‘It was love at first sight. Danny was working as crew and he had gone up the night before me. He rang me the next day asking where I was. I said, “Danny, I’m only in Cavan.” Half an hour later, he rang again saying, “Are you here yet?” I said, “I’m only in Monaghan, will you relax?” He was clearly bursting to tell me something. And when I arrived in Letterkenny in Donegal he announced, “I think I’ve met my Jenny. Her name is Amanda Woods and she’s the one for me.”
‘I think she has been a fantastic influence on my son. But when they started dating, I said to him, “She’s a lovely girl, but let me warn you in advance, Donegal girls don’t leave Donegal.” He said, confidently, “I’ll put that right.”
‘He’s now happily living in Donegal.’
Danny and Amanda married in 2006 and have two sons. Amanda boarded Brendan’s bus, in the first instance working in merchandising. But Brendan reckoned Amanda fancied acting. So what if she’d never acted before? It had never been a requirement in the past.
‘I knew she was terrified of going on stage, so one day I announced she’d be playing the part of Betty. And she was fantastic.’
Meantime, 20-year-old daughter Fiona, who’d studied film production, also joined the team.
‘The most important thing is to show your children that you have confidence in them so that they, in turn, have confidence in their own abilities – something which my own mother taught me. She also taught me the value of making other people happy. And she told me that whatever you do in life, you should do it to the best of your ability.’
Danny would later play the role of hapless young criminal Buster Brady, while Fiona would play Agnes’s daughter-in-law, Maria, who is married to Dermot.
Dermot would be played by Paddy Houlihan, also a virgin stage actor, but Danny’s best friend. Brendan had liked Paddy since he was a little boy and believed he had the comedy bones to make it on stage.
And he wasn’t wrong.
The Mrs Brown troupe was now entirely made up of close friends, partners and family. Brendan had created a world within a world in which he’d become the godfather, but without the pinstriped suit and the propensity to have family members whacked.
The mix worked. Audiences could see a troupe on stage having the time of their lives and it all helped create atmosphere. In fact, the success of Good Mourning Mrs Brown resulted in talks with a film distribution company about landing Sparrow’s Trap a cinema release.
‘During the whole time when people were owed money, the thing that was forgotten about was the movie. But I always knew it was a damn good movie and believed if I stood by it, everything would work out.’
Brendan again pledged the original investors would get their money back.
‘Before I started the Sparrow’s Trap project, I had a choice of whether to do the film or write the play. And if I had the choice again, I would do things the other way round. It has all worked out in the end. But, to tell you the truth, if you’d asked me then if there was light at the end of the tunnel, I’d have told you that I couldn’t even see the tunnel, never mind the light.’
The film never did make it into the cinemas. Brendan did, however, launch a new project. The production company he set up with Jenny (the pair had now moved to a new home in Blanchardstown) began taping the Mrs Brown plays to sell as videos. It proved to be a lucrative sideline.
Most of 2002, meanwhile, was spent touring Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding.
‘I know a bandwagon when I see it,’ said Brendan playfully at the end of each performance in the likes of Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool.
He was getting big audiences in all the big cities, apart from London. (London West End theatres demanded six-month runs, and even Brendan’s optimism, or patience to cope with being in one town for that length of time, wouldn’t run to that.)
‘But who would have thought when I left school at just twelve years of age, that today, thirty-seven years later, an audience would be sitting in theatres all across Ireland and the UK waiting to see something I wrote?’
Who indeed? But the theatres were full. And the audiences knew they were guaranteed well over three hours (way beyond the traditional length of a theatre show) of laugh-till-you-cry comedy.
The O’Carroll circus spent months on the road, broken up by the now customary trips to Florida, where Brendan could relax by his swimming pool and write.
And now that he had created two hit comedy plays, it was time to see if he could do it again. Brendan didn’t take long to come up with the third play in the trilogy, Mrs Brown Rides Again, to tour in the spring of 2003.
