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The Irish Are Coming
Ryan Tubridy
In the sequel to his bestselling JFK in Ireland, the Emerald Isle’s favourite son delves into his country’s past to celebrate the Irish people who through their skills and endeavours helped make the British Isles great.In ‘The Irish Are Coming’ Ryan Tubridy takes a journey into Ireland’s past to unearth the many amazing, and altogether fascinating, contributions the Irish have made to everyday British life; whether it be making us laugh (Graham Norton), thrilling us with their acting (Peter O’Toole), or dazzling us with their audacious adventuring (Earnest Shackleton).Just as Stuart Maconie has celebrated all that is great about his North of England roots in ‘Pies and Prejudice’, so the delightfully entertaining Ryan Tubridy makes a passionate case for the magnificent contribution Ireland has made to its nearest neighbour.






For Mum and Dad Thank you for history, humour and love.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u2da02fe4-5668-50ea-a338-f53cc6610161)
Title Page (#u69fd3f78-218b-57b0-8f60-a4a1af2e8aaa)
Dedication (#uc302dbb4-a54d-5881-8cd5-3adf226c8a80)
Introduction
The Hellraisers
The Comedians
The Chat Show Hosts
Politicians, Soldiers and Reporters
The Artists
The Writers
The Thespians
The Musicians
The Boy Bands
The Harry Potter Bunch
The James Bond Franchise
The Businessmen
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgements
Also by Ryan Tubridy
Copyright
About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)
FOR EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS OR THEREABOUTS, one of history’s greatest neighbourhood disputes has been rumbling on between two countries that on the face of it should be best of friends. Separated only by a 130-mile stretch of water, Ireland and Britain have always had what the Americans like to call ‘issues’.
Until relatively recently, the Irish considered themselves to be put upon by their nearest neighbour. We felt residual repression and an entitlement to complain about ‘eight centuries of hurt’. The British considered the Irish a boozy, noisy and troublesome neighbour but – let’s be fair – weren’t short of the odd bout of anti-social behaviour themselves. Such clichés are convenient by way of a Ladybird introduction to Anglo-Irish neuroses but they are glib and hide the enormous complexities that lie behind this strange and compulsive relationship. So let’s look a little deeper.
Eight hundred is a neat number. Round, even and large, it’s the number used when people casually refer to the amount of time Ireland has been annoyed, pestered and occupied by ‘the Brits’. For a long time, when someone was asked why we had such a gripe with the British, the retort was simply ‘Eight hundred years’. It’s unlikely there’ll be mention of the Norman invasion of the late twelfth century that marked the start of direct English involvement in Irish affairs but in many respects, that’s when the trouble began. Ireland proved a difficult outpost to maintain despite being right on the doorstep because the people tended to be fiercely proud, independent and uncooperative. The more they kicked off, the more the English cracked the whip and so began the rocky road that would last … well, eight hundred years.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Irish lands were confiscated and plantations created with English bosses in charge. Some were benign and respectful to locals but a lot came and treated the place and the people with contempt, often functioning as absentee landlords, sending in agents to do the dirty work while enjoying the financial rewards from afar. Cromwell was hated for bringing across his soldiers to enforce the law with an iron fist that left a bloody legacy, and when Wolfe Tone led the 1798 rebellion against English rule, he achieved national support. His efforts were fruitless in the short term, but the die was cast for future leaders of an embattled nation.
The famine known as the Great Hunger saw a million Irish dead between 1845 and 1852 and a million more emigrating to America, Australia and Canada, hoping that a new land would bring fresh hope and a bright beginning. The British government response to the famine was scribbled on the back of an envelope too late in the day and then tied up in red tape. In very simple terms, they sat back and tutted as the Irish starved and the population dropped by a quarter (although debate on this issue continues to rage, but that’s for another day).
