WHEN Brendan was a little boy growing up in Finglas, watching television was a delight – but also the cause of constant frustration. No sooner had he settled down to watch Coronation Street, which he still loves, or American imports such as I Love Lucy or The Fugitive, than the coin meter on the back of the television would run out.
Maureen O’Carroll was all too often so strapped for the two-shilling piece required to bounce Lucille Ball’s face back onto the screen. She’d hunt around the house, looking for a button that would fit the slot, and pay the price later when the electricity man came to collect.
In the New Year of 2010, Brendan allowed himself a smile when he thought back to those times. Not only could he afford to power as many TVs as he chose, he was set to become not just a TV star, but a co-producer of his own series, in partnership with BBC1 in the UK and RTÉ One in Ireland.
This meant he would be paid a dividend on every show sold abroad and every DVD released. And he was set to earn serious money. All the Can-Do Kid had to do was deliver six cleverly crafted episodes.
That in itself wasn’t a major task, now that he’d cracked the magic formula. After all, he had 18 years of Agnes, from the radio scripts to the stage shows, to ‘borrow’ from.
‘I have absolutely no problem recycling old gags. The old is new if it hasn’t been seen for a long time. And, you know, every time we have a new child, we tell them the same fairy tales we were told when we were kids. And they still sound great.’
What a great argument for reworking theatre plots as TV scripts. But would it attract a modern audience? And while Mrs Brown was a working-class favourite, would he widen the demographic and appeal to polite society? Would suburban England, for example, accept his feckin’ language?
The series wouldn’t be filmed until the end of the year.
Meantime, Mrs Brown’s Boys continued to tour. The show that had died in Hull had been brought right back to life, thanks to the defibrillator that was television. And a special highlight of the summer tour was a return to Toronto, and a chance for Brendan and co. to meet up with his sister, Fiona.
The cast and crew were living in hotels in the city and Fiona invited them, en masse, to her home out in Buckhorn for a barbecue.
The team travelled by bus, but Brendan, who’s not a country boy at all, drove. After two hours, he arrived in the nearest large town, Peterborough, and figured the journey had been pleasant enough. But then he had to make his way through dirt roads, over rivers and hills for another hour, all the time surrounded by dense forests. When he arrived at Fiona’s house, it seemed like the middle of nowhere.
He pulled into the driveway, got out of the car and hugged his sister with a pitying smile. ‘Fiona, why didn’t you tell me you were in the Witness Protection Programme?’
During the Toronto stint, Brendan revealed his steely side. The godfather loved his extended family, but he wouldn’t see them step out of line. And it was obvious some of the cast were not up to speed with their lines. Brendan read them the riot act.
‘We’re in Canada to work. This is not a vacation! So tomorrow when you show up, you’d better know your lines. And think on this: where else would you make so much money for working three hours a night?’
Brendan’s hairdryer treatment worked. But, back across the pond, would his sitcom create as much heat? The series was filmed in Glasgow at the end of the year, and audiences queued up for tickets. He was playing to the converted, of course. What really mattered would be the viewing figures on transmission. Thankfully, when the first show was broadcast on 21 February 2011, the audience reaction was positive, with almost three million tuning in; a good figure for a post-watershed slot. Some newspaper writers loved it, such as The Times and The Guardian, describing it as ‘postmodern’ and ‘hilarious’.
However, there were critics who would cheerfully have drowned Agnes Brown in a bath of Foley’s cider.
‘The whole thing is entirely predicated on viewers finding a man dressed as a foul-mouthed elderly woman intrinsically funny,’ noted the TV reviewer with the Irish Times. ‘If you do, you’re away in a hack, and the viewing figures are astronomical, but if you don’t, and you think that died out with Les Dawson and Dick Emery, then it’s a long half-hour.’
The Irish Independent’s comment not only gave Agnes and her entourage a kicking, the writer then stepped on her glasses and smashed them.
‘Mrs Brown’s Boys is the type of TV programme that makes you vaguely embarrassed to be Irish.’
It wasn’t just the Irish reviewers who didn’t like the show. Nor was it the broadsheets. Some of the tabloids such as Scotland’s Daily Record described the show as ‘dire’. Did Brendan care?
‘I don’t give a toss about the critics. We do it for the audience. I don’t want to write something that somebody in such-and-such newspaper would like. I can only write what makes me laugh, and as a writer you hope the audience will agree.’
The audience did agree. The numbers swelled and the first 2011 Christmas Special achieved 6.61 million viewers. The Christmas Eve and Boxing Day shows were the most watched programmes on TV, achieving a total of 15 million views per episode, including repeats.
The bandwagon rolled on. Mrs Brown’s Boys had been nominated for a BAFTA award in 2011, stunning (almost) the critics into silence, and in 2012 the show was nominated again. Would it win this time around?
