The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll

by Beacom, Brian

  He sat there for hours, until common sense descended. Brendan realised he had a wife and kids at home, and it was Christmas Eve.

  ‘Later on I thanked God I couldn’t find him. I went back to my family and we focused on celebrating the day as best we could.’

  The pub was closed. The dream was over. Brendan was disconsolate. He owed £96,000 on the business and it might as well have been £96 million for all the chance he had of paying it back. And with two young kids to look after.

  Brendan had to face the New Year believing he had lost his one chance.

  ‘It was gone. I was finished. Or so I thought. I’ve learned since in life that you get lots of chances. You’ve just got to be able to spot them. For example, if you have a massive debt with the bank, you need something to happen to pay it back. And say that thing doesn’t happen, you think you’re in trouble. But then you realise you’re not in trouble. It’s the bank that’s in trouble. So you say to the bank, “How can I help you get out of this trouble?” And you make a suggestion, to trade out, to borrow more money, whatever . . .’

  But he hadn’t yet learned that Zen-like approach to dealing with angry creditors. Brendan spent the next year in court, losing case after case after case against suppliers and finance companies.

  ‘At that stage, if you’d put my name into the computer, you’d have sworn that I’d murdered the bank manager’s wife, the credit rating was so bad.

  ‘I owed so much money that I had no means of paying it back. What destroyed me was knowing we both could have come out of the pub experience as seriously rich men. But he sold us out for about ninety-odd grand. It was nothing.

  ‘But then it’s easy for me to say that.’

  Three years later, Brendan discovered Kevin had been involved in the drugs scene, was gay and had contracted AIDS. Those days he’d disappeared now made sense.

  When Kevin had realised he was dying, he’d taken all the money, everything, and headed off to Brisbane for a last hurrah.

  But he came back. And he went to his mother’s house. And the night after he arrived back at his mother’s, he hanged himself.

  Brendan was arrested the following day. Which wasn’t surprising, since he’d made it clear to everyone how furious he was with Kevin.

  ‘But the enquiries didn’t last long. It was soon established Kevin had killed himself. ‘Yet, I often reflect on it. One thing I think about is that I have no idea what it’s like to be dying of AIDS. To be totally afraid. And even to be gay. Being gay can be a very lonely life.

  ‘And then I have to think, “What does it take to hang yourself? How much desperation must you feel?” But you can’t let it affect your faith in human nature. If you carry grudges, they weigh you down.’

  He adds, ruefully, ‘And anyway, it’s one of those ironic twists. If he hadn’t fecked off to Australia with the money, I might still be running a pub.’

  Yet, he now had no job and a wife and two kids to support. What would he do?

  Standing Up

  ONE afternoon, a gypsy woman came to the door of Brendan’s four-bedroom terraced house selling clothes pegs.

  ‘This woman had made lots of stuff to sell, so I would buy something from her like a comb and give her a fiver, and I’d normally give her daughter a tenner for her Holy Communion.

  ‘And she said nice things, like I was the most generous person in the street. And then she said she had some really good news to tell me.

  ‘“Great. What is it?”

  ‘“Look, somebody put a curse on you a few years ago but it’s nearly over. It’s just about over. I just wanted to tell you that.”

  ‘Now, was it true what she was saying? Well, I reckon there’s as much chance of it being true as not.’

  Brendan didn’t believe that Joyce had placed the curse on him. But part of him at least worried that those who had had their fortune told were in for some bad luck.

  Meanwhile, Brendan knew that going back to waiting jobs alone wouldn’t begin to pay off the debts. He needed to earn more. He tried all the usual outlets for temporary work but these were recessionary times. Brendan was desperate.

  As for his luck changing, there was no sign of a leprechaun appearing in the corner of the living room of his Ashbourne home. In fact one would later appear. But in an unexpected form.

  Meantime, Brendan saw another possibility, an idea that would have a major impact on his fortunes further down the line. He spied an ad in the Evening Herald with the catchy headline How To Earn A Thousand A Week. And he was curious. So he called up the company that had placed the ad, and he learned they were selling accident insurance.

