Sky on a meet-and-greet drive to secure new Irish talent

Commissioning teams from Sky's four entertainment channels plan to visit Ireland regularly from January as the broadcaster steps up its hunt for new programmes to complement the Emmy award-winning Moone Boy.

"Key decision makers" from Sky's entertainment channels – Sky 1 HD, Sky Living HD, Sky Atlantic and Sky Arts – will hold fortnightly "open surgery" meet-and-greets with producers, directors and writers here, says its director of entertainment channels Stuart Murphy. "It's not going to be like a royal visit. It's about properly engaging with the creative community," he says. Sky has a 2014 content budget of €700 million for the UK and Ireland, but it does not give separate figures.

"We're going to make sure we invest and commission a lot more in Ireland," Murphy says, citing a need to "properly reflect the audience that pays for us". The former controller of BBC Three – where he commissioned Pulling from Sharon Horgan – says the success Sky has enjoyed with Moone Boy, written by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy and co-produced by Grand Pictures, was not "a random aberration", or an "out of context" hit.

“It’s absolutely bang on the Sky brand in that it’s really warm, but it’s not corny,” he says. “I hate corny stuff, when it feels a bit sugary, a bit 1980s.

All the families I know, certainly my family, we show our love by taking the mickey out of one another and by being dismissive,” he says.

Episode three of the first series of Moone Boy achieved the highest ratings on Sky 1 in Ireland since the Irish episode of The Simpsons in 2009. Some 162,000 people tuned in to see Martin Moone, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, dismantle his garden wall to create a short cut to school.

The third series, which “contains quite a lot of surprises”, is in the process of being edited, while the second series has been completed and will open with a double episode on February 17th.

Meanwhile, Irish presenter Baz Ashmawy and his mother Nancy will star next year in Sky 1's entertainment series 50 Ways to Test your Mammy, which Murphy says continues the tradition of "loveable fools" on Sky that began with Homer Simpson, continued with Louis Spence of Pineapple Dance Studios and most recently manifested in Karl Pilkington on An Idiot Abroad.

“We were very, very pleased with that show. So we said who are the next loveable fools? And for me, Baz is the ultimate iteration of the loveable fool. He’s really funny, he’s so charismatic, he’s lovely, and he sends himself up.”

Sky’s future Irish commissions will be made for the broader UK and Ireland audience. Their nation-of-origin should not be their only or main defining characteristic, says Murphy. “I don’t want to hire Irish actors just to talk about being Irish, because that’s not how life is.”