Despite this, Ireland sent the English lots of its best writers and dramatists and in 1914 a whole load of Irish boys headed for London to sign up and fight for King and Country. But two years on, bang in the middle of the First World War, another bunch of Irish boys marched up to Dublin’s General Post Office to proclaim a Republic. Within months of that failed 1916 rebellion, the British made martyrs of the leadership by killing them in cold blood and found themselves in the middle of war they could well have done without. That was settled in 1921 and what can only be described as an Anglo-Irish Cold War began – and would last for the best part of the next century.

The lure of television
Throughout the fraught twentieth century, Ireland strove to forge its own identity by pretending that Britain barely existed. This meant doing things on our own terms as a country and not kowtowing to our former masters. We didn’t ‘do’ the Second World War (we even had our own name for it – ‘The Emergency’) and those who did join the British army were largely ignored or reviled on their return home and have only recently been officially remembered in post-peace-process Ireland.
The Irish might have moaned about the ‘bloody Brits’ but in the 1950s and 60s they headed to London in their droves when there was lots of building work to be had. There are very few motorways you can drive on, Tube stations you can enter, football stadia you can cheer in, or buildings you can work or live in that haven’t felt the trowel of an Irish plasterer or the brush of an Irish painter. It was suitable work for émigrés who weren’t particularly educated or qualified but knew how to dig a hole and work hard. They were drawn towards population centres like London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, but often stayed in their own self-created ghettos – such as London’s Cricklewood and Kilburn. Partly this was because the welcome they encountered wasn’t the friendliest, with many a boarding house having a ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ sign by the front door. However, just as they did in America, the Irish newcomers found their feet, made money and set up homes.
United by war and economics but divided by history and denial, it was the second half of the twentieth century that introduced a third intangible thread that brought these disparate countries together – popular culture. Television would change the day-to-day lives of British citizens first and it wasn’t long before the Irish followed suit. By 1955, when the signal was strong enough, Irish television viewers could watch British programmes and suddenly the ‘old enemy’ was in Irish living rooms. They looked just like us and they had similar worries. Bar the accents, they could’ve been us. What to do now?
It was only a matter of time before the lure of the London limelight became too strong for a slew of Irishmen who watched their televisions in awe as Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock and Bob Monkhouse strutted their stuff. The small screen offered some local talent the opportunity for big things. A selection of Irish broadcasters, actors and entertainers reckoned they had what it might take to mix it with the best of these guys and so packed their bags, kissed goodbye to a future in Ireland and headed for the streets of London. In many respects, this marked the beginning of a very public association between Irish people and the great British public. The most obvious and recognizable names emerge throughout the 60s and into the 70s and yet these iconic monikers are only one part of a much bigger story and a much deeper relationship.
Anglo-Irish relations deteriorated again with the Troubles of the 70s and 80s. The British looked askance at anyone with an Irish accent and wondered if they had a whiff of sulphur about them, or if they were related to someone who might be troublesome. Then there were the gross injustices of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four when people were just picked up off the street and banged away until eventually justice came along. Throughout that time, Terry Wogan was enormously important as a symbol of the civilized Irish. Every morning from 1972 to 1984 people woke to the tones of a cheery Irishman who made them forget about the unrest and reassess their view of the nation, then throughout the 80s he was on their TVs every evening straight after the news. I’ve always thought Wogan was more important than he’s given credit for in terms of tempering the British view of the Irish at a critical time.
The peace process came along in the 1990s, leading up to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Sure, there have been ups and downs since but once Queen Elizabeth came to Ireland in 2011 and was seen belly-laughing with a fishmonger in Cork, it seemed clear the Cold War was over and the neighbours were friends at last.

The Irish in Britain
The question this book asks is ‘What have the Irish ever done for the UK?’ Sit comfortably, because the answer is rather longer than you might realize … Who invented the submarine? Who is the cleverest funny man in Britain? Who is the most-loved radio host? Who makes the best hats for royal occasions? Who populates the cast of Harry Potter films? Who raised hell like no others? Who reports from the world’s most treacherous hot spots? You know where this is going but you’ll have to read on in order to equip yourself with such ‘Oh, I never knew that’ moments.
