The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll

by Beacom, Brian

  The Real Mrs Brown

  Brian Beacom

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Brian Beacom 2013

  The right of Brian Beacom to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 75452 0

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  This book is dedicated to all the mammies out there who make sure their kids are okay. Especially my own, Florence, who although she still can’t operate a DVD player manages to perform miracles every single day.

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Automatic Womb

  The Growth

  Jail Time

  The Frog Chorus

  The Leprechaun

  Teenage Kicks

  Cleaning Up

  He’s a Lucky God

  The Mammy’s Final Bow

  Between Beirut and Baghdad

  Pub Bombs

  Standing Up

  Outrageous Comedy

  Radio Days

  The Mammy Book

  The Course

  The Secret Millionaire

  Going West

  Deal Or No Deal

  Hot Milk And Pepper

  Mammy Mia!

  Who’s Agnes?

  Rosie

  Could the Sparrow Fly?

  Mammy Films

  The Last Wedding

  Agnes Belongs to Glasgow

  The Special One in Bethlehem

  Moving On

  Bigger Brown

  The Dying Cow

  Agnes Brown’s World

  Plate Section 1

  Plate Section 2

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Preface

  I NEVER wanted a date with Agnes Brown, the Dublin granny with the arthritic knee, baggy cardigan, mouth like a blocked sewer and more than a hint of facial hair.

  Neither did I relish the idea of meeting up with the creator of the mighty matriarch, Brendan O’Carroll.

  Yes, the Mrs Brown theatre shows were now established in a clutch of theatres in the UK, including my home town of Glasgow. But, despite it being part of the job to interview the stars of touring shows, the arrival of Mrs Brown and co. didn’t set my keyboard fingers twitching.

  Why? I’d had enough of drag acts. I felt dressing up as a woman was a device best left back in the 1960s. I’d seen the best of the men who’d provided huge laughs as a woman, from Stanley Baxter to Alastair Sim, from Les Dawson to Dick Emery. They’d all done great jobs in dragging up, mimicking female traits, but without being feminine.

  Now, here was a little Irishman doing the same thing. What did he have to offer that was new?

  There was another factor. The Mrs Brown shows were playing at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre, about which I’d come to feel slightly snooty. Not in a full-on Hyacinth Bouquet way, but I’d seen too many ‘earthy’, home-grown comedy plays containing clunking stink-bombers of lines. I’d feared Agnes Brown was a close relative of this level of nonsense.

  Yet, how could I ignore this Irish intruder? The Mrs Brown shows weren’t simply successful; they were a phenomenon in this corner of the city, playing to sell-out crowds for two-week stints. And the success was down to word of mouth. The show wasn’t hugely advertised and the star had done very few interviews.

  So I researched Brendan O’Carroll. Friends in Ireland said he was essentially a (very) risqué stand-up comedian who wrote funny plays. He certainly divided opinion. Newspaper critics reckoned he was either a genius, reworking the old comic styles into something cutting edge and contemporary, or he was a crude little bollix (to use local terminology), rehashing ancient gags and reliant upon double entendres and innuendo.

  I learned he liked to work mostly with family and friends, and could throw out one-liners faster than a north Dublin barmaid could eject late-night drunks. But ‘funny’ is subjective, isn’t it? What makes one audience in Dublin or Glasgow laugh doesn’t work for everyone.

  Regardless, I agreed to interview Brendan on the phone, just before the show was due to arrive in Glasgow. And there was real friendliness in his voice. And a half-hour chat ran to a couple of hours. And he told me little stories about his childhood, about growing up in a large Dublin family, and about his life before breaking into showbiz.

  I think we had only reached the teenage years by the time the chat came to an end. And that was only because he had to head off to get ready for his show that night.

  But as well as sounding likeable and clever, and very warm, what came across was that here was a man with a fascinating story to tell. And I asked him, ‘Why haven’t you written your autobiography?’

  ‘I guess I have had a bit of a life, Brian. You don’t see it yourself, though. It’s only when it’s pointed out to you that you realise it is something out of the ordinary. You think everyone’s been through the sort of adventures I’ve had. But that apart, I’m too busy with the plays.’

  ‘Hasn’t any Irish journalist ever suggested writing your story?’

  ‘No. I guess they always figured I’d write it meself.’

  ‘Here’s a thought, Brendan. Would you be interested in me writing it?’

  ‘Well, I would. But look, let’s talk about it. Let’s meet up next week when I’m in Glasgow.’

  Before that, I went to see his show. The result? I’ve never laughed so hard and so often in one single sitting. I vowed to spread the word that this man was indeed a comedy messiah.

  This certainly made the prospect of meeting the writer/performer so much more interesting. And the following Saturday we did meet up, in a theme bar.

  My first reaction? I smiled. Brendan looked as though he’d tied a blindfold round his head, covered his body in glue and run through someone else’s wardrobe. Someone with little taste – or a huge sense of humour.

