Picture a handful of Ireland's most famous comic talents, and it's likely the name Andy Quirke doesn't immediately come to mind. Yet to the Instagram generation, Quirke – the writer and star of RTÉ Two's Damo & Ivor – is a superstar, to the extent that he had to hire a bodyguard when the first series aired last year.
"I went out drinking one night and got out of a taxi outside Copper Face Jacks," he recalls. "I had people lifting me practically out of the taxi and up in the air. Getting [a bodyguard] sounds a bit crazy, but I was getting so frustrated. I know that people are trying to be nice and just come over for a picture or a chat, but I think people forget that I'd been in Damo & Ivor mode all week and all I want is a quiet drink with my mates.
“I’m sure people will go, ‘Here mate, cop on, look at the job you’re in’,” he adds. “Everyone’s so nice . . . but I’m the type who would rather stay at home and watch animal programmes.”
Not that fame-slash-infamy hasn’t been there for the taking for Quirke: he grew up as the son to Dr Quirkey’s owner and millionaire Richard Quirke, and he’s been on the periphery of Dublin’s social scene for years. Not only has he reportedly dated models Pippa O’Connor and Louise Kavanagh, his sister-in-law – his brother Wes’s wife, Rosanna Davison – is one of the most recognisable faces in the country. The reluctant celebrity is by now a careworn conceit in comedy circles.
‘Loving the limelight’
“Fair enough, when I was 16 and messing about in school, I was always loving the limelight, but now I’d prefer it wasn’t there,” he says. “I love writing the jokes, but I don’t do it to get people to tell me that I’m good at it.”
With Damo & Ivor pulling in an audience of more than 215,000 an episode in its first season, it became one of RTÉ Two's most popular offerings. It follows the fortunes and mishaps of two identical twin brothers separated at birth – northside "skanger" Damo and southside "posho" Ivor.
After leaving school – Presentation College in his native Bray – at 16, due in part to his dyslexia, Quirke set about recording comedy sketches on his mother’s camera and scribbling cartoons on paper. He came up with the character of Damo; Ivor followed a few years later. Quirke went to the Gaiety School of Acting at the behest of his mother.
“They were like, ‘Is this an apple I see before me?’, so I was like, ‘Is this the door I see before me?’” he recalls. “I only lasted an hour.”
Quirke drafted in his cousin Jules Coll to type up his scribblings; in time, she became his closest collaborator. They started to film sketches and shorts – although Quirke is adamant the enterprise wasn’t bankrolled by his parents.
‘Scrounging’
“It was just a pain, scrounging the whole time,” he recalls. “Our music videos cost less than €2,000 to make, and we saved up to make them, rounding up mates to get involved.”
With their work starting out as a segment on Republic Of Telly (Quirke played both Damo and Ivor), RTÉ bosses then gave Quirke and Coll free rein to create a whole series. Validation came in glorious form when the late Rik Mayall signed up to play Ivor's father, Alistair. Three weeks before shooting on Damo & Ivor's second series was due to start in July, Mayall died suddenly at his home.
"He's the only person I'd ever met where I thought, That's who I want to be when I'm older," says Quirke. "We had to shred the scripts when he died, but we didn't want to replace him, out of respect. So we made up a new character, Alistair's dad [played by Snatch star Alan Ford]. "
With Damo & Ivor, it would have been all too easy to rely on the broad strokes of caricature, making the characters' accents and class the punchline. Yet Quirke and Coll built up a narrative arc for their characters, creating a whole world for both. Still, the comparisons to Paul Howard's creation Ross O'Carroll-Kelly – another project that takes a perfectly aimed pot-shot at class factions – have proved inescapable.
“That’s totally fair enough,” says Quirke. “People will think, both Ross and Ivor are from the southside, but then Ivor’s not at all into rugby. It’s a different type of person. But I don’t read books, so it didn’t really influence the way I was thinking of the character.”
Despite his privileged start in life, Quirke feels more of an affinity with Damo. “I think I’m in the middle somewhere, but I like to think I’m more in the Damo direction – mainly so I’m not a w**ker.”
Damo & Ivor starts on Monday on RTÉ Two at 10pm