From the Duke of Wellington (the man, not the pub) to the Coach and Horses (the hostelry of choice for Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole) and from Eamonn Andrews to Graham Norton, the Irish have served and been served by the UK. This book is intended as a friendly postcard or, at the very least, a yellow Post-it from one neighbour to another with a view to reminding each other of how we’ve enriched each other’s lives, in sickness and in health, for richer and for … you get the idea.
I wrote this to celebrate those born in the Republic who came to live in Britain (for a time at least) and made a significant impact on British life.
* * *
Inclusion is based on a more or less arbitrary decision-making process by a committee of one, with no discussion and no voting. This is not Eurovision or a council election. This is one man’s curiosity about two countries that mean so much to each other. I haven’t included Bono, who is of course a household name in the UK, because he has always remained resident in Ireland. I haven’t included Daniel Day Lewis because he was born in England although he now has Irish citizenship. I haven’t included anyone from the North of Ireland because their history of emigration to England and reasons for emigrating are an entirely different story. I’m writing about the country I’m from, and George Best, Kenneth Branagh and Patrick Kielty need a book of their own (maybe someone will write it one day). Having said all that, I might break my own rules sometimes – but that’s the author’s prerogative.
For each of the people my committee of one has chosen, I’ll be looking at why they came over, how they fared, what the Irish think of them, what the British think of them, and what I personally think of them. In this way, I hope to shine some light on our differences and similarities, our shared quirks and oddities, and the way history has affected our views of each other.
So let’s get on with it and endeavour to discover how the Irish really did help to make Britain Great.

1 (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)
THE HELLRAISERS (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)
THE IRISH HAVE A REPUTATION for drinking a lot – and make no mistake, we do drink a lot. There’s no point being politically correct about it. A 2009 survey found that 54 per cent of Irish adults engage in harmful drinking each year, compared to a European average of just 28 per cent. The oldest pub in Ireland is said to date back to 1198 and the Irish have been drinking ever since, perhaps to help them cope with all those centuries of hurt they blamed the English for. The first written mention of whiskey comes from 1405 and they famously invented the shebeen (Irish: síbín), a place where illegal home-brewed booze could be drunk without paying excise duties to the British.
Drinking has always been a sociable thing with the Irish. We don’t sit at home nursing a can of Guinness; we’re out there with our friends, supping a well-pulled pint and enjoying the craic. The pub is a place where deals are done, tips on the horses are passed along, and generally the world is set to rights. Until fifty or sixty years ago no decent lady would be seen in a pub (many banned them), but I’m delighted to say that the Irish now welcome just as many women in their drinking establishments as men.
When there was a wave of Irish folk emigrating to the UK in the 50s and 60s, it was soon noted that they had a taste for the hard stuff. The Americans had long known the Irish were that way inclined. If they wanted an Irishman in a Hollywood movie in the 1950s, they stuck Bing Crosby in a priest’s outfit with a whiskey in his hand. If they wanted an Irishwoman, they chose someone tired-looking, with twenty-five children and a boozy husband. The stereotype stuck for decades as the waves of economic migrants caught the ferry across to British shores.
It wasn’t just booze and builders the Irish were exporting to the UK in the 50s and 60s. Some of our home-grown actors fancied playing in front of the bigger, more cosmopolitan audiences of London’s West End and making names for themselves in the movies so they sauntered over, complete with their home-grown drinking habits. If they made fools of themselves appearing drunk on chat shows, it was only part and parcel of the world they lived in. Besides, the English had Oliver Reed and the Welsh had Richard Burton, so it’s not as though they were drinking alone.
The ones I put into the ‘hellraiser’ category weren’t just boozers, though; they upgraded their drinking until they were completely out there. It was a Gatsby party done three-six-five days a year, and it included plenty of womanizing and sometimes a snort of white powder as well. Yet these were extraordinarily talented men who managed to work hard and play hard. How they were able to hit the tiles and hit the boards at the same time I’ll never know, but they lived to a good old age – well, most of them.
Back home the Irish watched with a mixture of pride at the awards ceremonies and horror at the tabloid headlines, but always there was a sense of ‘He’s one of ours.’ And the first two hellraisers I’m going to talk about are legends who completely transcend their boozy reputations because they were simply so amazing at what they did.

