘A constant stream of letters poured across the Irish Sea from the Andrews household to Broadcasting House,’ he recalled. ‘Nearly all were answered politely, but all said the same thing – “Sorry, but … ”’ Attempts to catch the attention of BBC bosses proved fruitless until 1950 when he was asked to host Ignorance is Bliss, a comedy quiz on BBC radio. Five years after the end of the Second World War, the Beeb were looking for accents that weren’t as plummy as those that had previously characterized the station. Eamonn Andrews epitomized this new ‘sound’. They also liked the way he was perceived by listeners (and later viewers): ‘He sells an ordinariness. The British public quite like that, they like to think they could do what you can do if they like you.’ He was Everyman: a genial Irish Everyman with a broad grin.

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