The play begins with perhaps the best of the Mrs Brown openers. Agnes is in her kitchen and we hear her dog bark outside in the garden.
‘Feck! I’ve forgotten to feed Spartacus.’ And she takes a tin of dog meat from the cupboard, opens the kitchen door and throws it outside. Big laughs emerge from the audience. Then she pauses dramatically and says, ‘Feck. I’ve forgotten the tin opener!’ She goes to the kitchen drawer, takes out a tin opener, opens the door and throws it outside. Massive laughs ensue. Why? It’s impossible to analyse, but Agnes is a mix of dotty, unpredictable – and slightly scary.
The main plot hinges on Agnes becoming increasingly unhinged. Her kids are planning a surprise party, so they stop speaking when Agnes enters the room. All she overhears them whispering is, ‘She’s smelly and wees all over the place’, and thinks they are planning to put her into a home. But she doesn’t know they’re talking about the sick Spartacus.
Meanwhile Dino, the boyfriend of gay son Rory, announces he wants them to have a baby together; Cathy brings home her condescending academic boyfriend; and another son, Dermot, cooks up a raffle-ticket scam with his moronic mate Buster.
There are gags galore, involving bikini waxes (‘It’s only for the craic’), condoms, childbirth and heart attacks.
Agnes, as always, does distressed like no one else.
‘In the crazy world of female impersonation comedy, there’s cross dressing, very cross dressing and then there’s Mrs Brown,’ wrote one critic.
And indeed one of the best tributes paid to the Brendan/Agnes creation was the award for ‘Best Actress’ at the Liverpool Theatre Awards show. (One presumes the theatre critics in Liverpool were entirely aware that Mrs Brown was in fact a fully functioning male.) Brendan was delighted to receive the award. All in all, he was in a much happier place. His personal life certainly seemed on an even keel.
Doreen spoke to an Irish newspaper about the break-up with Brendan, but it was far from critical. The pair, she said, remained ‘good friends’, which was what the kids wanted to hear. And Brendan, meanwhile, spoke about the new love in his life, Jenny, in glowing terms. The pair had now bought a home in Holystown, on the edge of a beautiful golf course and close to Finglas.
‘The apple never falls far from the tree,’ he says, smiling. (Although the apple would spend a fair amount of time planted in Florida.)
But this wasn’t Brendan settling down. He still had the need for adventure. He talked about setting up his own airline to operate domestic flights in Ireland. He went as far as developing business plans and looking for funding. It didn’t come off, but he held onto the aviation notion for some years to come. And the plans are still in a drawer, given he’s had more pressing commitments in recent times, such as world domination.
Brendan was also talking about going into politics again. He said he would put himself forward in the Finglas area for election to the Dáil within five years. Back in 1995, he had contemplated nailing his colours to the Democratic Left ticket. At this point, he was adamant that he would become an independent socialist candidate.
If elected today, the first thing Brendan O’Carroll TD would do would be to ‘tackle real drugs issues, real crime issues’.
‘The problem is not getting the kids off the drugs, the problem is filling their day. The beauty of being a drug addict is you wake up in the morning and your who
le day is filled, snaring the money to get your fix. Every day that you shoot up is an achievement.
‘You’ve achieved. You’ve got something that you can see and hold in your hand. That is not a dishonourable quest. It’s dreadful that it involves drugs, but it’s not dishonourable. Every one of us gets up in the morning and hopes that, by the end of the day, we achieve. What we need to do is give them something to achieve. There is an army of people out there willing to put this country right. There’s nobody who doesn’t want to make a contribution, even the guy shooting up.
‘I would use my vote to force the government to set up a civil maintenance brigade, numbering fifty thousand people off the unemployment register. Their job would be to keep the country looking good from top to bottom, even down to having stormtroopers. Potholes in Cavan? The stormtroopers are in; bang, bang, bang, potholes filled!’
It’s not hard to see why Brendan would win the populist vote.