RICHARD HARRIS: the excessive-compulsive
1 October 1930–25 October 2002
If I win an award for something I do, the London papers describe me as ‘the British actor Richard Harris’. If I am found drunk in a public place, they always refer to me as ‘the Irish actor Richard Harris’.
Standing proudly in the south-west of Ireland there’s a significant province that reeks of rebellion, tenacity and belligerence. That province is Munster, and within Munster is Limerick, a city that produces paradoxes by the cartload. A rugby city with a large working-class population, there is a celebrated statue that shows two players, arms outstretched, grasping for a ball. One of the players is a docker, the other a doctor. Together they play for the same club, province and (if lucky) country. They work hard, they play hard and they are unconcerned by class. Welcome to the city that gave the world Richard Harris, a city where two classes met and mingled freely.
In fact, Richard Harris’s father started out wealthy – he was a flour mill owner – but home life was shattered when the family business fell on hard times and, almost overnight, the cars, maids and gardeners that had populated his life were gone. Harris reflected, ‘One day was luxury, the next morning my mother was on her knees scrubbing floors.’
Loss figured regularly in the young Harris’s world. A sister’s death from cancer deeply affected him and in many ways informed his worldview: ‘I wanted to embrace it all. I had a terrible desire to let nothing pass me by.’ That desire led to a contrary existence that helped to attract and repel people in equal measure. At home, as one of seven children, he had to make a lot of noise to get heard. At school, the air heavy with testosterone, Harris was first in the queue and back of the class. He set fire to the toilets on one occasion and when a nun rapped his knuckles with a ruler, he grabbed it from her and whacked her back. Small wonder he left early, after failing to complete his leaving certificate. It’s a big wonder they didn’t turf him out.
For Harris, it was all about the rugby, and despite eight broken noses, it was a sport he excelled in, winning medals and cups and nurturing an ambition that he might go all the way and wear the green jersey at Lansdowne Road. This sporting life came to a crushing end in 1953 when he contracted TB and was forced into convalescence for two years. He was lucky to survive because tuberculosis remained a significant cause of death in Ireland, with a considerably higher mortality rate than in England at the time.
What he had lost to academia in school, Harris made up for in his sickbed where he directed all his attention to books. A love of drama and a brief dalliance with amateur dramatics informed his move to London in 1954 where the young Harris had been accepted to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He had an experience common to many émigrés when he saw a notice in the window of an Earls Court paper shop advertising a room for 30 shillings a week, followed by the message ‘No Irishmen or blacks need apply’. He reacted by pulling his sleeve down over his hand, punching through the glass window, removing the offending notice and keeping it as a souvenir.
In the rarefied environs of London theatre, Harris wasn’t going to be cast headlong into Shakespearean leads but made his debut when he finagled a part in Brendan Behan’s prison drama The Quare Fellow. He had overheard someone talking about the production while out drinking one night and decided to make a phone call about it. On being told the part was for a fifty-year-old, Harris explained: ‘I look f**king fifty. I haven’t had a good meal for four months and I haven’t slept in days. Just take a look at me.’ They did – and he got the role.
More theatre followed, both in London and Dublin, and the film roles began to trickle in. It’s always fun to spot the young Harris among the grizzled tough guys in The Guns of Navarone (1961) and as an angry sailor in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). But his knock-out role came in 1963 when Lindsay Anderson chose him for the lead in This Sporting Life. As part of the gritty, realistic ‘Angry Young Men’ films that were starting to emerge from the UK at the time, this was seen as an early classic. Harnessing his hard-nosed Limerick sporting background, Harris played the part of an angry, emotionally stunted, testosterone-fuelled rugby league player from Yorkshire, with Brandoesque style and an accent that’s more Limerick than Yorkshire. Widely praised for his authenticity, Harris was nominated for an Oscar and won the award for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963. I’ve recently watched it on DVD and it’s mind-boggling how good he is. I strongly urge you to go back and catch it if you haven’t already.
