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

by Beacom, Brian

  ‘Then I had to think where to begin her story. Now, it should have been set in the Thirties, to kick off her childhood, but I wasn’t around then, so I thought I’d start the story in the Sixties, in 1967, and I picked 29 March, my mother’s birthday. Agnes’s birthday is 6 December, the day Roy Orbison died.

  ‘I began the story on the day her husband died. And a new life begins. But the twenty pages ran on to thirty, to forty, fifty. A hundred pages. Then I got to two hundred and fifty pages and I hadn’t even got past the first nine months of her widowhood.

  ‘I read over it and became a little bit excited and thought, “This could be a book!” So I rang my manager back in Ireland, Pat Egan, and said, “Listen, Pat, I’m thinking about writing a book.”

  ‘“What’s it about?”

  ‘“It’s about Agnes Browne, the first nine months after she becomes a widow.”

  ‘“Go on . . .”

  ‘“It’s nothing deep at all. It’s just light and frivolous.”

  ‘“Okay, well, bring it home with you.”

  ‘But the very next day he rang me and said, “Good news, I’ve got a buyer for your book.”

  ‘“Who?”

  ‘“O’Brien Press.”

  ‘“You can’t have a buyer for the book, Pat. No one has even seen it yet.”

  ‘“Yes, I know, but I put a couple of feelers out and O’Brien say they’ll take it because the interest in the radio series is huge.”

  ‘“No, Pat, I don’t want that kind of deal. I don’t want them buying a book they haven’t read, just because it has Mrs Browne’s name on it. It might be crap.”’

  What to do? Dismiss the offer because the publisher hadn’t read the copy? No, Brendan reckoned he’d go and meet Michael O’Brien and see what he had to say for himself.

  And he was glad he did.

  ‘I liked Michael. His company was based in Victoria Place in Rathmines, on the outskirts of the city, and had been set up by his dad on a bicycle. In recent times they’d been publishing children’s books and now they were keen to publish books for adults. And I liked the idea of growing with a small company.’

  So far, so good. Michael O’Brien in turn loved the world Brendan had created and offered the writer a £5,000 advance, which was a decent figure for a first-time writer. The Mammy’s Agnes Browne wasn’t the woman who appears on television today, though; that Agnes is a heightened character, perfect for sitcom. The mammy of the book is more serious. Still funny, but more measured. And set in a world in which you can almost taste the desperation in her life.

  The Mammy certainly suggested Brendan had a dark comic mind.

  The story is set in Dublin in the Sixties and features Agnes, the mother of seven kids, who lives in The Jarro (a fictitious amalgam of areas such as Summerhill and Stoneybatter, which would later lead to confusion when American tourists tried to find it), and gets up at 5 a.m. to work at a fruit stall in Moore Street.

  The tale begins just hours after the death of Agnes’s husband, Redser, when she has to go to the Social Security office to claim money. She’s that skint.

  The officious lady behind the window pulls out the necessary form and asks Agnes how her husband died. Agnes says he was killed by a hunter. The lady is horrified and asks ‘What, with a gun? With a knife?’ Agnes looks at her as if she’s stupid and says, ‘No, it was a Hillman Hunter. He was feckin’ knocked down.’

  And the laughs and the pathos continue for the next 174 pages as we’re introduced to Agnes’s seven kids, her best friend Marion and her would-be suitor, Pierre.

  ‘Anyway, the book came out and on the Friday I plugged it on The Late, Late Show. And by the Monday it was Number One in the bestseller charts. It stayed there for an incredible eighteen weeks. I was quite stunned.’

  The book launch in Dublin brought about an added joy.

  Brendan’s favourite teacher and inspiration Billy Flood was guest of honour. Years later, when Mrs Brown’s Boys became successful on TV, Brendan again acknowledged his mentor. ‘If you don’t like Mrs Brown’s Boys, don’t blame me,’ he joked. ‘Billy Flood made me do it.’

  Brendan’s first novel (dedicated to Gerry Browne) had hit the mark.

  Four weeks later, Brendan met with Michael O’Brien in the Halfway House bar, between Rathmines and Finglas, to discuss the future.