  ‘But the intriguing part was that they were offering this training course in Positive Mental Attitude, which lasted a week and took place in a hotel in Athlone.

  ‘And so I went down there, was introduced to the main man whose name escapes me, and there were eight of us on the course. On that first morning, I took my place at the head of the horseshoe-shaped table, and the bloke in charge was full of energy. Right from the start he had us all up on our feet, and then the music struck up and he had us dancing to “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”.

  ‘I thought, “This is interesting. He’s off to a great start, getting us all up and jigging around.” And then he turned and looked at me, caught sight of the earring in my left ear and said, “Love the earring, Brendan. Not sure it’s right for this course, but love it anyway.”’

  That night, almost subconsciously, Brendan took the earring out.

  ‘Looking back, it was so clever how he’d managed to flatter me and have me do what he wanted me to do.’

  The next few days involved training in Positive Mental Attitude, psyching the team up to believe that they could sell policies to just about anyone. Brendan loved learning how to get inside people’s minds.

  ‘The first thing this involves is the mantra, “Get up in the morning and look in the mirror.” So effectively they use your mirror image to give you the PMA course every morning. You are taught to recite the Three Rs: Recognise something in somebody that’s beneficial, Relate it to yourself and then Reuse it for your own benefit.

  ‘Now, the irony was that those who learned PMA often became so good they left the company, moving on to big sales jobs. But the course does change people’s lives. It gives them the sense that they can conquer the world.’

  And, for a boy brought up to believe he could fly, the possibilities were limitless.

  Brendan did very well selling medical insurance. And those who opened their doors to Brendan liked the cheery banter. They bought into his oh-so-positive sales pitch.

  However, Brendan didn’t stay with it. He was uncomfortable that he was milking friends and acquaintances. And the PMA had given him the confidence to walk away.

  ‘It certainly focused my mental attitude,’ he says, smiling. ‘I thought I could do more.’

  But what? The leprechaun arrived at his door one afternoon, in the form of Gerry Browne. Gerry took Brendan by surprise when he said he was delighted at the news of the pub’s demise.

  ‘I’m actually thrilled,’ he told Brendan.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because now you’ll be able to do what you should have been doing all your life.’

  ‘And what’s that, Gerry?’

  ‘You’ll go on the stage.’

  Brendan’s mind had already flirted with the notion of a career as a performer. He’d won the talent competition. He’d worked with Brendan Grace. And hadn’t the spiritualist implied he would one day stand in front of a microphone?

  Now, Gerry’s declaration, combined with Brendan’s PMA thinking, opened the gates of possibility in his head.

  What if he could make a living at this game?

  Outrageous Comedy

  COULD Brendan make it as a comedian?

  ‘I’d loved my little Sunday morning stints at The Abbot’s Castle, informing the punters of upcoming events, doing it in the form of a little comedy routine. And now, with
Gerry’s thought in my head, I figured maybe I’d do a little stand-up, get seventy-eighty quid that the taxman wouldn’t see. And I could start to pay off a few debts.’

  Gerry Browne invited Brendan to appear with Tinker’s Fancy – Jimmy (Dicey) Riley, Brendan Harrington, Paul Leech and Gerry Browne – in their regular gig at Slattery’s Bar in Cable Street. (All had day jobs, working as chefs, mechanics, and so on; Gerry Browne was a milkman and Brendan was back working as a waiter.) And the extra money certainly came in handy.

  The act featured the musicians performing for a section, and then Brendan would perform his own act, a Billy Connolly-like set of observational material and hilarious stories. Indeed, the show with Gerry Browne and co. was not far away from Billy Connolly’s early folk music-and-comedy stage relationship with Gerry Rafferty in their band, The Humblebums.

  ‘I went on the stage on 10 October 1990, aged thirty-five.

  ‘I just opened my mouth and it all came out, like verbal diarrhoea, but everyone seemed to think it was funny.’

  The new addition certainly proved popular with the audience over the weeks, although a couple of the Tinkers weren’t too happy about sharing the spoils, nor the limelight, with the new boy.

  So at first, the relationship didn’t run smoothly. Early on, the group took off to London.