As a result of all this success, Harris was in serious demand and appeared in dozens of movies, but none of these roles matched the performance that in many ways defined the early part of his career. Maybe some of his potential was wasted away by the already legendary hellraising – who can say? Certainly, any accounts of Harris’s life in the 60s and 70s include words like ‘hedonistic’ and ‘debauched’. Always featuring in lurid tabloid headlines, he dressed in a style that garnered attention and lived in a neo-Gothic mansion in London. He worked hard and played hard, indulging his darker side to his heart’s content.
Harris had a particular love of women and they adored the mixture of charm and danger he exuded. ‘I overpower women,’ he once confessed. He showered them with love and sex and spontaneous partying until he exhausted them, and one woman would never keep his interest for long. His appetite for the next girl, whoever she might be, was insatiable and it’s reported that he once flew to New York on Concorde for an afternoon of sex. He picked up and lost two wives along the way, for which he took all the blame: ‘I have made seventy movies in my life and been miscast twice – as a husband.’ Commitment of any kind scared him. It wasn’t his thing.
At one point, his cocaine habit got out of control and a stint in hospital saw a priest rushing to Harris’s bedside, armed with the last rites. The story goes that Harris woke suddenly to hear the priest reciting the holy rosary and announced to the padre: ‘Father, if you are going to hear my confession, prepare to be here for days. By the end of it all, I can guarantee you will very much regret your vow of celibacy.’
At first the film studios accommodated his hellraising, adding extra shooting days to allow for the hangovers and lost weekends, but by the late 70s work was getting thin on the ground. The ‘good’ life finally caught up with Harris in 1981 when doctors told him he had eighteen months to live if he kept going that way. It was a summer evening when, with typical gusto, he marched into a club for a final drink. He cracked open two bottles of Château Margaux 1957 (£600 per bottle), drank them slowly – he later described the experience: ‘I treated them like you’d treat making love to the most gorgeous woman in the world. If you knew you only had one orgasm left, you’d say, “I’m holding it up babe, because I don’t want this to end”’ – and then stopped taking alcohol. For a decade.
The good roles were still few and far between, though. When he had a shot at playing Maigret in a 1988 TV series, the Daily Mirror suggested that his Irish accent made a mockery of the programme, and ironically suggested Harris should go the whole distance: ‘How about Sherlock O’Holmes, Paddy Mason, Hercule Guinness?’ But this kind of ridicule failed to faze Harris who was well used to the stereotyping that suited elements of the British press. He acquired the rights to the stage production of Camelot and took it on a world tour, making a lot of money in the process, and in 1990 he won the London Evening Standard Award for best actor for his role as Henry IV.
But perhaps it was a sweet irony that Richard Harris had to come home to put in what many consider to be his finest acting moment – in The Field as the megalomaniac farmer Bull McCabe, whose lust for land was visible in the actor’s every fibre. Harris was trying on hats for the part when he saw the name of Ray McAnally inside one of them and realized that the great Irish actor had been earmarked for the role before he died. ‘I’m very sorry Ray McAnally died,’ Harris reportedly commented before adding, ‘But I always knew I was destined to play this part.’
Whether it was fate or luck, Harris was right and the part gave him the opportunity for a glorious final lap. Nominated for his second Oscar, Harris was back to his old self when explaining why he didn’t want to attend the Oscar ceremony: ‘Why the f**k would I want to participate in any of this Hollywood b*****ks. It’s fourteen f***ing hours there, fourteen f***ing hours back, two hours of f***ing stupidity and kissing people’s f***ing cheeks. F**k that.’ … It seems he didn’t want to go. However, Richard Harris was back in the game and had rediscovered his acting groove. The 90s proved fertile ground for the once-again sought-after actor – even though he’d started back on the Guinness. Close to his seventieth year, Harris moved into a suite at London’s Savoy Hotel where he justified the princely rent of £6,000 a week by saying: ‘If you’re paying the mortgage on a home, you can’t ask the bank manager to fetch you a pint.’
