The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) is a character study hewn in the image of its subject. As a poet and, in the 1980s, an unlikely star of children’s television, Ingoldsby was like magic realism made flesh, or a glinting line from Joyce downloaded into human form. That is also the tone struck by Seamus Murphy’s mesmerising film, which doubles as a meditation on what it is to be different in a world that demands everyone be the same.
Ingoldsby poems can be deceptively simple. As a person he’s deceptively complex. Outwardly, at 78, he cuts the same esoteric and jocular figure as when he was the star of Pat’s Chat, 40 years ago. But beneath the bonhomie is darkness. “I’ve been a reactive depressive, manic depressive … all sorts of things,” he says.
He recalls seeking help at St John of God psychiatric hospital in Dublin and feeling overcome with shame. To keep his secret safe, when he left the hospital he would walk some distance and take a different bus from normal. Gradually, he realised the bus route was strewn with kindred lost souls, fellow patents of St John of God’s who thought that getting aboard farther along their route would conceal their terrible secret.
Ingoldsby was born in Malahide, in north Co Dublin, but he is a creature of Dublin city centre, where he sold his self-published poetry for years. He laments what the city has become – slicker, more money-oriented. There is, he feels, no place for outlaws and eccentrics.
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Amid such musings, friends and admirers line up to pay tribute. The musician Don Baker says that Ingoldsby left RTÉ by choice in the 1980s and was not fired; Imelda May recalls responding as a kid to the “childlike spirit” he brought to the airwaves.
As a poet, Ingoldsby is a renegade figure. He is not regarded as a significant Irish voice – you won’t read him in the right journals or hear him quoted in the more prestigious lecture halls. Still, to those who appreciate the mix of whimsy and darkness, there is nobody else like him.
“I love his street poems. They go straight to the point. There’s no decoration no embroidery. It all makes sense,” says his friend Vivienne Baillie, the Scottish-Swiss photographer. “His surreal poems are like an equation: they have a beginning, a middle and an end. He’s not cheating. It’s a form of integrity I like. It’s not someone trying to make an effect. It’s just Pat. ”
Ingoldsby’s verse often goes around and around, with no clear destination. Murphy’s film has the same trajectory. By the end you may be none the wiser about what makes Ingoldsby tick. But this feature-length film flies by. If chatting Pat remains essentially mysterious, what fascinating company he provides.
