The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (17 page)

‘Doreen looked at the money on the table and with a look of horror said “Sure, I’m not taking any of that!”

‘“What? You’re kidding me!”’

She didn’t think he’d stolen it. Worse than that. She thought he was a phoney.

‘She said “I’m telling you now, they’re going to find out you’re only a waiter - and everybody’s going to want their money back. And I’m not having any part of it.”

‘And Doreen’s perspective never changed. I was always the waiter. I had to say to her “You married the waiter. He doesn’t exist any more.’”

Brendan certainly wasn’t being treated like a big star at home.

‘I remember the opening night of my one-man show at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin and Doreen couldn’t make it because she was taking her mother to the bingo.

‘I’d come in having sold out a show, as I did once on a trip to London, at the Lyric Theatre in London’s West End, and I’d get “Oh, that’s nice”.’

After
The Late, Late Show
, Brendan was the best-known comedian in Ireland. But he reckoned it was time to end his radio show. After all, he didn’t need the publicity any longer and radio paid very little. So he decided to kill off Agnes, the woman with a mouth like a drain and the laugh of a machine gun without a safety catch.

Brendan ended the second series with Agnes ill in hospital, surrounded by her children, with the last line of the show being a doctor proclaiming, ‘I’m sorry. I have to turn the machine off.’

What happened next? The fans were furious and the radio station was bombarded with complaints. ‘How can you kill off Agnes Browne?’ It was like the outrage that greeted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls.

‘I had no idea we’d get that reaction. I presumed it was a Dublin story for a Dublin audience. I had no idea that nationwide it was going bananas. It was only when travelling around the country doing the bigger gigs that I truly realised. So I agreed to do another series and I opened the new one with the doctor repeating his line about switching off the machine and then Agnes coming in with, “Excuse me, they’re my children. If they want coffee they can have as much as they like, but don’t turn off the coffee machine!”’

Mrs Browne’s Boys would gently fade out in 1994, but Brendan was now a star, voted Ireland’s Number One entertainer at the
National Comedy Awards
. (Gerry Browne was now happy to take second billing to his friend, although he was still a joint partner, on a fifty–fifty split of all earnings.)

The pair continued to appear at the Tivoli, still very much the talk of the town, and one night the talk reached the ears of Hollywood star Gabriel Byrne, of
The
Usual Suspects
and more recently TV drama
In Treatment
fame. The actor came to see the show and loved it.

‘Someone told me he was in the audience with his (actress) wife Ellen Barkin, and I was asked if he could come back and say hello. Of course, I was delighted. So we had a chat and then Gabe asked me to come back for a coffee to the Westbury Hotel, and he got talking about my performance. He happened to say to me, “You have a very unique way of telling a story. You should think about writing a screenplay.” And I said, laughing, “Oh I will, Gabe.”

‘“No, seriously, you should, Brendan.”

‘“Oh, honest to God, I will.”

‘And I kept the smile of tacit agreement on my face for a while before I eventually managed to work up the courage to say, “Gabriel, I have to ask you. What the hell is a screenplay?”

‘“A screenplay, well it’s a movie story.”

‘“What do you mean? Is it a script? Is it a narrative?”

‘And he explained it was a sort of combination between a theatre script and a narrative. To highlight what he meant, he went up to his room and brought me down a couple of screenplays that he was in the process of turning down.

‘He then asked me to have a look at them, to see how a film script was set out. And at the same time he suggested I read a couple of books by a film teacher called Syd Field,
The Scriptwriter
and
Making a First Script Great.

‘What happened in fact was Gabriel sent me these books. And Syd Field had a really great way of thinking, which inspired me.’

Hopeful writers are always told, ‘Write what you know about’, and Brendan followed the maxim. He had boxed a bit during his youth and he came up with a story called
Sparrow’s Trap
. It was the tale of a young boxer who has the world – and his opponent – at his feet, until something stops him dead in his tracks.

Brendan loved writing the script, but of course he wasn’t a film writer. It was just a bit of fun, an exercise in writing, and
Sparrow’s Trap
was consigned to a bottom drawer.

Meantime, in the summer of 1994, Brendan was asked by RTÉ to go to America to the World Cup Finals where the Irish national team were taking part. He took friends such as Gerry Browne with him, and son Danny.

‘I was to go out to Orlando to stay with the team, to do a three-minute piece to camera every second day, interviewing the players, that sort of thing. I was the light relief in the serious business of football.

‘Now, to be honest, even though I was there with Gerry, I was bored out of my skull. Can you imagine me only working for three minutes every two days?’

Not even the trauma involved in having his ponytail removed by Leeds United and Ireland footballer Gary Kelly could create enough excitement in his world. (The ponytail was subsequently auctioned for charity and sold for $15,000.)

‘To pass the time I read more of Syd Field’s book. And one of the exercises that Syd had come up with was to encourage you to write a twenty-page synopsis on your central character. Then you have a back story, and you know how your character will react to any given event.

‘Syd pointed out that drama is all about getting someone from A to B and putting obstacles in his way. But with a back story, you know how he’ll cope with each obstacle. So I thought, “What a great idea.” I went to the shopping mall across the road, got some paper and pens, and decided to do a back story for Mrs Browne. Of course, she had been popular on radio, but I reckoned we didn’t know anything about her really. So I decided to do twenty pages on Mrs Browne, just to pass the time.

‘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.