Now he was of a certain vintage, the parts offered and taken were appropriate and commanding. And so when Ridley Scott needed an imperial Marcus Aurelius, he went to Harris (Gladiator, 2000). When the time came to find Harry Potter’s genial headmaster at Hogwarts, it was Harris they called (of which more anon). Producers and film insurance executives notwithstanding, he still enjoyed the occasional night on the lash. He once dragged Alan Rickman and Kenneth Branagh out until four in the morning and, according to Rickman, they had a ball: ‘Richard was regaling us with stories about his life, we just sat there with our mouths wide open.’
Harris was without doubt one of the finest actors of the second half of the twentieth century, a fully fledged, high-octane, booze-soaked (for the most part) Irishman who brought a swagger to the silver screen that until then had been lacking. Would he have won more acclaim if he’d curbed what he termed his ‘excessive-compulsive’ nature? Did he care? Prosaic in his analysis of the acting world, Harris commented shortly before he died: ‘Actors take themselves so seriously. Samuel Beckett is important, James Joyce is – they left something behind them. But even Laurence Olivier is totally unimportant. Acting is actually very simple, but actors try to elevate it to an art.’ All the same, I contest that British theatre and film would have been far poorer without him. He was what they call a dangerous actor, one who brought colour, unpredictability and emotional integrity to his every role and raised the bar high for all the compatriots who would follow (as well as setting a vertiginous standard for hellraisers).
Harris may have made his home in London and bought a house in the Bahamas, but he remained a proud Irishman, Munster man and Limerick man to the end. When Munster was playing rugby, you’d often find him cheering from the stand, and he was a regular visitor to his family back in the old country. After his death in 2002, a funeral mass was held in his London home but the coffin was draped in the Irish flag. In a final flourish, his ashes were scattered in the exotic surroundings of his Bahamas home and it is there that he swirls mischievously in the Caribbean air today.

PETER O’TOOLE: the Celtic dynamo
Born 2 August 1932
God, you can love it! But you can’t live in it. Oh, the Irish know despair, by God they do. They are Dostoyevskian about it. ‘Forgive me Father, I have f**ked Mrs Rafferty.’ ‘Ten Hail Marys, son.’ ‘But Father, I didn’t enjoy f**king Mrs Rafferty.’ ‘Good son, good.’
Peter O’Toole is less Irish than Richard Harris in many respects because Harris lived in Ireland till adulthood whereas O’Toole was only a boy when the family emigrated to the UK. But although he had an English accent and took British roles, he always played the Irish card – and when it came to hellraising he was destined to be the last man standing.
O’Toole’s father moved the family from a ruggedly desolate part of Connemara to a Leeds working-class housing estate – what O’Toole later called ‘a Mick community’ – in search of a better and brighter future. Full of Irish ex-pats and hard-nosed working men, as streets go these were meaner than average. Three of his childhood friends would later be hanged for murder. This was no gilded cage and yet a cursory look at the O’Toole parents gives us some insight into what was to come. Dad, Patrick Joseph O’Toole, was an illegal gambler with a fondness for alcohol and Mum, Connie, loved literature and read stories to young Peter when he was a boy. And so, hailing from Ireland’s wild west, reared in a tough part of town in a home that mixed literature and booze with a whiff of rebellion, the foundation stone of the house that Peter would build was laid very early on.
Not unlike Richard Harris, the man who would ride shotgun with him later in life, O’Toole was a poorly child, afflicted as he was with TB, a stammer and poor eyesight. And during his school days he felt the wrath of religious rigour, with nuns who tried to beat him out of left-handedness. O’Toole dedicated a corner of his autobiography to the women in black who tormented him as a youngster, describing the day they went for him after he drew a picture of a horse urinating: ‘Flapping, frantic as startled crows, rattling beads and crucifixes, black hooded heads, black winged sleeves, white celluloid breasts, hard, white bony hands banging, the brides of Christ got very cross indeed.’ Sounding more and more like Alex or one of his droogs in A Clockwork Orange, he continues: ‘They tore up my drawing and began to hit me. This made me more cross than those sexless bits of umbrella could ever be so I joined the dance and hit and tore. ’Tis only a gee-gee having a wee-wee you cruel, mad old ruins.’