  ‘He had started to increase the spend on marketing. He could see it was still moving nicely. But Michael said, “Listen, we need to have a chat.”

  ‘I knew what he was going to say and I pre-empted the conversation. He was going to ask me for another book, afraid I’d go elsewhere. So at the meeting, I said to him, “Look, here’s the deal, Michael. I see this as a trilogy.”

  ‘“Oh, yes. So do I.”

  ‘“Well, here’s what I’ll do. The next two books are yours.”

  ‘“Fantastic, Brendan!”

  ‘“Yes, but you’ve got to promise me you’ll keep up the marketing.”

  ‘Now, as it turned out, I don’t think he had the will or the wherewithal to market the book on a worldwide basis. It was me who would eventually get overseas interest and worldwide marketing.’

  Brendan knew instinctively that Mrs Brown would sell outside Ireland.

  ‘Mrs Brown is not an Irish story. It’s a mammy story. If a book like this sells well in an English-speaking country, there is no reason to believe it won’t work in every English-speaking country. That’s why Cliff Richard sells albums in Australia.’

  He wasn’t wrong. But The Mammy didn’t only sell in English-speaking lands. It would go on to make the Top Twenty in India and Brazil too.

  ‘It was translated into Japanese and Polish, a total of twenty-eight languages. During the Bosnia conflict, it was the Number One book in the country.’

  Brendan had proved he could write a novel. And he set out to write the follow-up for O’Brien. But he’d soon come up with a writing idea that was, even by his standards, quite audacious.

  The Course

  BRENDAN had fun writing the follow-up to The Mammy, called The Chisellers, the title emerging from the alcohol-tinged tongue of Agnes Browne as she mispronounces the word ‘children’.

  Set three years on from her husband Redser’s death, it features Mrs Browne’s battles ‘in being a mother, father and referee to her fighting family of seven.’ But Agnes Browne is no longer living in the inner city area, The Jarro. She has now moved to suburban Finglas, the area where Brendan grew up.

  Write what you know.

  But while there was a real chance the book would replicate the success of The Mammy, what he needed was an idea that would present him with a completely new challenge.

  ‘I had no idea what that was,’ he says with a grin.

  ‘Then, one day in January 1995, I was asked by a journalist what I planned to do in the year ahead, and I said, “I think I’ll write a play for the Dublin Theatre Festival and stage it myself.”’

  Brendan had never written a play before. He hadn’t actually seen more than a couple of theatre plays, apart from the Christmas shows and revues. Nor had he ever produced one, or hired actors, booked theatres, etc. It was an entirely insane idea, particularly as he was still carrying The Abbot’s Castle debt, and had a mortgage and family to look after.

  So of course he had to go ahead.

  ‘I was aware that a Dublin writer hadn’t been premiered at the Festival in eighty-five years, so I thought I’d have a go,’ he says with the casualness of a man who’s just declared he’s off to buy new socks.

  Maureen O’Carroll was gone but she continued to influence her son’s life. Brendan was once again looking over the edge of a crevasse, but his mammy gave him the courage to leap to the other side.

  And, after all, he’d written a bestselling novel at the first attempt. Why wouldn’t he be able to replicate this feat in Theatreland?

  While making the announcement, Brendan had avoided mentioning the name of the play or indeed the subject matter. Not because he was being de
liberately coy. It was because he hadn’t a clue what it was going to be about. He was desperate for an idea. Think positive. Come on Brendan, it’s all about having the right Positive Mental Attitude. That’s what the course taught you, wasn’t it? Yes, the PMA course you had to undertake as part of the job with the insurance company. When you walked away from that course you believed you could conquer a mountain range that Edmund Hillary would have walked away from.

  Now, all you have to do is put on a play. You can come up with a premise.

  And there it was. He’d call it The Course, of course.

  And so he came up with the story of a group of ‘losers’ who sign up for a Positive Mental Attitude seminar.

  The play’s central character, Joe Daly, played by Brendan, gives courses to a motley bunch of seeming no-hopers, and he gets a good bonus for every person who passes the exams.

