The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll
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But then again, he wasn’t slow in inviting as many people along on the circus ride as he could afford. Or even, at times, not afford. Fiona, Danny and Eric, now ten, were all part of the travelling O’Carroll book tour.
‘My publisher Viking wanted to know why I needed eleven hotel rooms in New York. I said they were for my family and friends.’
Back in the UK, it was time to tour again with Mrs Brown Rides Again. Again, the audiences were more than prepared to saddle up.
‘She remains a classic comic invention,’ said the Liverpool Post. ‘A sixtyish woman with a well-rounded figure, she strides through her family home like a tiger, sometimes protecting her young from would-be suitors, sometimes attacking them.’
Brendan took the moment to appreciate how far he’d come, from rags to riches in the form of the movie deals, to losing the lot, and now to building a Mrs Brown empire.
‘You know, I’d love to be able to say that I had a grand plan, but it’s not true. There have been things that have happened to me and I’ve thought it was the end of the world, but then I’ve discovered it was meant to be. Everything happens for a reason. I guess my writing comes from these sorts of experiences.’
Brendan had developed his own philosophy on life, part Buddhist, part Zen. He had come to believe life was pretty much mapped out, but if you get a signpost you should follow it. And if you have a negative experience, try your hardest to see the positive in it.
If he has some regrets, it was having spent so many years trying to be a great waiter or a great cleaner. What he should have done is follow in the footsteps of Brendan Grace and try sooner to become a great comedian. That’s why he encourages his kids and friends to follow the path they feel they are pulled to. Therein, happiness lies.
In 2004, he loved the experience of working on the Channel 4 comedy Max and Paddy’s Road To Nowhere, starring Peter Kay and Paddy McGuinness. Brendan played Gipsy Joe, an Irish crook who sells Max and Paddy a dodgy TV set.
Brendan and Peter Kay in particular would go on to become good friends.
Yet, while Brendan was now moving in established comedy circles (TV writer Caroline Aherne became a big fan, and she’d later write comedy drama The Security Men for her Irish pal, in which he’d star alongside Bobby Ball and Paddy McGuinness), he still had pitfalls to face.
Yes, he could do no wrong in places such as Glasgow, Birmingham and Liverpool, reprising Good Mourning to loud acclaim. But in Manchester, the response was now more muted.
And reviews from the likes of the Manchester Evening News weren’t entirely favourable.
‘Smash hits they might well be, but there is little attempt to disguise the fact that his trilogy of Agnes Brown plays are merely a platform to transport Brendan O’Carroll’s anarchic surreal sense of humour. Whenever he leaves the stage, the whole shebang falls a little flat.’
It’s hard to argue the plays aren’t a platform for Brendan’s sense of humour; he writes them. He created a window into a world of farce and fun. But implied in the critique was a danger Mrs Brown fans would become a little bored looking at the same scenery.
In 2005, it was back to the beginning of the trilogy with Last Wedding doing the rounds. But in August that year, Brendan’s thoughts were on a real wedding. His. He and Jenny married in Florida, with a huge cast of family and friends in attendance, including BoyZone star Keith Duffy.
‘It was a magical day. I couldn’t have been happier. I knew Jenny was the woman I wanted to be with for the rest of my life.’
Brendan also decided to take a break from wearing the wig and women’s tights. He went back to the relative simplicity of stand-up, touring his show How’s Your Wibbly Wobbly Wonder?
‘Being a stand-up is like playing poker, you look the audience in the eye and ask them to suspend disbelief because you’re about to tell them stories that are not true. It’s like “two elephants walking down a street”. Two elephants don’t walk down a street, they don’t talk to each other, and one of them does not wear sunglasses. But, unless I get them to picture that, and for that moment believe it, the joke is not going to work.’
That’s not to say Agnes didn’t make an appearance, vocally at least, and the show sent audiences home happy. Interestingly, Brendan’s material had altered immeasurably from the stints in the early Nineties. This was a much more family-friendly Dubliner in evidence. Albeit, with more than a few fecks thrown in.
