The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (32 page)

‘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.

Brendan wanted to somehow capture the spontaneity, the energy that made Mrs Brown work in theatre. But how?

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.’

With the pilot script completed, the producer fought hard to get clearance for a show that used the F-word (albeit the Irish version, ‘feck’) 34 times in this first 30-minute episode.

But, on top of all that, the TV politics of the time militated against success. In late 2008, the BBC had been caught up in the debacle surrounding presenters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, in which the pair had left rude messages on actor Andrew Sachs’s answering machine.

Brendan believed this would seriously prejudice his own chances.

‘I thought the whole sitcom idea was a bit pie-in-the-sky, to be quite honest. Especially since there had been false dawns in the past.

‘Then when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand got into trouble over Sachs-gate, I thought, “Well that’s it, there’ll be no series for us.” I thought the BBC would look at the script and all they would see was swearing and nothing else.’

Thankfully, Stephen McCrum convinced the BBC that Brendan should have his shot at glory. The pilot would be filmed in Glasgow in October. But even Brendan’s natural PMA was seriously contained at this point. And he was simply being realistic. Most TV ideas fail. That’s the truth of it.

He had to hope that the stage-show audiences would pick up.

In April 2009, the clan were safely home in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, performing
For the Love of
. Again the audience clapped till their hands were sore, with critics comparing the on-stage madness to a mix of
Monty Python
and the
Carry On
movies, and Brendan hailed as a ‘gifted comic’.

But, gifted or not, the writer knew he couldn’t keep the bank manager happy with the returns from the likes of Dublin and Glasgow.

In the summer months, Brendan returned to stand-up, with the
How’s Your Wobbly Bits?
tour. He wanted to feel what it was like to be on stage on his own again, to recharge the batteries. But, most importantly, it was a far cheaper show to take on the road than Mrs Brown.

Yet, at least he had another new Agnes Brown adventure to offer the world. While trying to develop his sitcom pilot in Florida, Brendan had also, rather remarkably, come up with the fifth play in the ‘trilogy’,
How Now Mrs Brown Cow.

The backbone of the story sees Agnes expecting her priest son Trevor to come home from Boston for Christmas. Cathy’s been in touch with her brother and knows he just can’t make it, but no one wants to pass the bad news on to the mammy.

Meantime, Agnes is getting mysterious phone calls from a firm of solicitors who specialise in adoptions, and her brood are wondering which one of them is adopted.

But the third plot strand offered up the best comedy potential. Agnes is convinced she’ll land the role of the Virgin Mary in the church Nativity Show, and shows the family how she’ll perform the role. Brendan’s scene of Mrs Brown on a pretend donkey ride searching for an inn for the baby Jesus is nothing less than hilarious. As always, the sight gags are a guarantee of laughter, with Dermot working as a penguin and Grandad being bashed on the head repeatedly with a tin tray to the loud backdrop of the theme from TV classic
Rawhide.

The ending is entirely predictable – Trevor makes it home and the family sing in harmony next to the Christmas tree. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less effective. Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out.

Brendan opened the show in Glasgow in October, and filmed his pilot the following week.

‘Peter Kay came up to the filming and said he thought it was amazing, a seminal moment in television. But I wasn’t sure. What I knew was I’d done my very best. My feeling was, “If it works, fabulous. If not? It just wasn’t to be.”’

Brendan’s voice was, unusually, downbeat. He said the audience had enjoyed the show, but then Glasgow audiences adored Agnes. What would decide her fate would be BBC bosses back in London.

Would the concept, the swearing, the crudeness, the fourth-wall-breaking idea work? Would Scotland be the place from which massive fame would appear?

Meantime, the Mrs Brown circus took off again. But the tour bookings weren’t looking good at all. Brendan and Jenny had to work harder and harder to get bums on seats. Some dates’ box offices were almost as small as Buster Brady’s IQ.

Each gig demanded more publicity, but that in turn was difficult because journalists were running out of ways to describe the stage show:
The madcap Mammy and her dysfunctional family
;
a
n urban terrorist in big knickers
.