The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (14 page)

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 arrangement 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.

‘I’ve always tried to love my neighbour, which is the one Christian law that counts. I don’t go to Mass at all but every time I hug my child, that’s a prayer. As for, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”? Great idea, but which God are we talking about? Jesus? Or, Jaysus? Most people who use the word “Jaysus” use it as a term of hope or a term of despair. If anybody who is in despair calls on Jesus, I think that’s good, regardless of the situation. And Jesus can do with all the advertising he can get. I’m happy to include Him in my act.’

Brendan reckons Jesus, a man with a great sense of humour, would be a fan of Mrs Brown’s. ‘He’d piss Himself laughing. I betcha if I’d been around, He’d have booked me for the Last Supper.’

Brendan certainly had his followers in Ireland in 1991.

The mix of music and comedy was so successful that Gerry Browne sold his milk round and he and Brendan became full-time entertainers.

Colin and Willie, both musical purists, left to be replaced by Gerry Simpson and Eric Sharp and seventeen-year-old Glen Power (now with The Script) on drums, but the success continued, with the act doing eight gigs a week.

Audiences loved the format; the band would do forty minutes and Gerry performed some parody songs. Brendan would perform a further forty minutes of comedy, and then they’d all perform the final third of up-tempo songs.

The band of brothers were having an incredible time on the road. And by this point Benny (as Gerry nicknamed his pal) and Gerry had made a pact: other band members could come and go, but they were the axis on which everything turned.

‘I then suggested building my own stage, with backdrop and lighting. I reckoned with this set-up we could do a gig anywhere. And to do all this would cost thirty thousand pounds.’

But therein lay a problem. Brendan couldn’t raise thirty thousand smiles, even if he stood naked outside the President’s Palace with a shamrock clenched in his teeth. His name was still mud at the bank. However, he managed to find a finance company that was prepared to back him, so long as he managed to get receipts for everything. But he needed a guarantor. Gerry Browne stepped up to the plate.

‘“And I said to him, ‘If you do that, Gerry, you’ll be my partner.”’

The one-time adversaries were now blood brothers. They wrote together, coming up with an album of parody songs,
Yer A Sick Man, Da
, which attracted major radio airplay. And now two other key personnel were added to the team.

‘When I started doing the Rathmines Inn, I used to carry the speakers down, unlock the van and put the speakers in, lock the van, go up and get the microphones, come back down, repeat the process, ten times or so every week. Until this night, this fella was standing there and offered to help me throw the stuff in the van.

‘This process repeated every week. Now, after a few times I said to him, “Look, I don’t have enough money to pay you,” and in fact, at first he was lending
me
the price of a pint.

‘Then, when we got the first bigger-paying gigs, I asked him to come along as a lumper.’

Former window-cleaner Dermot O’Neill, aka Bugsy, and so nicknamed because of his resemblance to the wise-cracking cartoon rabbit, had been a fan of Tinker’s Fancy and now became Brendan’s first lieutenant. (Bugsy’s brother Tommy was married to Gerry’s aunt and played football with Gerry.) Since that time, Brendan and Bugsy have been inseparable, with Bugsy going on to play Grandad in the
Mrs Brown
stage and television adventures and being the butt of many of Agnes Brown’s gags. ‘We give Grandad Viagra,’ says Agnes to Winnie. ‘It stops him pissing on his socks.’