  Everything is going well until the American supervisor, Burt Rubenstein, arrives, reckons Daly to be a scammer, and threatens to close down the course – unless everyone passes the exam.

  ‘So I started all the basics, trying to work out how many characters I needed, writing them in, rubbing them out. And I realised that you become God when you write a play.’

  Once he had the idea, the shape of the play began to form quickly, and he came up with his oddball cast of characters, which included a prostitute, a golf widow, an alcoholic, a resting actor and a country bumpkin. Brendan/God loved creating this new world, to be played out on stage later that year.

  Meanwhile, during that summer, Brendan picked up the Entertainer of the Year Award at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Brendan and Gerry sang ‘Hey, Paddy’ and Brendan forgot the words. It didn’t matter; the pals had a great night. And were delighted to be introduced to U2. Gerry took the chance to mention to lead singer Bono that he used to deliver milk to his family home in Ballymun. It put a smile on his face to think he’d supplied the snap, crackle and pop to the pop star’s Rice Krispies.

  Brendan also landed his first film job, appearing as Weslie in Roddy Doyle’s mobile-chip-shop adventure, The Van. Brendan loved the filming, and became pals with the writer.

  During filming, however, Brendan received a rather unwelcome phone call.

  ‘It was from the Dublin Theatre Festival office and the person on the end of the line sounded very serious. They wanted me to give up the theatre to some Italian Circus Opera.

  ‘The Italian production had been booked into the town’s Andrews Lane Theatre, which was too small. So they wanted me to swap. They wanted me to swap theatres.’

  Producers rarely play musical theatres with their plays. Audiences don’t like to migrate. Publicity has to be remounted. But the Festival office didn’t see the problem.

  Brendan did. He was hugely resentful. He felt that the Theatre Festival people were making him out to be the bad guy, forcing him into a very difficult position. And being cavalier. This was theatre royalty treating him like a Johnny-come-lately, a lowly subject.

  Thankfully, Roddy Doyle was quick to encourage his fellow writer.

  ‘Roddy took me aside and said, “You cannot let these people do this. You’ve got to do it yourself, outside of the Festival Theatre umbrella.”’

  Yes, why not? He still had the Tivoli. He still had the backing of Tony Byrne. Three days later, Brendan picked up the phone to hear a very friendly co-producer on the line.

  ‘Tony was an avid golfer and he asked me to go for a round with him, at Holystown (the North Dublin suburb where Brendan would later live).

  ‘So we started playing golf and we got to talking. At about the fourth or fifth hole he said something strange to me. He said, “You know, when I told people in the theatre business that I was going to co-produce this theatre play with you, a man with no theatre experience, they told me not to touch you with a ten-foot bargepole.”

  ‘And so we moved on to the next hole. But at the sixth hole Tony said to me, “I got a call from the Theatre Festival.”

  ‘And right then I knew. He had been leaned on. So he opened up a bit and said, “What do you think about their problem, Brendan?”

  ‘“Well, exactly that. It’s their problem, Tony.”

  ‘“I’d like to help them out.”

  ‘“If you want to do that, you’d better build a theatre very quickly, because you’re not getting the one I have.”

  ‘“Well, I am joint producer.”

  ‘“Yes, Tony. But you came in as co-producer after I had rented the theatre. That rental arrangement stands. I rented the theatre and I’m lending it to the joint production.”

  ‘“If that’s the case, Brendan, I’m pulling out of the joint production.”

  ‘“You’re kidding! That’ll leave me about thirty-five grand short.”

  ‘“Look, Brendan, that’s the way it is. I have to think about my reputation within the theatre industry.”

  Tony certainly didn’t want to incur the wrath of the theatre inner circle. Meanwhile, the golf match continued. And when the pair, now operating in something of a cold silence, reached the ninth hole, Tony was three shots in front. But by the end of the game, Brendan had won by five shots.

  ‘I was feckin’ determined to whup his arse. During the last rounds, he tried to talk about the play, but I just put him down saying, “Tony, from the ninth tee off, you were no longer producing the show. I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

  ‘“Well, I want to explain . . .”