Later in life, when he criticized the Catholic Church in general and his Catholic upbringing in particular in an interview in Playboy magazine, O’Toole was surprised to receive a sackful of post from angry priests and nuns: ‘They were shocked. I wrote back saying I was shocked – what were they doing reading Playboy?’
But back to his younger, less sinful days: O’Toole left school early and earned a crust by packing cartons at a local warehouse before landing a job at the Yorkshire Evening News, his local paper, where he went from tea-boy to journalist to bored wannabe: ‘I soon found out that, rather than chronicling an event, I wanted to be the event.’
Abandoning journalism, he looked to drama as a potential path before being grabbed from his nascent career by a stint of National Service that saw him joining the Royal Navy as a signals operator. This unlikely nautical adventure was followed by a further bid for theatrical glory. Aiming for the top, O’Toole tried his hand at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) but was refused entry on the basis of his academic shortcomings. The flighty would-be actor blew his top and the tirade was fortuitously overheard by RADA principal Sir Kenneth Barnes, who set up an audition that O’Toole passed, resulting in a place at one of the world’s foremost theatre schools. It wasn’t long before the lithe Irishman was treading the boards and propping up bar counters around London.
O’Toole’s acting career was firmly launched in 1959 when he starred in the play The Long and the Short and the Tall by Willis Hall, directed by Lindsay Anderson (the same director who had launched Harris, soon to be O’Toole’s drinking buddy). His understudy was one Michael Caine, who quickly came to realize that the worst part of being Peter O’Toole’s understudy was wondering whether the star would return from the pub before the curtain rose. Night after night, O’Toole kept Caine waiting until the last minute before cantering past and straight on to the stage. Young Caine was charged with sourcing parties, alcohol and women, tasks that drove the beleaguered understudy to comment: ‘I’d have made a wonderful pimp.’
There’s always a delicious irony to the idea of an Irishman taking on the role of a British national treasure and so it is entirely appropriate for me to dwell on one of British cinema’s twentieth-century masterpieces, Lawrence of Arabia. The lead role in this gargantuan 1962 production was originally to be played by Marlon Brando, then Albert Finney, but ultimately it came to Peter O’Toole. And by the end of filming, O’Toole was giving Lawrence a run for his money when it came to exploits in the Middle East.
Egyptian film star Omar Sharif became a close friend, a man with whom he had way too much fun in Beirut’s hot spots. Asked by a journalist if that entailed getting up to no good, O’Toole replied with a grin: ‘Oh darling, do you consider it to be no good? We considered it to be very good indeed.’ Among the less salubrious exploits was the night he threw a glass of champagne in a local official’s face, leading co-star Alec Guinness to comment ‘O’Toole could have been killed, shot or strangled and I’m beginning to think it’s a pity he wasn’t.’
The film involved a gruelling and physically brutal schedule but the results were worth it. Seriously. I watched it recently and thought it was pretty trippy. Back in 1962, they knew a star was born and O’Toole lapped it up. ‘I woke up one morning to find I was famous,’ he remarked. ‘I bought a Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the queen mum. Nobody took any f**king notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.’
And yet, the world did notice Peter O’Toole. It was hard not to. Always wearing his trademark green socks, O’Toole played up his Irishness and floated around town, drinking lavishly and followed by wisps of Gauloise cigarettes that he smoked in an ostentatious cigarette holder. Described by a friend as smelling ‘like a French train’, Peter was a committed smoker. When John Goodman, his co-star on King Ralph (1991), offered to get him an ashtray after he flicked his ash on the ground, he cried, ‘Make the world your ashtray, my boy.’
This was the stuff of O’Toole legend: a half-sozzled, licentious thespian with swagger and a talent to back up all the talk. As part of a set of working-class boys who made good, O’Toole, Harris and Richard Burton became their own West End rat pack, lascivious lounge lizards who took the art of candle burning to new levels. Looking back on those days, O’Toole is unapologetic: ‘I do not regret one drop. We weren’t solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public! … It was a fuel for various adventures.’ Such fuel allegedly saw him go for a drink in Paris one evening only to wake up in Corsica.