In the summer of 2006, Brendan was back in Florida but this time he had invited a couple of guests along: myself and my partner, Fiona. It was a chance to spend time with Brendan away from the pressures of performing, relaxing with his family. That’s not to say he ever relaxed totally at his gorgeous villa in Kissimmee. During the stint, he was working on a deal for a syndicated cartoon series of Mrs Brown’s Boys, which he eventually concluded. And he did come up with ideas.
What was particularly fascinating to watch was his closeness with Jenny, with his grandchildren, and how he simply loved having his family around.
‘They mean everything to me. All this, it’s for them. I work thirty weeks a year and the rest of the time I’m here. I’m not going to give up on the time I have with the kids.’
What did the week reveal to the biographer? Many things. What he once said about loving cleaning products since his time as a cleaner in Jeyes in Finglas is true. Walk down the domestic product supermarket aisle with him and the blue eyes light up.
In a more serious moment, however, Brendan revealed how Agnes Brown was both a blessing and weight on his shoulders.
‘I don’t want to be playing her forever. I’m fifty-one years of age and I don’t want to be putting on the false tits for too much longer. What I want to be able to do is make enough money to be able to retire and do something else. Politics. TV. Whatever.’
Brendan certainly wasn’t in that sort of financial league. But he believed the dream could still happen.
Meanwhile, the holiday over, it was back to being Agnes Brown, performing all three plays consecutively across the UK with three weeks of Mrs Brown festivals. The strategy certainly didn’t do the O’Carroll bank balance any harm. But he knew he’d have to come up with a new show, such was the demand for a fresher Brown family. And so the ‘fourth in the trilogy’ emerged, For the Love of Mrs Brown. It was a play that took Agnes in a whole new direction. In fact, right out of the window.
The central storyline involves Agnes realising (to paraphrase Benny Hill’s comedy milkman Ernie) ‘a woman’s needs are many-fold’. After friend Winnie McGooghan reveals she once had ‘an organism’, Agnes too reckons it’s time to have some fun in life.
Meantime, Rory leaves behind some recreational pharmaceuticals in Agnes’s kitchen, which she takes, thinking they’re for heartburn. The result is Mrs Brown on LSD. In one of the best sight gags ever to have played out in a theatre, a drug-fuelled Agnes appears in a Wonder Woman costume and proceeds to fly right through the back-door window.
It’s a scene that brings the roof off every theatre it plays in.
Brendan had come back with a bang. Subplots? Yes, lots as usual, such as Cathy announcing to her mammy she wants a boob job. A puzzled Agnes replies, ‘But Cathy, you’ve got a job!’
And sex, the main subject matter of For the Love of, was right up Brendan’s personal back alley. It took him back to his Outrageous Comedy times, and he couldn’t wait to write up naughty gags.
Such as? It’s coming up to Valentine’s Day, and Agnes is thinking about looking for a man on the Internet. Cathy informs her mammy that, ‘If you are going on a first date nowadays, a man will expect you to perform fellatio.’
Agnes looks shocked and says, ‘Me? Sing opera? He’d have a better chance of getting a blow job.’
The show opened in Glasgow in February 2007 to rapturous reaction.
‘I was shitting myself before the opening. You write something you think is funny. But you never know until you start to perform and hear the audience reaction. But it’s been wonderfu
l. Even better than I’d hoped.’
The following year, Brendan and the troupe toured Britain, Ireland and Canada with For the Love of Mrs Brown. Critics enjoyed it, and they acknowledged that Agnes Brown fans loved it. But the critical voice in the likes of the Liverpool Post was noticeably a little stronger.
‘Admittedly, this series was never intended to be Ibsen, but you still feel that it would make a better sitcom than it does a piece of theatre. The signs are all there: the atrocious theme music, the stereotypes on show, the slapstick comedy and the quick-fire jokes. But the play is overlong and the concept is as stretched as Agnes’s tights. If you are new to the franchise, the show is well worth seeing. But if you have been before, you might feel a sense of déjà vu throughout.’
Were Agnes’s tights becoming a little saggy at the knees? Was the Mrs Brown show starting to wear a little thin? Surely not? Agnes on drugs is hardly a dull concept.
