LIFE can be tough sometimes when you're the little guy. You have to, square up to it, bark loudly at it, even bite its ankle when necessary. If Brendan O'Carroll were a dog, he'd probably be a terrier, and, once he got his teeth into something, no doubt he'd hang on for dear life, and you'd never shake him off.
You see, comedian, author, playwright and comic actor, Brendan O'Carroll has something to prove, as much to himself as to the rest of the world, but he hasn't got, the patience (or the temperament) to carry a chip on his shoulder, being too busy building a ladder so he can reach life's leafy balcony. And when he finally gets there, he'll shout loudly to the rooftops: "I made it, Ma! Top of the world!" In a Northside - Dublin accent, of course.
To the horror of the high brows, this wiry little Dub with a moustache and balding pate has infiltrated the world of the arts with his style of entertainment. His first play, The Course, ran against the grain and 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 and has even sold, more copies at home than James Joyce's Ulysses. We're about to see him in his first film role, starring alongside Colm Meaney, in the film of Roddy Doyle's The Van, and soon O'Carroll's own creation, the Browne family, will be following the Rabbittes onto the big screen. The way things are going for the 41 year old former waiter, hotel manager, painter and decorator, it won't be long before he's got a collection of paintings hanging up in the National Gallery alongside the Caravaggio and the Jack B. Yeats. Amazing what you can achieve with just a sense of humour and a positive mental attitude.
But, despite the large number of "possies" in O'Carroll's life at the moment, there are still a few "neggies" lurking in the wings. As The Course prepares for the second leg of its Irish tour, Brendan's wife, Doreen, is back in hospital, fighting the latest battle in a long war against the breast cancer which has loomed large over their lives for the past few years. She's just undergone breast reconstruction but, as the opening night in Mullingar approaches, Doreen has developed an infection, so Brendan, must flit back and forth between the hospital and his home in Ashbourne, Co Meath, checking on his wife's slow but steady progress.
When I arrive at O Carroll's stately detached house on a quiet street in Ashbourne, the little man greets me with a hug, throwing me off my guard and melting my cool with this warm and friendly gesture. Replicas of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy sit grinning on the hall steps as I follow Brendan into the kitchen - take my place at the table with Ireland very own King Of Comedy. With a few hours to go till curtain up in Mullingar, Brendan is using the time to correct another chapter of his new novel, The Granny, the last book in the Mrs Browne trilogy, which began with The Mammy and continued with The Chisellers.
"Mrs Browne has been extremely good to me, right from her early days on the radio," says Brendan and as the interview continues, he's even more generous with his praise for the non fictional people he has encountered in both his personal and professional life.
"Mrs Browne is based on my mother in law," he continues, "and she's exactly like Mrs Browne in that the entire world revolves around her family. Her family is her world - regardless of their shortcomings, she loves them all beyond reason."
The Mammy expands the characters which Brendan created for the 2FM radio series, Mrs Browne's Boys, a five minute comedy soap which aired daily on the Gareth O'Callaghan show and attracted a big listenership. In the book, the widow, Agnes Browne, and her seven children are more sharply defined, the Dublin humour is broader and bolder, and there's a stronger undercurrent of tragedy beneath the colourful language and comic events. "You can't have comedy without tragedy," is the author's firm belief.
In 1977, Brendan O'Carroll from Stoneybatter married Doreen Dowdall from Finglas and they now have three children, Fiona aged 15, Danny aged 12 and Eric aged four. Like the strong, stalwart women in O Carroll's books, Doreen lives for her home and family and, according to Brendan, seismic events in the world at large don't seem to impress her.
"Doreen is completely underwhelmed by what's going on in our lives," says Brendan. "I remember the opening night of my one man show at the Olympia in Dublin - Doreen couldn't make it because she was taking her mother to the bingo. I come in, having sold out the Lyric Theatre in London's West End, and I get `oh, that's nice'. Fiona comes in with a B in Maths and it's celebration time." Not that Brendan minds too much but sometimes, he tells me, it feels like he's standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and there's no one there beside him to share the exquisite view. It could be that Doreen simply has such strong faith in her husband's abilities, she doesn't need to be there to share in his triumphs.