‘All these people want is a week’s wages and to achieve every day. That can be provided and I’d love to start such a brigade.’
There haven’t been too many entertainers in Ireland and the UK who’ve revealed not only political ambitions but thought-out plans. But then few entertainers think like Brendan O’Carroll. He is a natural problem solver, whether it’s a friend’s domestic crises or a Dáil Éireann social policy.
‘I will go into politics one day. If they can have a poxy actor as President of America, I don’t think it’s at all implausible.’
Brendan’s ambitions have always been to work to get enough money to not have to work.
‘At the stage I go into politics, I will probably not have to work. John F. Kennedy, for example, didn’t need the presidency. I spoke to Courtney Kennedy (daughter of Bobby Kennedy) once, and she told me that the Kennedy family, to this day, get a dollar on every bottle of spirits imported into the United States of America. It goes back to something they organised in the 1920s. John F. Kennedy didn’t need the bread. He just took a dollar a year for the presidency.
‘He wanted to make a contribution, plus he wanted to get his leg over. Several times a day. But he wanted to make a contribution and, fuck me, he did.
‘He didn’t need the money, so why should we only vote for TDs who need the money in Ireland? In fact, some of the TDs who are in there for the money are dangerous.’
With that sort of rhetoric, why wouldn’t the public vote for the man who was already the People’s Champion?
Meantime, Brendan had to carry on working. He was feeding the dream. He liked to live well. Extremely well. He wasn’t going to buy a coffee in a cheap café when he could afford a cappuccino in Bewley’s. With that thought in mind, he bought Danny and Fiona homes next door to his in Florida.
The circus had to keep touring.
Bigger Brown
BRENDAN wasn’t just generous with his cash, he was generous with his time. Over the periods when we’d meet, he’d reveal almost every detail of his professional and private life. No question went unanswered. But that’s not to say the conversations were all based around him. Our meetings came to be called Tuesdays With Morrie, in reference to the bestselling book in which a young man spends quality time with his sage and mentor.
Brendan did indeed become a mentor and, on occasion, a counsellor. He talked me through the death of a friend and he spent the longest time offering advice on a play I was writing at the time.
I was struggling to work out what it was really about, this story of a soap actor whose character drives a taxi, but can’t come to terms with losing his acting job and is forced to become a taxi driver in real life.
‘I know what you’ve written, Brian. You’ve come up with It’s A Wonderful Life in a Glasgow taxi.’
And he was right. And from that moment, the play picked up speed, eventually appearing at the same theatre as the Mrs Brown plays (thankfully with enough months separating them and not affecting Hacked Off’s box office).
We became closer. He came to my house. He got to know all the family, my sisters, and my mother and Auntie Ethel (who’d read all the Mrs Brown books before she’d heard of the stage play), and all thought the Irishman a comedy magician.
We talked of everything from VAT bills to baldness.
‘I remember going to the barbers at fifteen, and him saying, “You’re not going to have this too long, Brendan.” But it’s never bothered me. I’ve been offered a hair transplant but I’m used to being bald.
‘And can you imagine me with hair? I’d look like Bobby Ball.’
We talked about a publication date for this book. But he pushed the subject aside.
‘Let’s wait until I’m famous.’
‘But you are famous, Brendan. In Ireland certainly, and in half a dozen major cities in the UK. And in North America.’
We talked about his mammy, of course. Maureen O’Carroll was rarely far away from his thoughts.
‘This will sound completely mad. I loved my mother dearly – but the best thing she could have done for me was die.’
‘Why, Brendan? That’s an astonishing thing to say . . .’
‘I’ll tell you why. I could never express myself as an individual because I was always worried about whether she would approve.
‘I have taken some incredible risks in my career, like becoming a stand-up comedian when my pub business went bust, but if my mother had been alive she would never have let the business go under – and I would never have become a comedian.
‘I have learned and lived more since my mother died because I have had failures – lots of them. But despite that I loved her so much and it makes me really sad that she can’t be here to see all of this.’