Was the journalist right, however, about the TV notion? Could Mrs Brown work in a TV sitcom format? It had been a radio sitcom back in 1992, but Brendan’s stage show had been running in theatres for over eight years. He had also been filming, making Agnes Brown DVDs for three years and selling them in vast numbers. If it had the potential to be a TV show, wouldn’t someone in the business have recognised it by now?
‘Not a chance. It was right under their noses and nobody saw the opportunity.’
Would the seemingly myopic TV producers ever see the potential in putting Agnes and co. on the telly?
The Dying Cow
BRENDAN knew that his comedy act was like a shark; it had to keep moving or it would die. The show was still well received, but audiences had dwindled down to the die-hard core.
He couldn’t take it to London because the the play couldn’t sustain a six-month run. It was too risky. And Brendan would have been bored out of his head being in one place for that length of time. (The show hadn’t sold well at the likes of Hammersmith.) And while it had played well in Canada, the size of the O’Carroll circus meant the box office had to be incredibly good in order to make any return.
In the spring of 2008, Brendan tried to expand the fan base, playing venues such as Edinburgh Playhouse, with its 3,000-seat capacity.
‘We thought we could make it work in Edinburgh, playing one of the biggest theatres in Europe. But it was a tough sell.’
Edinburgh didn’t have the same earthy, working-class audience as the likes of Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool. Some cities simply didn’t see Agnes as one of their own.
‘Dublin women tend to marry young. They get married at nineteen and become forty immediately, have kids and raise a family. Then, when they are forty, and the kids are doing their own thing, the mothers become sixteen. You get these women of forty, fifty and sixty talking like teenagers and, coupled with colloquial language, you are going to get something quite extraordinary – like Agnes Brown.’
The inability to spread the gospel according to Agnes, especially in the south of England and Wales, was worrying. So many prejudged the show (as I had), and decided the adventures of a big-mouthed matriarch in small heels weren’t for them. Brendan knew there was only a finite number of times his character could keep flapping her tea towel in Rory’s face, and making imaginary cups of tea.
What seemed a tragedy, though, was this was held to be one of the funniest comedy shows ever to grace the stage. What needed to happen was that someone important had to see the show; someone who had the ears of the powers-that-be and could take it on to the next level.
Brendan had always argued the need to remain positive. His mantra was, ‘The world turns every twenty-four hours, so relax and let it happen. And if there’s a problem you have to find a solution. But if you try, the solution will find you.’ Yet, what he needed wasn’t a solution, it was a miracle.
In October 2008, I took a close pal along to see the reprise of For the Love of Mrs Brown at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow. But he wasn’t just any pal. Ian Pattison is the writer and creator of BBC sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt and several other shows. Ian had never seen a Mrs Brown show, but he’d listened hard when I told him how good they were.
But Ian likes clever, sophisticated comedy. He’s a huge Woody Allen fan who loves plays by Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton and Alan Bennett. Would Agnes come anywhere close?
Would he like Mrs Brown? No, he didn’t like the show. He loved it. More to the point, he loved it so much he was prepared to shout it from the rooftops. Or at least down a phone line to London.
In recent times, Ian had worked with the BBC’s London-based producer Stephen McCrum on a sitcom, The Crouches. He called the producer that night and said he’d seen the future of British sitcom.
Ian suggested strongly that his chum should fly to Glasgow and find out why the city’s collective cheeks were wet from tears of laughter.
Stephen McCrum reacted without hesitation and booked a flight for the next day. On hearing this, I called Brendan and asked if he’d have any problem if I brought in a ‘special’ guest to see the show.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Can’t do any harm.’
It didn’t. Stephen McCrum sat in the stalls and was taken aback by what he saw.
‘The audience, to a man and woman, were laughing fit to burst, alongside ushers who were about sixteen or seventeen and also pissing themselves,’ he said later.
More importantly, he believed it could transfer to television.
After the show, we took the TV producer to the Number One dressing room to meet the star, just as he was removing make-up and padded breasts.
‘I’m Stephen McCrum from the BBC, Brendan. Great to meet you.’
