‘We will hug again” some pandemic-era slogan promised us and, despite the “wear a mask” signs outside the Meath hotel in which we meet, Brendan O’Carroll greets me like a long-lost friend.
n anyone else it might seem like a luvvie gesture but he is “the huggy type”. When the cast of Mrs Brown’s Boys meet, there are hugs all round. And when he went to write his new autobiography, he would jot down a memory in the early morning and then go back to his sleeping wife, Jenny, to ask for a reassuring hug.
For a man who spent his career with his eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, and what was coming next, it was hard to look back.
Call Me Mrs Brown is the title of the resultant book but auld Agnes – at least the TV version of her – doesn’t get much of a look-in. Instead of a behind-the-scenes look at the show, it’s the story of the man under the wig: his childhood, his long, grafting career in hospitality and then his even more grafting career in showbiz.
It’s a story of humour born of pain, success wrung from adversity and of the steely ambition beneath the affable exterior. Mrs Brown is just the happy ending we all know is coming.
Some readers might find it a bit strange rooting for O’Carroll as he ducks, dives and deals, but feeling that in the end Mrs Brown, with her zillions of viewers, hardly needs the support
Nobody guessed that a tart-tongued Dublin matriarch would become the biggest comedy hit ever to come out of this country and it feels as though for every enthusiastic viewer, there has been a sniffy article wondering how it happened.
Mrs Brown has been described as cultural revenge for 800 years of oppression and the worst show ever made. But through all the journalistic vitriol some antic, campy, punny magic keeps her number one.
For a decade the Christmas Special has been as integral a part of the festive period as the John Lewis ad and the Queen’s speech and the series has topped numerous public polls of the greatest comedy series of all time.
Surely we can’t put it all down to his oft repeated and frankly un-Irish PMA (“positive mental attitude”). So what was it?
O’Carroll says he has “no f**king idea” how it all happened, but it sounds like he has an inkling.
“I get that comedy was seen as the new rock and roll. Every generation has its own comedy, just like every generation has its own music. But the problem is, people aren’t dying at 40 and 50 anymore.
“So all of a sudden, the comedy that came along left a whole audience behind. And we tapped into that audience.”
Of the charge that it’s lowbrow, he adds: “I’ve never ever written for a critic. Never. I write for the audience. Somebody told me once that you’re more Shakespeare than you’re anything else. Shakespeare didn’t write for the royal family. He wrote for the penny-paying public. That’s who he wrote for. And I write and I perform for them.”
Agnes Brown has her roots in O’Carroll’s childhood, in the traders from Moore Street that he knew and ran errands for, and in the towering figure of his mother Maureen.
When his father Gerard died in 1964, O’Carroll was just six. He was more conscious of his mother losing a husband than of his own loss.
“He wasn’t the huggy type. He had been sick for a while and in hospital. So it wasn’t like, ‘oh, there’s no daddy in the house’. There hadn’t been any daddy in the house for months on end. My initial thought [when he died] was, what about my pigeon loft?”
One night, soon after his father died, he was coming up the stairs of the house in Finglas, when he heard a sound that he thought was the television. “And it wasn’t, it was her [his mother] crying. And I remember saying to myself, ‘my job now is to f**king make her laugh every day’. And I think that’s where it started.”
Maureen was the founder of the Lower Prices Council, which campaigned against high prices and black marketeering in the aftermath of World War II. She entered politics and was elected as TD for Dublin North-Central in 1954, becoming the first female whip of the Labour Party. She was a principled woman who, decades before it became a cause célébre, raised the issue of the dodgy adoptions of Irish children by wealthy American couples.
But the price was a certain neglect of family life. O’Carroll’s siblings – he had 10 in all – would hear her on the radio “decrying the fact that too many kids were coming out of school illiterate”. But she wouldn’t be there to help them with their homework. “It was hard to understand, that you’re fighting for all the children in the world except us.”
His favourite childhood Christmas, he says, came at aged 13, when he was left alone and had all his friends in for a buffet, after which they watched Morecambe and Wise. When he told his wife, Jenny, about this she wondered if it was appropriate to leave a kid that age on his own at 13. “But then she thought about it and said, ‘I’m not sure you were ever 13,’” he adds with a smile.
After Maureen lost her seat at the 1957 general election, and gradually drifted away from politics, the family endured poverty and tough times.
“We didn’t know we were poor, because everyone on the road was the same,” O’Carroll says. “But my recollection is of my uncle Vincent and my uncle Paul calling to the house on a Friday night. She’d be in the sitting room, talking to them.”
In adulthood, he understood that the uncles represented the St Vincent de Paul.
“It was only years later I realised they were paying the ESB bill, they were paying the gas bill. I mean she was on a Widows and Orphans pension, which didn’t amount to much.”
O’Carroll left school at the age of 12 and worked a series of jobs thereafter, but mainly as a waiter. While working at Dublin Castle during a state visit by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 he mistakenly put salt instead of sugar on her dessert and “almost killed her”.
He also served the Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe. “You looked at him and you went ‘there is one f**king thug’. I was thinking, ‘what is this c**t doing in our country?’”
O’Carroll watched as a nervous colleague served Valery d’Estaing, the former president of France, who gesticulated just at the moment a shot of Baileys was being brought to the table, knocking the drink on to his own head. “He looked like a Christmas pudding,” he recalls, grimacing at the memory.
He went into business with his friend Kevin Moore, with whom he ran Abbott’s Castle pub in Finglas. In 1989 O’Carroll returned from a trip to his sister’s wedding to find Moore had cleared out the pub they owned together and had done a runner with all the fixtures and fittings, plus the cash. It was a huge blow and O’Carroll had no idea where Moore – who had a history of addiction and mental health issues – had gone.
