It's not exactly super-stardom, but it might be a bit of fun. While sitting in on the filming of Fair City, somebody suggests that I could sit at a table in McCoy's as an extra. There I would choose from a Guinness (real), a lager (real) or a spirit (not real) and move my lips in a non-existent conversation with a complete stranger. Two of the extras have been propping up the bar since the first episode 12 years ago, but have never a line to say between them. Drowning their sorrows like that, they must be two characters with big stories that will never be told.
Anything, though, could happen. The soap will broadcast its 1,000th episode in January. On its first night it was watched by more than one million people. This year has seen RT╔ suffer an alarming drop in ratings across the board, and Fair City is now a long way from that figure, but it is still watched by an average audience of 650,000. This year they tuned in to see Kay and Malachy wrestle with the ethics of abortion. They tuned in to see various characters wrestle with each other in bed. And on November 21st of this year, there was a storyline with enough drama, violence, sex and not a little absurdity that 840,000 tuned in for it. Billy Meehan - Grade A baddie - met death under the head of a golf club wielded by his new stepson Lorcan. When the end of the year comes, it is that episode which will rank as the most watched programme on Irish television in 2001.
The talk of being an extra doesn't last, and anyway it doesn't have quite the appeal as maybe being allowed burst into the room as Billy's long-lost - and even more evil - twin brother, come back for revenge on Lorcan and his four-iron to Billy's soul. Perhaps they'll save that for episode 2,000.
There is no such drama in the scene they're shooting now. Sound Stage B is home to all the "commercial" sets - the pubs, The Bistro, Rainbows the deli, and the shop tucked away behind that. On the McCoy's pub set, David Mitchell, Orlaith Rafter and Simon Keogh (as Jimmy, Robin and Floyd) play out a small argument over rent money before being interrupted by Robin's new boyfriend. It requires four takes. Lines get forgotten. Somebody drops a bottle off camera. The scene requires more urgency. Then they're given the OK and it's on to the next scene. There might be 20 or 25 scenes shot in all today.
Going out on air four nights a week since the spring means six-day weeks for the cast, who have to perfect the art of speed-learning, and tap at a whim into the inner onion to well up the emotions. The schedule bulges at the seams. If an actor falls sick, or the real taps run dry in the fake pub, there is nothing to fall back on. Which makes it somewhat of a relief to crew and cast that there is no hour-long Christmas episode this year. Instead, after the high drama of recent times, things are settling back into the relative normality of marital strife. If you don't want to know the plot, look away now. Yvonne - Bistro mogul and hard-nosed businesswoman - walks into the restaurant to find her husband, Mike, getting festive with the waitress. OK, you can look again.
"I have spent the last seven or eight weeks shouting, screaming, laughing and crying," explains Ciara O'Callaghan, who plays Yvonne. "My character has had no fun, so when I come in to work and have 12 or 13 shoots in a day doing that, then it does affect you. OK, we're acting, but you have to give a certain amount of yourself. It's not like pressing a button."
The alternative, of course, is turning a page of the script and finding her character having a sheet pulled over her dead body or waving farewell from the back of the long-distance cruise ship. "If that's going to happen, it's going to happen. That's part of what's exciting about it, and what's really depressing about it too."
Why Yvonne is so wound up is a bit of a mystery. In common with the experiences of all restaurant owners and greasy spoon proprietors in soaps, The Bistro is probably the busiest eaterie in Dublin. It's a place where everybody goes, for every meal. Maybe she would be happier owning one of the pubs, through whose doors the population of Carrigstown traipse like sailors visiting a foreign port. If that truly reflected ordinary life there would be only one storyline.
"We'd all be alcoholics," laughs O'Callaghan.
"We serve coffee as well," explains Kevin McHugh, script editor for 744 of the first 1,000 episodes. "Actually, I have a note here on a script saying it's too early in the day for Paul to be drinking, give him a coffee. We're also conscious of people having to drive, we won't give them alcohol."
McHugh's desk is buried under scripts. He heads a team of almost 30 writers who shape the drama from the first suggestions of a storyline six months before it is broadcast, through to the filming of it three weeks in advance. It is they who put the golf club in Lorcan's hand, and who made sure Kay walked through the doors of the abortion clinic. "The main pressure is providing stories for the amount of characters we have. Stories that are new and credible and that belong to those characters; if we get that right, the rest falls in to place." McHugh insists that plots have not been written out of their potential to cause controversy, but from their capacity to engage.
"The abortion story didn't start as an abortion story. It came in as a birth. But we didn't want to cope with a new baby in the environment, so we decided it would be an abortion story and we would confront the issues. We didn't do it to cause a sensation, but to show it as a real problem, a real moral dilemma for that character. She was a practical woman who had to come to a practical decision. And we said we would actually go to the abortion clinic and show the effects and the pain."