Jenny reckoned it would, and cleared a space on the windowsill. Brendan wasn’t happy, though. He was afraid she would jinx the big night. But he didn’t have to worry. Mrs Brown’s Boys won the BAFTA, the most prestigious prize in British television, for Best Situation Comedy.
Brendan and the team celebrated like there was no tomorrow.
‘It’s mad.’
The award gave the show a new impetus. Foreign sales grew, with the show expanding worldwide to Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, South Africa, Turkey, Slovakia and Romania. It wasn’t hard to see why. As Brendan says, ‘Mrs Brown is everybody’s mammy. She’s the Jewish mama, she’s the black mammy. She’s a universal creature. Most societies have such a creature, this woman who would lay down in front of a train for her kids.
‘I had the idea at one point of taking Mrs Brown to Broadway, with an Italian, Jewish or black actress playing Agnes. It may still happen.’
What had also happened by this time was that the Mrs Brown stage shows had become a huge box-office success. The troupe were no longer playing to a couple of hundred people in Hull, they were now playing in arenas up and down the country, to five and six thousand fans at the likes of the Manchester and Nottingham arenas. And the audiences knew exactly what to expect.
‘The last thing I wanted to do was a sanitised version of Mrs Brown on TV and have a nice audience coming to the theatre and saying, “Holy Shit, what is this?” But thankfully, the BBC supported us all the way.’
The halls are so big, giant screens have to be installed.
Yet, it’s not all about the money. Brendan was offered a $40 million deal with American broadcasters HBO, makers of the likes of The Sopranos, which he turned down.
‘It meant going to sit in an office for two years writing sitcoms and never seeing my family. And how much money do you need?
‘We don’t take anything for granted, though. None of us. Bugsy was a window-cleaner, Pepsi was a mechanic, Rory worked in EMI, Jenny worked in the bank, Eilish worked for Guinness and I was a waiter.
‘You’re always terrified that one day they will find out you are a waiter and want their money back.
‘But here’s the thing. And this is the most important thing. I work when I want, I can take off to Florida and be with my wife, my kids and my grandchildren. What money can do for you is buy you time, and that’s the time off to spend with people you want to spend it with. And when I do work, I’m with the people I love. In that respect we’re all really lucky. We’re like the feckin’ Partridge Family.’
Playing sell-out shows to giant crowds every night has certainly made pulling on the Agnes wig and cheap skirt far less of a task.
‘When that first laugh comes from those five thousand people, it’s actually so loud it moves your clothes. You can actually feel your clothes vibrating. I just love being on stage. I love the power it gives you. I love to see the faces of the women in the front row. I love to be able to talk to the audiences at the end of the night, to read their requests, because that extends the connection I have with them. And while performers often don’t want to meet the fans, I’ll stand outside and sign autographs until my wrist aches. I know how much they love to meet the performers. And I get as much of a buzz from meeting them, hearing them say how much they’ve loved the show, as they get from me. Being up there on that stage and watching an audience laugh is one of the greatest feelings in the world.’
Does it beat sex?
‘No, although at the end of the show I do get a round of applause.’
Yet, despite the astonishing global success of the show, Brendan, in a quiet moment of detachment, now admits that sometimes the critics can get to him.
‘I can learn from some of them but, truthfully, they also hurt. God, they are just like somebody taking a hot rod and sticking it in the middle of your back. It’s a terrible, horrible feeling.
‘Anyone would tell you, it doesn’t matter how big the ratings are, it doesn’t matter if you get two hundred magnificent critiques. When you get one bad one, that’s the one that puts a knot in your stomach – and just twists it. It’s the one bad one that always sticks in your mind.
‘I haven’t read them in ages but that doesn’t make a difference, because there is always someone willing to tell you about it.
‘Yet, at the end of the day, I don’t do this for them. They’re the only ones who don’t pay for a ticket. They get in for free.’
And, as always, he makes sure he gives value for money, especially now that show prices have been hiked for the big venues.
‘I know for those buying tickets, it’s not just about spending twenty-five euros or whatever. It’s about getting your suit dry-cleaned, your hair done, the babysitter in, a few drinks beforehand. And I don’t want my bit to be the bit that lets that night down.’
Television had fuelled the live shows’ success, which in turn shot the TV audiences to the eight million-plus mark. And, in January 2013, now on the third series of the show, Mrs Brown’s Boys won the National Television Award for Best Situation Comedy.
Accepting his award, Brendan thanked fans of the show and his cast. And in a nod to the fact he was employing almost everyone he knew, added a dedication to Maureen O’Carroll.
‘The only person that’s not in the show is my mother. And that’s because she is dead.’
The success story hasn’t stopped. Brendan signed a deal to syndicate the Mrs Brown’s Boys cartoon series around the world, and was also offered the chance to write the Mrs Brown movie he’d always wanted, with a £3.6 million budget, backed by the BBC and Universal Pictures. The working title is Mrs Brown’s Boys – D’fillum.