The fuel would come in handy on one of his visits home to Ireland. There was the time O’Toole stayed with his old friend, the movie director John Huston, at his estate in the Wicklow Mountains. The two boys had had a long night of it when we join the story as recounted by O’Toole:
Came the morning, there was John in a green kimono with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. He said: ‘Pete, this is a day for gettin’ drunk!’ We finished up on horses, he in his green kimono, me in my nightie in the pissing rain, carrying rifles, rough-shooting it – but with a shih-tzu dog and an Irish wolfhound, who are of course incapable of doing anything. And John eventually came off the horse and broke his leg! And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him!
As with Harris, the booze was blamed for damaging his health. There was a serious illness in 1976, when he required major surgery to remove his pancreas and part of his stomach; then he nearly died in 1978 after succumbing to a severe blood disorder. The booze certainly helped to destroy his marriage to Welsh actress Siân Phillips, from whom he was divorced in 1979. He later said he had studied women for a very long time, had given it his best try, but still he knew ‘nothing’.
O’Toole returned to work after his brushes with death but his 1980 Macbeth at the Old Vic made headlines for all the wrong reasons: ‘He delivers every line with a monotonous tenor bark as if addressing an audience of deaf Eskimos,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian. The morning after the disastrous premiere O’Toole opened the door to journalists seeking his reaction and gamely laughed it off – ‘It’s just a bloody play, darlings!’ – but it must have rankled. Later he won his fair share of theatre awards, including a lifetime achievement Olivier Award, but dismissed them as ‘trinkets’.
By his seventy-first year, his film work had earned him seven Oscar nominations – two of them for the same character (he played Henry II in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968)) but none of those shiny statuettes. The Academy attempted to bestow an honorary award but O’Toole initially turned it down, telling the bewildered committee that he was ‘still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright’ before urging them to ‘please defer the honour until I am eighty’. The Academy (and his daughters) convinced the contrary actor to change his mind and, despite his upset at the lack of booze at the event (apart from the vodka he managed to have smuggled in), Peter O’Toole took to the stage to accept the ‘lovely bugger’ in 2003.
As if to prove a point, he powered his way to the acting frontline once more when he was nominated for yet another Oscar following a classy performance as an ageing Casanova in the 2006 film Venus. It was as if he wanted to score a goal in extra time and, despite not winning the award, O’Toole proved he was still very much in the running. When he retired in 2012, saying, ‘The heart of it has gone out of me’, he was bowing out more or less at the top of his game.
Despite playing all those English establishment figures, he always remained an Irishman to the core, with a house in Galway as well as one in London. He played cricket for County Galway and often went to Five Nations rugby matches with the two Richards, Harris and Burton. There is a special place in any Irishman’s heart for watching England being defeated at rugby. We’re at one with the Scots and the Welsh on this. There’s a Celtic brotherhood of freedom-fighting, feisty people who have been oppressed by the English. So for the Irish, it’s sweet to win at Murrayfield and the Millennium Stadium but the sweetest victory of all is to decapitate the English rose at Twickenham – as I’m sure Harris and O’Toole would have agreed.
Harris has gone now, Burton went long ago, and O’Toole is the last man standing, bemoaning the fact that his drinking partners have left him alone at the bar, an act he considers ‘wretchedly inconsiderate’. But behind the beer goggles, who is the man that theatre critic Kenneth Tynan described as an ‘insomniac Celtic dynamo’? We’ll probably never know; even his own sister, Patricia, can’t figure him out. When she met an actress who was about to star with him, she asked, ‘At the end of the picture, will you tell me who my brother is? What goes on in there, in the f**king thing he calls a mind?’
It’s a question that may never be adequately answered but whatever it is that goes on in there, it helped produce a flamboyant bon viveur who became a legend in his own lifetime – both for his acting and for his hellraising. They simply don’t make ’em like that any more.

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.

2 (#uf222c17e-ee26-5bd5-a572-16e78f43eb4c)
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:
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)
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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