"That's really it," agrees Brendan. "Doreen's attitude always was that Brendan will think of something." He recalls times in the distant past when the dole money would run out. "She'd say, `ahh, you'll think of something' and the thing is, I did!"
So what is it that Brendan O'Carroll has that makes everything he does turn up trumps? Has he got the Midas touch or is its' simply the common touch?
"I suppose it's because, deep down, maybe I am Joe Average. And I play to myself. I do what Daniel O'Donnell does: Daniel O'Donnell only sings songs he likes. And if you're doing that, people like you for it."
It seems that, in the world of popular entertainment, the old cliche, I don't know about art but I know what I like, still holds true.
"MY introduction to theatre was through pantomime, and I remember one year going to five pantomimes - I was around 11 or 12. There's only one pantomime now, that's it, end of story. Now, when I got a little bit older, I went to Des Keogh and Rosaleen Linehan and Maureen Potter in their revues. There's none of those now. Theatre has become so serious that unless it's Hedda Gabler or Keely & Du, it doesn't seem to merit entry into the theatre. And I'm not saying that I was determined to change that. I wasn't. But I just went, if I build this, they will come. The theatre going audience of Dublin is a minority but the pubs are being jammed for Sil Fox and Brendan Grace and for small two piece bands. Now, the theatre people say that the audience is not out there - the audience is out there but you, can't introduce a child to reading by giving him War and Peace. You've got to give him Peter Pan and Ladybird.
"Now, I'm not suggesting that that's what I'm doing. What I'm saying is I'm conscious of the fact that the audience I want are out there, and I want to get them into the theatre. Most of them are in a theatre for the first time in their lives. They're sitting in the Tivoli theatre, looking around, thinking, this is the London Palladium. The spongy seats and the stage right there happening in front of you! This is the business! In a lot of cases, this wasn't their night out that week, this was their night out that month. They got a babysitter, they got a taxi, she got her hair done, he got his suit cleaned and pressed for that night out. I'm conscious of the fact that they're out there and they want some entertainment. But there is some theatre that is aimed at highbrow, and highbrow is sometimes too high for me."
In his own experience as a theatregoer, Brendan found plays such as I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, Brownbread and just about everything by Paul Mercier the perfect tonic for the middlebrow troops.
"Willie Russell twigged it, Alan Parker twigged it: If we're going to entertain the audience, we've got to get the audience in the door!"
Recently, says Brendan, he was invited to a forum for theatre in Dublin Castle where he attended a discussion entitled Theatre For Audiences, Audiences For Theatre.
"In one of the speeches," recalls Brendan, someone said, "We've got to look seriously at audience, because an audience lends a certain ambience to a show. The audience is the reason for the show! They're not lamp shades, they're not there to decorate the theatre or to help the production, they're there to be entertained."
Brendan insists he wasn't trying to usurp Irish theatre by staging The Course - quite the contrary. He'd like nothing better than to be acknowledged and welcomed by the very powers that be that tried to marginalise his first dramatic effort.
"The Course is art whether they like it or not! It's art because a mass of people have come, sat down, laughed, thought about this, felt good and went home. It had an effect on them. Now, I didn't set out to be an artist, I set out to write something that would entertain people and make them feel good. The Theatre Festival rejected my work but they didn't just reject my work; the fact is they get a lot of work submitted and they have to reject some of it. However, I was a good bet: two best selling novels, popular in his own right, he can pull an audience. But, what would he do to the credibility of the theatre? If we allow this guy who never went to drama school, never went to writing school, didn't go beyond primary school, and we acknowledge him as being a playwright, then all that we stand for, that we support, that we grant aid, becomes redundant."
O'Carroll's own Positive Mental Attitude got an early jump start while he wash still a little chiseller from Cooper Street, attending St Gabriel's Boys National School and getting ready for a bleak future working in a factory. He was the youngest of 11 children and his father died when he was around seven, leaving Brendan under the sole influence of his mother, Maureen, who instilled a sense of independence in the young O'Carroll, despite the fact that her own life seemed to be a mass of contradictions.