‘I’ve got a great idea for it,’ he said, speaking from Florida. ‘I’ve got no time to write it, but I’ll get it done.’
He’ll write it himself this time. He’ll star in it, alongside the usual cast and perhaps a few famous names.
‘I’d like to have U2 make an appearance as the wedding band.’
The fillum won’t be a remake of Anjelica Huston’s Agnes Browne. It will be an out-and-out comedy, along the lines of the classic sitcom movies such as On The Buses and Up Pompeii. Will it work? The storyline will see Agnes Brown battle against developers, politicians and bankers who team up to close a Dublin fruit market. Agnes enlists the help of Cathy’s new boyfriend, who’s a solicitor (Brendan hopes Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville will play the role), and rolls up her cardie sleeves in preparation for war.
Brendan’s idea is solid. And he didn’t have to look too far for inspiration. His mother Maureen O’Carroll once fought against injustice on a national scale. And if she were alive today, Brendan believes it’s the sort of cause his mother would be fighting.
He will also bring back Mrs Brown’s Boys for a 2013 TV Christmas special. But can he cope with the pressure of writing while continuing to perform?
‘I have convinced myself that I always write better when I am under pressure, which is just a cover-up for leaving everything to the last minute. I have always written alone but I have no discipline whatsoever. Jenny is the one that drives me. As well as being an exceptional muse, without her I would sit and read all day.’
So he says, but it seems unlikely, given his fear of becoming lazy, and the fact he hasn’t stopped racing forward from the moment he could crawl. And he loves to create stories.
‘Sometimes it comes really easily, just flows. But then there are those horrible, horrible times when it is just word-by-word, and you wonder why you ever told anybody you were a writer, because you just write shite.’
The ‘shite’ is set to make Brendan O’Carroll more than £50 million over the next five years. In 2014, he’ll tour Australia and Canada with the show. When the tickets were announced in Australia, where the TV series is a smash hit, eight millon dollars’ worth were sold in 24 hours, before the hotlines overloaded. And that was just for two of the venues of a nine-city tour.
To add to the growing O’Carroll legend, the US Comedy Channel have bought the rights to screen his sitcom. And several European broadcasters have bought the format rights, which means a Slovenian or Turkish Agnes is about to appear on television anytime soon.
Yet, the boy from Finglas, who’d once had to rely upon his uncles Vincent and Paul to eat, hasn’t turned his back on the world he grew up in. There aren’t many Irish charities he doesn’t support, such as providing 1,500 poverty-stricken families with Christmas turkey dinners, via the St Vincent de Paul organisation.
And he’s been working with autism agencies, giving over money to buy iPads for kids, which is reckoned to improve their cognitive awareness.
‘For some reason, autistic kids like the show. Experts don’t know why, perhaps it’s the swearing, who knows? One woman wrote to me to express her gratitude that her son had said his first word when watching the show. I laughed when I read what it was. “Bastard”.’
As for Mrs Brown’s Boys, it has now entered the league of classic television, one of the shows that will be talked about for decades to come. Why does it work? Agnes Brown, of course. Every family has one: the busybody, the scathing commentator, the women with bile on her breath who can still hug her kids like they are babies.
There’s a wonderful innocence, a naivety, which harks back to Maureen O’Carroll not realising the fridge wasn’t in fact a shiny cupboard. Mrs Brown is also an enigma. She’s a much-loved housewife, except that she’s a man.
Brendan has long argued Agnes is his mammy, or she’s part Dolly Dowdall, or she’s Gerry Browne’s mammy, or she’s the women from Moore Street. But she’s aggressive. Sometimes wicked. There must be something of Brendan O’Carroll in there too? He laughs mischievously as he answers.
‘There is a bit of her in me, all right. I have five sisters and lost my dad very young, so life for me has always been from a female perspective.’
What’s clear is the major influence for Agnes Brown is Maureen O’Carroll. And Agnes is Maureen is Brendan. Maureen O’Carroll lives on in the form of her youngest son, the special one. He has her mindset, her intelligence and quick-wittedness, and, just as importantly, her voice. Not only in a physical sense, with his rasping pitch, but in his ability to cremate an offender at three paces. Brendan, like Maureen, can make a passing remark that can practically hospitalise – and get laughs in the process. What’s evident is that his early life spent adoring and absorbing – and often battling – with this force of nature has helped form his own personality. And the result of this amazing alchemy, which the world can wallow in, is the wonderfully irascible Agnes Brown.
Mrs Brown’s Boys is one of the biggest sitcoms of the twenty-first century, yet its comic roots are in variety theatre and Sixties sitcoms. And while modern media demands slick and sophisticated, Mrs Brown is rude, crude and lewd. Why do you laugh when you shouldn’t?