Later O’Carroll was questioned by police in connection with the murder investigation into Moore’s death.
“They wanted to know did he have any enemies in the Castle. He didn’t. He didn’t have any enemies anywhere. For all that happened, he was just the most lovely guy, which made the whole thing so shocking.”
It later transpired Moore had been diagnosed with HIV and had gone to Australia for a holiday before returning to his mother’s house, where he died by suicide.
“I’m not sure there wasn’t somebody else involved with him, that pushed him along. I’m not sure if there wasn’t. I used to go down and sit down the road from his mother’s house in the car, and go, ‘he’ll come home, he has to come f**king home’. And I often think, ‘thank God he didn’t come fucking home’.
“Because I don’t know what I would’ve done. I really don’t know what I would’ve done. I was just so furious. And terrified. I spent most f**king days in court, just losing case after case against creditors.”
The grief turned out to be a blessing in disguise and drove him to make a go of his passion: comedy.
His first gig was at the Rathmines Inn in Dublin, where he organised a version of Blind Date. The man was blindfolded and the three women answered questions from O’Carroll. The first two women were prissy and middle class and when asked what they looked for in a man answered “his eyes” and “deportment”.
The third was a garrulous young woman who responded: “I don’t care as long as they have a big c**k.” It drew roars of laughter and O’Carroll tried to analyse why.
“It wasn’t that she said ‘c**k’, it was that she was so confident. She didn’t care. She was being herself and people loved that. And I realised that was an incredible freedom to have. I wanted that freedom.”
He thought of that girl again a few years later while waiting backstage at RTÉ to go on The Late Late Show. By then he had built his act into a sell-out stage show and a regular slot on Gareth O’Callaghan’s radio programme. But an audience with Gay Byrne was a new level.
“I was throwing up beforehand. Because The Late Late is a big opportunity, but there is nowhere to hide – people get found out on it. Some people look back and cringe.”
The audience on the night was flat, Byrne tried to gee them up before O’Carroll went on, and he realised it might be a “chance to shine”.
When he came out, his opening gambit to Byrne was “how’s your Mickey”. Host and audience ate it up and a star was born. Some people might have felt that they had arrived, but O’Carroll’s feeling was “now it really starts”.
His first play, The Course, which drew on his brief stint as an insurance salesman, became a huge success, despite having been rejected by the Dublin Theatre Festival. His first novel, The Mammy, topped the Irish bestseller list for 16 weeks. He wrote the script for the movie adaptation, Agnes Browne, starring Anjelica Huston (he says he has no idea if she’s ever seen Mrs Brown’s Boys).
It’s clear that behind O’Carroll’s familiar image of the cheeky chappy, there is an edge as well. He doesn’t take failure lying down.
In the late 1990s he was trying to get a movie called Sparrow’s Trap made – about a boxer succeeding against the odds. He travelled to New York to try to woo Aidan Quinn’s agent, in the hope the actor would star in it. O’Carroll waited in Manhattan for three days for a meeting, but the agent bluntly turned down the offer. O’Carroll was beyond disappointed.
“I’m going to walk in here someday [with another offer] and you’re going to kneel down to f**king blow me,” he told him.
The agent, says O’Carroll, responded with: “Well, I tell you know, if the money’s f**king right, I just might.”
“I’ll never forget how dejected I was when I came back from that trip,” O’Carroll says. “God it was the beginning of a nightmare.”
Around that time his first marriage was also coming to an end. He had married his teenage sweetheart Doreen Dowdall in 1977 but as the years passed, the marriage began to fray. They split in 1999 and I wonder if he regretted persevering with it as long as they did.
“No. That’s like asking me did I regret trying. I never regret trying. Nobody wants to fail. I never ever wanted to fail.”
It was a low, both in career and personal terms – any money he made from The Mammy went toward debts for Sparrow’s Trap and it was a fallow period for gigs. He holed up in his apartment in Temple Bar and at one point didn’t sleep for three days.
It was only the intercession of his late mother, coming to him in a dream and telling him to “get up off your knees and do something” that snapped him out of it.
“I used to look back at Sparrow, in particular, and I could pick out the people that I would blame, whose fault it was. Looking back I eventually realised, some things were my fault. It was me. It was my fault. I heard what I wanted to hear.”
I wonder if he had his own words of wisdom for his daughter Fiona, who split from her husband of 15 years, and co-star on Mrs Brown’s Boys, Martin Delany.
“Hers isn’t even a similar situation in that she wasn’t a kid when she got married,” he says. “She was quite mature when she got married. I didn’t know what I was f**king doing. And I probably got married because my ma told me not to. I was a rebel.
“I was really, really young. Fiona wasn’t, and hers is kind of a breakdown that you saw coming from both sides.”
Fiona and Martin, he says, are now better friends than they ever were when they were married.
The cast of Mrs Brown’s Boys is famously made up of many of his family members. Given how much he struggled to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, I wonder if he ever felt they have had it too easy?
“F**k yeah. But look, everybody of my generation wanted their kids to have a better time and an easier time than they did.”
He got off to a slightly tense start with Jenny Gibney – committing the faux pas of interrupting her crossword at a breakfast table – but they recovered and have been married now for the last 17 years. He credits her with a lot of his positivity.
“The amount of times that I come down to Jenny and have a cup of tea and say, ‘I can’t think what to write next, I’m lost’. And she’s so casual, she’d go, ‘Ah, it’ll come’. And that calmness is something that’s so important.
“One of the great lessons that I’ve learned through it all, is to stop looking for success. Sometimes you have to stop looking so hard and it will find you. And, eventually, it found me.”
‘Brendan O’Carroll The Autobiography: Call Me Mrs Brown’, published by Penguin, €14.99, is out now