‘And you too, Stephen. Howareye?’
‘Great. Would you like to make a sitcom for the BBC?’
‘I would, Stephen!’
Of course, TV sitcoms aren’t commissioned straight off. A pilot episode has to be written and then given the green light. (TV produces more pilots than British Airways, but most don’t make the airwaves.)
And Brendan had a massive problem to overcome: how can you reduce three hours and fifteen minutes of stage madness into 30 minutes of small-screen hilarity?
Brendan gave Stephen McCrum some problems of his own. The comedian insisted on using his regular cast, his family and friends. (He would later bring in his best man Mike Nolan to appear as the manager of Foley’s Bar. Fiona Gibney, Jenny’s sister, would join the circus as Winnie’s daughter Sharon; Emily Regan, now Paddy Houlihan’s wife, graduated from wardrobe to playing Barbara, and Jamie O’Carroll, Danny’s son, would play Bono, Agnes’s grandson.)
While the BBC hierarchy commended Brendan’s loyalty, they wanted him to work alongside tried-and-tested television performers. Both sides argued the case. The BBC pushed, saying the series could only go ahead if he agreed to the new people. Brendan stood his ground with a determination his mammy would have loved. And the Beeb backed down.
Then Brendan insisted the pilot, featuring an Irish cast (except for Gary Hollywood), be filmed in Glasgow. Why? He believed the city’s Pavilion Theatre had saved him, and it had been the venue where his theatre show was discovered for television. It had a magical connection for him. The BBC agreed.
But he still had to write the script. Weeks turned into months and he couldn’t manage to get it right. He enlisted the help of Ian Pattison along the way – after all, Brendan had never written a sitcom before (the five-minute radio slots weren’t in the same league), but the efforts didn’t produce the necessary result.
While Stephen McCrum tried to keep the BBC bosses onside, Brendan took off to Florida to write, to try to find a format that worked. But it didn’t look hopeful.
‘It’s really hard,’ he said on the phone. ‘I want to try and capture the atmosphere we have in the theatre, but I just don’t know how.’
He wrote idea after idea – and then dumped them in the bin. Thoughts flew out of his head faster than the pigeons from the pop crate he’d kept as a boy.
Then he had his eureka moment.
He couldn’t contain his excitement during a phone call.
‘I’ve got it. I know how to make this sitcom, Brian. I’m going to film as if it were a live theatre play. That way, the audience at home will get the atmosphere of the gigs.
‘We’re not going to try and convince them they’re in someone’s living room, we’re going to let them in on the joke, let them see that we’re filming a show. We’re going to film it live and we’re going to let them see the mistakes, the cameras, the lot. It will be brilliant.’
‘It will be a major disaster, Brendan. TV shows don’t reveal all. Some TV shows such as Shameless have the central character speaking directly to camera, but never to remind the audience they are watching a piece of fiction. Stephen McCrum will have kittens when you tell him that.’ But that’s not what was actually said to Brendan. Only thought. What was said to Brendan was: ‘Gosh, I don’t know. You may be right . . .’
In the Mrs Brown stage shows, Brendan regularly breaks the fourth wall. When Dino, for example, utters a line, ‘Mrs Brown, you can’t say that!’ Brendan will quip, ‘I feckin’ can. It’s in the script.’
Would that work on television? Would he be able to convince Stephen McCrum and script editor Paul Mayhew-Archer that this stage trick should appear in the pilot? Stephen McCrum compared Brendan to sitcom legend Leonard Rossiter, crediting him with ‘incredible comedic intelligence’. But even he was nervous about Brendan’s idea to let the audience in on the act.
The BBC bosses had another concern. Would British and Irish viewers accept the locker-room language?
Brendan dug his heels in. ‘I said, “If Agnes Brown says twenty pounds or twenty fecking pounds, does it matter? There are much worse words than feck. Rape or murder are worse.” I argued that it’s colour. To take the feck out would be like taking every second word out of a Wordsworth poem. It wouldn’t work. And here’s the thing: she’s the only person in the show who swears. Agnes Brown wouldn’t allow anyone else to swear.’