And while many modern hit comedies emerge from big writing teams, Mrs Brown is the invention of one very clever man. Is it magic? Perhaps it’s just feckin’ funny.
Brendan himself isn’t sure why it all works.
‘The funny thing about it is that basically I’m doing what I’ve been doing for many years, but I think it’s just a question of timing.
‘We’re in a recession and people are scared, people are a bit down. So they need a laugh first of all and, traditionally, no matter who you are, comedy always does well in a recession. But in dark times people also get nostalgic. They want to look back at the times when summers were longer, the Christmases were brighter and family life was better. And we remind them of that.
‘But all this is guesswork. I can only think what my mammy used to say about disco music. You don’t analyse it, you just dance to it. And it is what it is. There are people who will love it, and people who won’t. But I think the people who love it are the audience that comedy forgot.’
Brendan argues that alternative comedy in the 1980s killed off mainstream humour for a time.
‘I think somebody at the BBC read in a magazine that comedy is the new rock’n’roll. And they actually believed that, and started pitching it only to the 18- to 25-year-old market. And left the rest behind. But we’re redressing the balance. We’re going for the audience that loves to laugh out loud.’
And they do. And the success is down to Brendan O’Carroll’s drive, his self-belief, his ability to almost walk out of a meeting for his sitcom pilot and bluff his way to a 12-episode deal.
Brendan is still a gambler, he still has the cheek of the devil and, as Agnes Brown would most likely say, testicles the size of turnips.
‘Way back, when I’d only been doing stand-up for a year or so, I got a call from a guy who wanted me to do a date. I’d already booked a caravan holiday, so I said, “Sorry, I can’t.” He said, “OK, I’ll give you £500.” I said, “No, I’m actually not working that weekend.” He rang me back later: “OK, then it’s £750. And that’s me last offer.” I said, “Look, I’m not working,” and he said, “You’ve some cheek . . . Right then, £1,500 – and that’s it!” I said, “What date did you want me to do?”
‘I learnt a lesson then. The scarcer you are, the more valuable you are.’
What Brendan also has is innate belief in his own ability.
‘Funny lines just come naturally to me. Of course, it’s a bit like playing snooker, you can pot the black a thousand times in practice, but you still have to go out and do it on the night. But no matter what other problems I’ve had in my life, making people laugh has never been one of them.’
Where does Brendan go from here? He filmed a pilot show for the BBC, Mrs Brown’s Celebrity Quiz Show, but decided not to progress the idea for now, for fear of overexposing the Agnes Brown brand.
However, he will continue to tour for the foreseeable future, making vast fortunes in the process (a week in Dublin alone at Christmas 2013 will produce ticket sales of £1.6 million) and making sure every one of his troupe has the mortgage paid off and is set for life.
He’s now talking again about going into politics some day soon. He’ll certainly be able to afford to.
But has success changed him? He’s been well known in Ireland since the early Nineties, but now he’s a global celebrity.
‘I believe in being nice to people. I believe in trying to make someone’s day, as I did when I was a waiter at the Gresham in Dublin. I also believe in karma, what goes around comes around. And not just in heaven. You get the payback on earth. For example, I was in a restaurant in LA during the Agnes Browne film development process, and we were having a meal in a restaurant when suddenly the diners stopped eating, everyone got up and left. O. J. Simpson had walked in.’
But it’s hard to keep your feet on the ground when you’re in constant demand, from promoters, film and TV executives. And from a writer trying to pull together his biography. The Tuesdays With Morrie sessions in Glasgow have been on hold for a little while.
‘We will get back to them soon, I promise you. I loved our chats. But it’s different now. To not be able to get from the check-in to the aeroplane without stopping for forty photographs is really weird.
‘I don’t even think my mother, if she were alive, would want a photograph of me.’
Twenty years ago, however, Brendan was asked what he’d do if he ever became famous.
‘I’d get someone to take a photo of me standing next to my 747 jet while sipping a cocktail, and I’d send it to one of the teachers who said I’d never amount to anything.’
And now that he’s an overnight success story at the age of 58?
‘I know at some stage I’m not going to be here and I’d like to leave something to my children and to my grandchildren. Hopefully the royalties coming in off the books, the TV series, the animation series and the rights we sell worldwide . . . well, no matter what happens to me, my grandchildren will be all right.’
His face breaks into a grin.
‘And I’m old enough to know that me going out and getting a Maserati or a Ferrari is just not on. I’d look like a wart on a frog’s arse.’
Brendan doesn’t need the flash car. It’s enough for him to know he’s made millions of people laugh the world over. He’s a one-man recession tonic. And his own smile has never been wider.
‘I’m just enjoying it all, Brian. My life, so far, has been magical.’
He’s written his own Spielberg ending. But Agnes Brown would play it all down. She’d probably sum up Brendan’s phenomenal success with her catchphrase.
‘That’s nice.’