  He was wearing a red T-shirt under a yellow jumper, pale blue trousers, green socks and white trainers. He looked like Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy. (It was a relief to discover later that he is in fact colour blind.)

  Then Brendan O’Carroll revealed himself to be an Olympian-level hugger. Now, Scottish people, traditionally brought up on a diet of repression and porridge, don’t hug anything other than babies and heavy winter blankets, and this display of huge affection came as a great surprise.

  I later learned the southern Irish are incredibly European in this way, but this little Irishman particularly so. Yet, his accompanying ‘Howareye, Brian!’ and huge welcoming smile made the hug seem natural even for me.

  ‘It’s grand to meet ya. You sound like an interesting fella, so let’s talk about a book.’

  We didn’t start by talking about the book, as it happened. We chatted. About anything and ev
erything. And it was hard not to like the man. He talked a little about life on the road with a touring company, and even when he was complaining, he was hilarious. Even when he spoke about the huge difficulties in taking 20-plus people around the country, his description was funny. He spoke about working with difficult theatre managers, and the way he shaped his criticism was pure Agnes Brown.

  And underpinning everything he said was a warmth in his voice. When he explained his troupe was made up of family and friends, you could see his eyes light up. He spoke of his home in Florida and how much he loved Disneyland and you could see the child in him. This was a man who really didn’t want to grow up. Brendan’s world seemed a very happy one indeed.

  But my new pal didn’t simply sit and sip cappuccino and talk about himself.

  He enquired about me. He wanted to know about my politics, about what I’d studied at university (Politics); he asked about my family. He asked my thoughts on everything from New Labour to Scottish Presbyterianism to Nationalism. He asked what I knew of Irish history, about the Irish connection in my family, and smiled when he discovered my grandfather was a freedom fighter who’d fled to Scotland in the 1930s.

  Brendan’s curiosity didn’t stop there. He asked about my partner, he asked about my job as a showbiz journalist, he asked about my literary heroes, and we spoke at length about playwright Neil Simon and Oscar Wilde and comedy. He asked about favourite TV shows, and we both revealed a love for Bilko and Lucille Ball. He asked about spirituality, about how all our lives connect, and he asked a great deal about my mother; he wanted to know about the woman who’d brought up three kids on her own, and I guess he was making comparisons with his own mother.

  He wanted to know about the experiences that had formed and informed me. We talked about schooldays, about awful teachers, about hopes and dreams for the future. But none of it came in the form of a grilling. It was gentle. It was born out of curiosity. You sense he cared. And he listened intently. I realised quickly that Brendan O’Carroll has the ability to make you feel you’re the most important person in the world. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever met an individual with such a power.

  At the same time, he wasn’t about to bare his soul to a new acquaintance. Yet, he seemed really happy we’d met up.

  ‘I feel we’ll be friends,’ he said over the last cappuccino several hours later. ‘But if you’re going to write this book, you’ll have to come to Dublin. Come to Finglas, where I grew up. Come on the road with me. Meet the family, come to the house in Florida and see how we live. We’ve got a great crowd with us.’

  And he laughed. ‘You’ll have a great time, and it will all be worth it because one day, Brian, I’ll be a huge feckin’ star.’

  And he was right.

  But then he added something at the end of the conversation that made me think either he had some incredible foresight, a sixth sense, or that perhaps this genial Irishman was a couple of Guinnesses short of a party box.

  ‘I get a really good feeling about you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know us coming together will produce something special.’

  I left the bar slightly baffled. But delighted. Not only was I going to write a book on a complex, fascinating character, I’d met someone I felt would be a major new presence in my life.

  Prologue

  THE CURTAIN had just come down on Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding at Hull’s New Theatre that wet and windy Saturday night on 25 November 2009, when Brendan called together the cast for a meeting.

  Those who’d watched the show, a reprise of the very first Mrs Brown stage adventure featuring Agnes and her dysfunctional family, had laughed till they cried and applauded till their hands ached.

  But only 150 people had turned out that night, in a theatre that held 1,159. And this wasn’t the first box-office disaster of the tour. Every theatre reported a major drop in ticket sales.

  Brendan O’Carroll, aka Agnes Brown, knew the writing wasn’t only on the wall; it was on the invoices and final demands from sound crews, advertising agencies, car companies, and hotels – and all in red ink.

  So he’d come to a decision. As the doors of the theatre were clattering shut and the slowest members of the audience shuffling home, Brendan asked the whole troupe to sit down on the stage. Tearfully he told them that it was all over, the end of Mrs Brown on tour – he simply couldn’t afford to keep the show on the road.

  Struggling to hold his voice steady, he informed the cast, including his wife, his son, his daughter, his sister, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law and friends he’d known for 20 years, that tonight was the last hurrah. The cast were stunned, if not entirely surprised. They offered each other consolatory hugs and sniffled against Mrs Brown’s beige cardie.