  ‘We were offered a few gigs in London suburbs such as Leytonstone, Walthamstow, Kilburn – the tough Irish clubs filled with guys with tractor parts in their pockets.

  ‘Now, the Irish who emigrate tend to be in a time warp. That’s why the Irish bands who’d died ten years ago at home then have a life abroad. The émigrés tend to think of them as stars still.

  ‘So we went over and the band did the ballads, and I did the jokes.’

  ‘But at the end of the tour, the social club convener spoke to the manager, who was Gerry, and said that they didn’t want the comedian. Me.

  ‘God, I felt hurt. But even more so because by this time I had said to Gerry that I wanted to go full time in the business with him and the band, to really make a go of it.’

  Brendan had hoped Gerry would say the club boss was an idiot, but what he actually said was that he and the band were thinking about going it alone anyway.

  Gerry and his Tinkers continued to play in England, but on their return came back to play a gig in Ashbourne, in a bar near Brendan’s home.

  ‘I went up to see them and discovered the money for the Ashbourne gig was to pay for a new backdrop for the band. Then, after the gig, I spoke to Gerry and asked how the English gigs had gone.’

  ‘“They were fuckin’ phenomenal! We’re going to be so big.”

  ‘“So you’ve made a final decision then about us?”

  ‘“Yeah, we should go our separate ways.”

  ‘“Well, best of luck to you.”

  ‘And I went home, feeling really down. But the next day I got a call from Gerry.

  ‘“Hi, Brendan. Look, do you still want to be part of the band?”

  ‘“Yes, I do.”

  ‘“Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Gerry believed in Tinker’s Fancy. But he also believed that greater success lay with appearing alongside Brendan O’Carroll. And Gerry loved comedy. He loved writing comedy songs, parodies.

  ‘So I rang a bloke called John Sweeney, a guy I’d known from the Ashbourne, who now ran a pub called the Rathmines Inn, and he was a bit taken aback when I said I fancied doing a bit of comedy.

  ‘He said, incredulously, “Here? Look I could have Glenn Miller on in here and this lot would talk right through it.”

  ‘“No, John. I think it could work.”

  ‘“Brendan, the pub is always packed. There is no way anyone will listen.”

  ‘“Look, John, just give me a chance.”

  ‘And he did. The only night that was a possibility was a Tuesday, when it was a little quiet. But John said, “Look, don’t just do comedy. Come up with something different.”

  Brendan thought for a while and then announced he had an idea.

  ‘I said to John Sweeney, “All right. I’ll do Blind Date.” The idea came right out of nowhere. Brendan knew how popular Cilla Black’s ITV show was, and simply thought to transfer it onto stage. It was a little moment of genius. Of course, being Brendan, he was never going to transfer the idea without O’Carrolling it to suit the occasion.

  But then there was another problem. ‘About a week before the gig, John rang me and said, “Just a wee question: what time is your band starting?”

  ‘“What band?”

  ‘“Well, you just can’t stand up on the stage and go ‘Howareye? We’re going to do Blind Date.’ You need a bit of build-up entertainment.”

  ‘“So I’ve got to provide that?”

  ‘“Yes, it’s your show.”

  ‘That’s where Gerry Browne and Dicey out of Tinker’s Fancy came in. They did a two-man warm-up and I paid them twenty-five quid each. I paid fifteen pounds for the rent of the PA. And that left me a tenner.

  ‘And there were forty people in the pub.’

  When it came Brendan’s time to take the stage, he really hadn’t a clue what he was going to do.

  ‘I got a fellow up and I blindfolded him, and he would have a choice of the three girls who came up on stage.

  ‘And the first question was, to the girls, “What’s the first thing you notice about a guy when you see him?”

  ‘Now, I had two girls from very posh areas, and one from a less posh town.

  ‘The first girl, from Stillorgan, said, “Shoulders, Brendan. I like the way a man moves, his deportment, his swagger.”

  ‘And the audience didn’t crack on. I thought, “God, make me funny, please!”

  ‘And then onto the next girl and she said, “I like a man to be tall. With brown eyes. Because eyes are the window to the soul.”