Once it began, though, he admits that the results - media discussion that went beyond the usual forums of the tabloids and TV Now! - was all they hoped for. "We're slightly different to other soaps in that we don't have a drama department beside us doing issue drama. We don't like to do issue drama, we like the story to come from the characters. But a moral dilemma gives great drama, obviously. And we felt this was one that hadn't been explored properly, either here or in England."
McHugh insists on one thing in particular. "What I hope is that people realise we take it seriously. We see it as true drama, I suppose the equivalent of the old 'play for the day'." It's hard to miss the unconscious nostalgia displayed on the door into the office, which says you are entering the drama department, home of Fair City and Glenroe. One is gone and the other, which began as an upstart which faced calls for its demise before the end of its first week, is now the only in-house drama produced by RT╔.
"I think there's a particular attitude in RT╔ towards Fair City," says executive producer Niall Mathews. "It's looked on as almost the driver of the schedule because it's on four nights a week. And I think more and more it's becoming the most important programme in the schedule." It is Mathews who must ultimately second-guess the tastes and boredom thresholds of the viewers, must decide what buttons to push and when, what stories go too far and which ones should go further.
"I think there are very few stories you can't tell pre-watershed - it just depends on the way you tell them. There are few stories we haven't touched on. Sometimes we feel we are behind the times in telling stories - for instance, we were behind the times on the Ashti story - but then after the recent events maybe we were way ahead on that one." The "Ashti story" was an example of one plot that didn't quite work this year. An Iraqi Kurd under threat from human traffickers, he was a character played in a manner that was so "corner shop" it hurt to watch. Mathews says Fair City had hoped to cast a real immigrant in the role, and had one particular actor in mind, but that the demands of the schedule might have proved overwhelming for someone who wasn't a professional actor and for whom English wasn't a first language.
Eventually, Ashti was sent to Mosney to be processed, leaving a Carrigstown not so reflective of the Dublin beyond the set walls. "We need to look at that mix and the issue of racism again, and we will. It doesn't reflect the multi-culturalism out there and hasn't for some time."
The success of the Billy Meehan story, he claims, surprised him. "When Billy kicked Carol when she was pregnant, something seemed to click in the national psyche about Billy. After that it was just all about him, and it sort of culminated in his death. You can't continue those types of storylines. It was a type of EastEnders story, but even they can't preserve that type of story, because otherwise you'd be killing somebody every other week. And then it would become passΘ." As much as anything, that story pushed the boundaries of violence and language to places not visited even in the British soaps, even if much of the language is euphemistic. "It's very difficult to do that story without using the f-word, but you have to, because you are at that particular time of the evening. It's funny, but you feel you can get away - rightly or wrongly - with a guy like Billy kicking the crap out of a pregnant woman, but he can't say that."
After a story like that, there must always be the morning after. "After a Billy storyline you have to go back to normal life, and there's almost a let-down in that. You enter a Billy story at your peril because you can only do it every now and again, and then you have to go back to the bread and butter stuff, which is about relationships, triangles and ordinary living. It's not about people dying or being killed or being kicked to death or whatever."
Soap, though, is about all those things and whatever else can be thrown in to the pot. Mathews says there are only two topics they still consider too taboo to cover. One is incest, but he forgets the other, so posing an interesting teaser to those who thought they'd seen it all.
"That figure of 840,000 was a blip, there's no doubt about that. There was massive hype. But bit by bit it's turned around. Now anytime people talk about it they say, God it's getting very good. And that's been the reaction for years now: it's getting very good. I think that as long as we can keep people thinking that, we're doing well."
Outside on the street set, there is an eerie feel to Carrigstown when the population is working elsewhere. The first thing that hits you is how real the houses actually look, how the way that the street is hemmed in gives it a sense of being a genuine Dublin side street. The faded boxes in the corner shop don't look just like the ones littering the shelves of dusty, musty corner shops across the city. The Carnegie Library with the plaque at the front that tells you that it closes on a Saturday at 2 p.m. The industrial unit with its list of businesses - Bella's Bazaar, Acorn Cabs - looks ready for business. The exterior of McCoy's gives the impression that the inside is reassuringly dingy.
Snub your nose up to a window or walk around the back, though.
McCoy's backs on to a portacabin. The bricks on the houses are fake, although the creeping ivy is the real thing. The library has a narrow doorway that leads nowhere. The blinds in all the houses are pulled shut so viewers can't see that inside usually lies a mess of materials and general detritus from the set. The cars parked on the street are real all right, but they're only the spill-over from the RT╔ multi-storey car-park that sits just over a wall. It is a strange place. A street in search of a story. Then again, Fair City has found plenty of those.