His eyes filled up at the thought. ‘I suppose she’s up there somewhere looking down on me.
‘But I will always regret the fact that she has never seen me performing on stage or read one of my books.’
It was perhaps not surprising that Brendan would tell me constantly to enjoy every single moment I could with my mother, wishing he’d had a little more time with his own. And even when he was out of town, he’d text. We’d speak on the phone. Sometimes when we’d arrange to meet either in Manchester or Glasgow, he’d be later than a broken alarm clock. But he’d always smile and apologise, and it was hard not to forgive a man who was always travelling at the speed of a runaway train, either writing, or setting up the next deal, whether it was to buy an airline or a flat in Shanghai.
And the gang, the troupe, would always be around. And the hugs would be so constant that sometimes it was almost possible to forget you were Scottish. Then he would be off again on tour. And it was great to see the success story continue.
Brendan’s Mrs Brown Rides Again went down a storm at the Olympia in Dublin in January 2003, playing an incredible 31 shows. The accolades came thick and fast with the Irish People, for example, describing the Agnes Brown creator as ‘Ireland’s most successful comic writer’.
The O’Carroll roadshow then took off to New York in time for the St Patrick’s Day celebrations as part of an 11-city, 70-bookstore tour of America to promote his books, in particular The Young Wan.
His right hand was aching from the constant signing of autographs, and no doubt his face muscles had been stretched into a smile too many times to count, but Brendan was feeling exhausted, sitting in the dining room of the Fitzpatrick Manhattan Hotel, for a different reason.
‘I had sidestepped the hotel’s raucous party the night before, but stayed up late. I stayed up watching the news on Iraq, watching war begin. And I was worried. I thought, “Bush has no foreign policy knowledge.”’
Brendan agreed to a series of interviews on his trip. During one chat in New York with the Irish Voice, Brendan revealed the generous side of his nature when the interviewer referred to him as ‘Mr Brown’ and he offered no correction. He doesn’t often suffer fools gladly.
But he certainly didn’t hold back from putting fellow Irish writer Bill Cullen in his place during the same chat
. Bill is a businessman and author of It’s A Long Way From Penny Apples, his own story of growing up poor in North Dublin, and working in the markets of Moore Street. Bill Cullen butted in as Brendan was just about to talk about The Young Wan and how the prequel to The Mammy emerged.
‘Five thousand copies of my book sold out last night on the QVC shopping channel in two minutes,’ boasted Cullen to Brendan. And he added, ‘That’s a hundred thousand dollars in two minutes.’
‘Really? I have five books of my own,’ countered Brendan. ‘And can’t you see I am being interviewed?’
Brendan says he enjoyed Cullen’s opus. But he couldn’t imagine Agnes Brown having anything to do with that ever-so-serious Dublin world.
‘She would have had feck-all to do with all those negative Nellies in his book. They would have been too heavy for her.
‘I knew a few Nellies in my day. But they’re not for me either. That’s why I select memories. My memories are all very happy. The other ones I can’t remember.’
The book tour had gone well, although it was not without incident. Brendan wasn’t even wearing his Agnes skirt and cardie when he was propositioned by a man.
‘I was having a drink before a reading in Sonoma, California, and this old guy comes up to me.’ Brendan takes on a hillbilly accent. ‘“You got nice teeth, boy, like a woman.”’
The terrified comedian and staunchly heterosexual father-of-three ran away from his potential suitor.
‘It was like a scene from Deliverance,’ he says, of the Burt Reynolds hillbilly horror movie. ‘All that was missing was the banjo.’
Brendan knew these book promotions were important, not just to the publisher who’d given him such a nice advance, but to his production company.
‘By this time I was supporting forty people – everyone: the cast, the crew, the production team back in the office.’
He was determined none of his ‘family’ would struggle as he had as a youngster.
‘We did okay back then. We thought we were rich. We just didn’t have any money.’
The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll Page 22