  ‘Still nothing from the audience. I was feckin’ dying up there. And then I got to the last girl, who was a cleaner in St James’s Hospital. And I said, “What’s the first thing you’d notice?” And she said, “I don’t give a fuck so long as he has a big, swinging mickey.”

  ‘And the forty people in the audience laughed louder than you could imagine. It brought the house down.

  ‘And what they were laughing at was the fact that this girl was herself, while the other two had been acting.

  ‘Now, without any shadow of a doubt, the PMA experience had given me the self-belief I needed to hold an audience’s attention for a couple of hours. I’d always had the feeling at the back of my mind that I could entertain. But it had remained there. PMA brought this positive feeling to the forefront. Now I felt, “Yes, I can tell jokes. Yes, I can make this crowd laugh. Now just go out there and do it.” But at the same time I thought, “This is a lesson to learn. Brendan, just be yourself.” And it made me think about honesty. I realised I’d spent years being someone else, so I should really try and be myself.’

  He realised being funny on stage was like a drug.

  ‘I felt a feeling of warmth and acceptance and, yes, power. I was the guy with the mic. I could say, “Look over there” and everyone looked. I loved it. And I was good at it. And I knew I could do it again.

  ‘I loved that feeling. I was the little guy who could go up there and be noticed. I was the one everyone was looking at, everyone was talking about. I was the one who was getting the big smiles. When I paused, you could feel the sense of expectation. And when I told a story, they listened hard. I was in heaven.

  ‘Meanwhile, the Rathmines asked me to do a show every Sunday morning, a stand-up. I took seven hundred and fifty quid at the door, on top of the seventy-five pounds. And that week I twigged that this could be a very lucrative business if it was managed right.’

  The posters originally read Tinker’s Fancy . . . featuring Brendan O’Carroll, but it soon became apparent that Brendan, with his fast wit and comedy persona, was the main attraction. He was also seen as the godfather of the outfit.

  ‘We made an arrangem
ent that in our organisation Gerry would be the management – on the face of it – and go in to negotiate. But if, for example, we were offered three hundred and fifty quid, he’d be able to say, “Oh Brendan won’t do it for that. He wants five hundred. And he’s a bastard. He really is.” And he’d use me to play off one person against another.’

  Meanwhile, Dicey dropped out, to be replaced by Colin Goodall, and the show became Brendan O’Carroll’s Blind Date . . . with Gerry Browne and Colin Goodall, and ran successfully for almost two years, appearing right across Dublin and in towns such as Cork, Waterford and Wicklow.

  A bass player joined the outfit, Willie De Mange, and the name was changed to The Outrageous Comedy Show. At times The OCS could be risqué. In fact, it was once described as ‘bluer than a frost-bitten penis’, and praise was delivered in similes that reflected the ‘toilet’ humour.

  ‘The Outrageous Comedy Show got people’s attention, but those who thought that that was me on the stage were wrong. It wasn’t the real me. I was doing my job really well. Me, I’m a waiter. I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m Victorian in my own way. I’ve got Victorian values.

  ‘I can go up there and talk about sex and get laughs. I can talk about the size of someone’s mickey and get laughs. But this wasn’t who I was. If I were at home or at a party I’d never crack a joke about genitalia. It just isn’t me. What the audience were getting was what I thought they wanted. And they did laugh. And yes, some people didn’t like it. They reckoned I was a filthy little bollix and maybe they weren’t wrong. But you’ve got to find your level. And this was the level I thought I should be aiming at on stage.’

  When Brendan was on the end of a stinging crit in Hot Press magazine for being too crude, he actually wrote the critic a letter. ‘You’re right,’ it said. ‘I’ll change my ways.’

  It’s not surprising that Brendan’s humour attracted some strong criticism in Catholic Ireland.

  ‘I’m not a devotee of the Church; I’m not a devotee of any organised religion. I was christened a Catholic but I’m certainly not a supporter of the Catholic Church. The closer you are to any organised religion, the further you are from God. But I have a good one-to-one relationship with Jesus, which I’ve had since I was a kid.