"My mother had a degree, my mother was a secondary school teacher, my mother was a Labour TD, says Brendan, and this is where you find a huge difference if you look across my family. My older sisters remember her as a woman they would hear on the radio, decrying the fact that so many children were coming out of primary school illiterate, yet she wouldn't be there to help them with their homework. A woman with a degree who fought for free education and yet not one of her 11 children went past primary education. Well, I think that's an indictment of her. The only saying grace for me was that, when my dad died, my mam retired from politics. And at that stage, most of my brothers and sisters had each moved out, married or emigrated. So I was left with the undivided attention of this complete genius who used to sit me on the table when I was seven, tie my shoelaces and then look me in the eyes and say to me, you know, you can be anything you want to be. And I believed her. I grew up believing I can be anything I want to be. She had tremendous belief in independence.
"I remember when I was caught stealing in Superquinn supermarket, she had enough clout to get the charges pulled but she said, `did you do it?' I said, `yeh' and she said, `well, the best of luck in court'. It was my ninth birthday and I was sent away to Dangan for three weeks. She could have stopped all that but her attitude was, if you do something well, you stand on the roofs tops and say, `look at this! I did this!' But you've got to do that when things don't go well - `hey, look, I'm sorry. I did it, it was me'. And d'you know, there's an incredible, freedom in, doing that."
BRENDAN doesn't mind admitting his professional mistakes, such as the time when, firmly convinced he could do no wrong, he brought his one man show to Britain for the first time and lost £50,000 on the brave but foolhardy venture. This first failure may have stood him in good stead, however, and probably helped sow the name of Brendan O'Carroll in the British subconscious. Just recently, he made his second foray into the United Kingdom with The Course and this time victory was his. Audiences loved it, catching on quickly on the Dub humour, while the critics loosened their bow ties and focused on the play's sheer entertainment value. In a brilliant piece of back handed praise, Charles Spencer wrote in the Daily Telegraph. "Examined rationally, this is a dreadful play, shoddily designed, lazily characterised and intellectually dishonest. There is only one problem: it works." The Course notched up plenty of possies in London, Manchester and Glasgow and also got a standing ovation in Liverpool.
I ask Brendan if he thinks Roddy Doyle may have paved the way by introducing British audiences to Dublin via The Commitments and The Snapper.
"Oh yeh. I think it even goes further back, before Roddy. I think it goes back to Bob Geldof and people seeing live interviews of a Dublin man talking off the cuff, with a touch of sardonic humour to it. Certainly Roddy is the patron saint. I was being billed in America as `The Commitments Live' and it helped me move along so much that by the time we eventually crowned New York in June 1994 with Brendan O'Carroll - Wild and Dangerous, there was eight and a half thousand at it. Thank you, Roddy!"
Brendan O'Carroll met Roddy Doyle for the first time when director Stephen Frears rang Brendan up and offered him a part in the film version of The Van.
"I was actually a bit overawed at meeting Roddy and I didn't think I would be. He's such a quiet man and, although later I found out he's an extremely relaxed, laid back man, he came across as being intense. When I went on the set, he was very encouraging but in a very economical way. The night it was in the paper that the Theatre Festival rejected the play, he just put his wing around me the next day and said, `now, here's what you do'. And on the opening night, when we were taking our second curtain call, I looked down and there was Roddy standing there clapping. The next day he sent me a beautiful letter which I will treasure. He's been very, very good, an inspiration before I met him and certainly an inspiration now that I have met him".
Further acting roles are definitely on the cards for Brendan, although he won't be starring in the movie adaptation of his own book, The Mammy, which should be going into production this autumn. He was, he says, offered the lead in a new production of, A Funny Thing Happened To Me On The Way To The Forum ("I thought it was a Frankie Howerd vibe, like Up Pompeii!"), but his hectic schedule forced him to turn it down.
"I've been acting all me life," he says. "Acting is a Dublin export. I mean, you only have to go into the clinic to the relieving officer and tell him you've no money and you have to spend the next 10 minutes trying to convince this guy to give you £25; you'll see how good an actor you can, be."