  And at the end of the night, each shuffled off into the darkness, facing a future with little hope. The Mrs Brown dream, their lives together, the fun of touring, the very comfortable living they’d made, was over. How would bills be paid? These weren’t career actors; most had only ever worked on stage alongside Agnes Brown. The air hung heavy with the dark, unspoken reality. The fat lady was finally singing.

  Or was she?

  Brendan’s lucky leprechaun was waiting in the wings. Ready to find a way to silence her.

  Automatic Womb

  FROM that day we first met, ten years ago, Brendan and I established a pattern in our relationship. When Brendan arrived in Glasgow we’d meet up in his favourite café and talk right through the afternoon hours.

  The chats would seldom pass uninterrupted, however. Aside from the waiters and waitresses coming over to say hello (he knew not only their first names, but little details of their lives), the members of the Mrs Brown circus would pop in: wife Jenny, son Danny or friend Bugsy. They’d all say hi and offer a quick hug. I was drawn into this close world. (I could see Brendan didn’t need to seek out the new. Everything and everybody he needed travelled with him.)

  We were close, and it was all very relaxed when we got down to the matter of his life story.

  ‘I suppose I’d better start with my grandmother’s story,’ he says, taking a sip of cappuccino, as if to fuel the tale that was about to unfold.

  ‘Flashback to 17 September 1911, in Dublin City, Ireland. And seventeen-year-old Lizzie was set to marry Michael McHugh. The pair were madly in love and ready to head to America together to start a new life – but without telling Lizzie’s parents.

  ‘Why did they need to elope? Well, Ireland was a desperate place at the time; life was tough and young people were emigrating across the globe. But for them there was more than that. Lizzie’s father, you see, was deeply against them marrying. Michael was a Republican associated with Michael Collins’ “Brotherhood”, which Lizzie’s father detested, and Michael, in his mid-thirties, was almost the same age as Lizzie’s father himself.

  ‘So, when Lizzie’s father heard of the romance, he pummelled Michael with the poker, breaking his forearm and collarbone. Michael and Lizzie knew there and then that they had to escape Ireland. That’s why they had saved for a year to buy the tickets for the long sea voyage.

  ‘But Lizzie’s mother found out about the plan and convinced her husband he had to accept Michael, or he’d lose his daughter for ever.

  ‘And he did. Michael and Lizzie’s father shook hands and everyone hugged and, the next day, Michael McHugh put an advertisement in the Classified Section of the newspaper offering his boat tickets for sale.

  ‘He sold the tickets for the journey to America to a young policeman and his newly married wife. There were four tickets. Two of them would take the couple by train down to Queenstown in Cork, and the other two were for their sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to America.

  ‘And the ship they would sail on? The SS Titanic. The policeman survived, but not his new wife.

  ‘Meanwhile, Lizzie and Michael became Mr and Mrs McHugh and, ten months later, a child was born, just skipping scandal by a week. A baby girl. She was christened Maureen. And she was m
y mammy.’

  And she was the woman who provided most of the inspiration for Brendan’s sitcom heroine, Agnes Brown.

  ‘Agnes Brown is Che Guevara in a dress,’ he says, grinning.

  Guevara was of course a bearded, cigar-puffing, sweat-stained Argentinian who died in a Bolivian ambush. But he fought unfairness in his world, to protect the unprotected. And so too did Maureen O’Carroll.

  ‘People used to ask me if Agnes Brown was based on my mother, and I’d say no. But in recent times, I’ve come to realise just how close they are.’

  Indeed. Indeed. Both are battlers. Both could find a colourful adjective when roused, although Maureen was smarter, and way more ambitious than the havoc-creating, uneducated fruit-market worker. Maureen O’Carroll could definitely deliver a cutting one-liner, just as Agnes Brown does. Maureen could also take a simple tea towel and turn it into a weapon, as Agnes frequently does. Both Maureen and Agnes would lay down their lives for their kids, but loved to make fun of them.

  Brendan’s mammy also had that ability to get what she wanted out of people, just as Agnes can, using the cleverest of psychology, becoming a little bit pathetic when required. And if that didn’t work, like Agnes, she would tell the world exactly where it was going wrong.

  Maureen’s healthy disrespect for authority – life is to be challenged; rules are there to be broken – is evident in Agnes. As Agnes does, Maureen lived in crowded houses, and managed to create her own safe little world.

  There are more similarities. Maureen wasn’t entirely comfortable with modern devices either. She had little time for small-minded people.

  And Agnes Brown now, and Maureen O’Carroll then, would be ready and willing to smack the face of injustice with the back of their hands.

  Maureen McHugh, as she was before marriage, certainly didn’t have to search far to find inequity in early 20th-century Ireland.

  Born on 29 March 1913, her father Michael was an academic, a schoolteacher from Galway who was also a freedom fighter; not in the sense of taking to the streets of Dublin with a gun to fight the Black and Tans during the 1916 uprising, but working behind the scenes. And he was arrested and spent time in a British prison.