  ‘“You don’t have to explain. The show is nothing to do with you. Let’s play golf.”’

  After the match, Brendan was furious, and desperate too, given he had to find the extra £35k to open his play. But when he arrived home there was worse news. He picked up the phone to hear a Dublin Herald journalist ask: ‘Have you seen the paper?’

  ‘And there it was in the Arts section of the Irish Times. It read: Dublin Theatre Festival Rejects Brendan O’Carroll Play.

  ‘So I went through the story to see what excuse they had come up with. And the copy revealed the play had been rejected because it wasn’t up to the standard required by the Festival.

  The Theatre Festival boss Tony O’Dalaigh didn’t expand on his reasons and Brendan had no idea why his play was turned down. It transpires however Tony O’Dalaigh thought The Course to be ‘derivative’, the idea a little too close to the 1975 play Comedians, by Trevor Griffiths, about a bunch of comedy losers who are transformed by a course.

  Brendan meantime was in despair. The dream of writing a hit play seemed stuck in a bunker with Tony Byrne’s last shot.

  Thankfully, that same night the forlorn writer had a visit from Gerry Browne and Tommy Swarbrigg, who now arranged Brendan’s stand-up bookings. At least he could rely on support from his right-hand man and one of his trusted lieutenants.

  Or so he thought.

  ‘Gerry actually seemed pleased at this bad news. Now, he wasn’t trying to get one over on me; he had his own reasons for not wanting it to go ahead. I think it’s because he really didn’t want to do the play.’

  It seems hard to believe Gerry didn’t want success for his friend.

  ‘He did. But he wanted our world to stay the same, to carry on with the comedy shows. His thinking was, “Stick with what you’re good at.” I wanted Gerry with me. I wanted him up there on stage with me and said to him, “Gerry, take some acting classes.” But he never bothered. He was scared, I guess. Yet, I knew he could act. He was a natural.’

  Gerry denies all this. He says he wanted to move forward with the idea of the play. He had no idea whether his friend could write a play, but he assumed it was possible. After the success of The Mammy books, anything was possible.

  ‘Tommy was also accepting of the bad news. He said to me, “Now I don’t want to add fuel to the fire, Brendan, but you have to accept that the Theatre Festival people have been in this business a long time. You have to accept they know what they’re talking about.”

  The Theatre Festival pressure, and the fact that
his friends weren’t exactly stoking the fires of encouragement, took its toll on Brendan. Regardless, he went off and finished his play. And he felt he had written a decent comedy. But given the obstacles in his way, PMA just wasn’t kicking in.

  ‘I was so low. And by early September, just a few weeks before the play was to go on stage, I was seriously considering throwing in the towel.’

  The metaphor was appropriate. Even a helicopter ride the following day to a World Boxing Championship couldn’t lift Brendan’s spirits.

  ‘On this Friday, I had a helicopter picking me up to take me to Cork, where a friend of mine, Steve Collins, was fighting Chris Eubank for the middleweight title.

  ‘It was their second fight. Steve had won the first because Eubank was out of sorts. And we all knew that this time around Eubank was going to kill him. Or we thought we knew.

  ‘I had really been looking forward to this fight, but on the flight I was so low I never spoke to a soul. I was so gutted. I was the same during the limo journey. Wrecked at the thought of the play being pulled.’

  At the ringside, an RTÉ producer approached Brendan and mentioned that Jimmy Magee, the well-known boxing commentator, had spotted him on one of the cameras.

  ‘Jimmy knew I’d boxed and wanted me to go over and do a piece to camera, and so I did. It went fine, and I managed to sound upbeat, and we talked about Steve’s new style, which meant throwing bombers, big punches that would upset Eubank’s style. It was hoped to turn it into a scrap, because if that were the case the street fighter – Steve – would win.

  ‘And as we were talking about the fight plan, I looked up at the monitors and could see the fighters arrive. And I found myself staring at the screen. I could see Steven’s face under the hood, the close-up, and I could read his lips. And they were saying, “Still the champ. Still the champ . . .” And that was something I had told him earlier: “As long as you are still standing, you are still the champ. And you don’t stop being the champ until that fight’s over.”