THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:'GOD, I'VE HEARD all about those cults, Ted. People dressing up in black and saying, 'Our Lord's going to come back and save us all'." "No, Dougal, that's us. That's Catholicism." "Oh, right."
Arthur Mathews, co-writer of the classic
Father Ted
TV series, is walking through Merrion Square, carrying a brown paper bag of crayfish sandwiches. It is Bloomsday, and Dublin is plumping herself up under the gaze of fretful, well-dressed Americans. With maps and instructions and back-packs, they are on the trail of history and culture, comfortably shod flotsam washed up on the shoreline of Joyce’s art.
Did you read
Ulysses
, I ask Mathews. “No, but I listened to the box set – somebody said that was the way to do it,” he replies with conviction, before deflating himself by adding that “someone else said it absolutely wasn’t”.
We find a bench. Bodies are scattered over the baize-like grass, disgorged from Georgian offices, sunbathing. One alarmingly confident individual is embracing the seasonal weather in nothing more than a pair of miniature black Y-fronts. Is that a man, I ask Mathews.
“I hope so,” he replies, “or maybe I mean I hope not.” Mathews’s appealing irresolution on matters of literature and gender bodes well. This comic writer obviously doesn’t hide behind ironic detachment; maybe it’s the heat, but he’s not coming across as evasively cool.
ARTHUR MATHEWS ANDGraham Linehan, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews. Before one can talk to Mathews about Mathews singular, the conversation must inevitably veer towards the decade when the two scriptwriters were joined at the comedic hip. The glorious Father Tedmight be their best-known creation, but Linehan and Mathews were never a one-trick pony, and their many successes must read like a comedy tour guide to the wannabes in their wake. Having met in the 1980s while working on Hot Pressin Dublin (a golden age for the magazine, according to Mathews, populated by funny, sparky writers such as Paul Woodfull and Fiona Looney), the friends moved to London in 1990, their arrival fortuitously coinciding with one of British comedy's periodic golden ages. Clinging on to the city from the grimmer end of a Tube line, Linehan and Mathews began writing for some of the new crop's best and brightest, including Alexei Sayle, Chris Morris, Alan Partridge, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Harry Enfield (they were the progenitors of Ralph the bumbling aristo and his reluctantly yielding love object, Ted the gardener).
In Merrion Square, on a lunch-break from editing his new television series, Val Falvey TD, which Mathews has penned with his long-time friend and collaborator, Paul Woodfull, and which is due to air as part of RTÉ's new autumn schedule, the writer seems pleased with his picnic (jaunty fruit and a muffin). Down the road from the editing suite, tucked away in this oasis of clammy office workers and noisy birdlife, amid the unpredictable hubbub of other people's mobile telephones, Mathews offers memories of the time when he and Linehan began to write together in London.
He talks of comedian Rhys Jones with affection, as a man of great generosity who sorted out a place for them to live that was closer to town, in Kilburn, home to many a struggling Irishman before them, “in one of the many houses he had accumulated as he got richer and richer”, Mathews recalls, grinning. He describes an evening at their munificent landlord’s Clerkenwell mansion, where they found a swimming pool and, equally delightfully, Stephen Fry, one of Mathews’s heroes. “It was brilliant, hanging out with people you’d seen on TV for years,” Mathews says. Only problem was that Linehan and Mathews couldn’t afford a taxi home, so they had to stay until 5am and the first Tube.
One assumes that as the work accumulated (the titles sounding like a wish-list for a funky toddler: Big Train, Hippies, Jam), he and Linehan could soon afford a taxi whenever they chose and stayed at parties until 5am only if they felt like it.
Halcyon days, but after years of playing snakes and ladders in a wildly fickle industry, experiencing phenomenal successes, picking up a plethora of awards and raking over some inevitable disappointments, the two friends, who had lived together, written together and gone out together (“but not in a Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sort of way”), found their creative marriage dissolving.
“We didn’t say we were going to stop writing together. It just fizzled out,” Mathews says with equanimity, an obvious affection for Linehan still present. “You gain in confidence yourself, but at the beginning you need each other to boost yourselves along. We’re still very good friends.”
Mathews comes across as an equable man. Seemingly without rancour, he is gentle, bemused, and wears his ego lightly. On his own writing, he says, "I never had a plan to be a writer, I just sort of drifted into it," while on Linehan's recent high-profile successes (including his sitcom, The IT Crowd), he comments enthusiastically: "He's done fantastically well. I was talking to him last week – he's going to write a play next, for the West End." If Mathews seems almost protective of his friend's accomplishments and untroubled by the odious nature of comparison, it is a tribute as much to their great friendship as it is to Mathews's apparently sanguine nature. But in this balmy park, as the detritus of lunch begins to attract the vague interest of passing pigeons, one is tempted to look for the dark side. So, I try to draw Mathews out on what lies at the heart of his humour, what inner wound is stitched by his satire. He looks at me with the same amused incredulity he showed the sunbathing Adonis in his Y-fronts. "Oh, I couldn't comment on that at all," he says, laughing.
Undaunted, and despite feeling like an over-earnest first-year psychology student, I continue my probing by asking him about his childhood. “Happy-secure” is the description he uses, and I resist the urge to throw my coffee over him. Born in Co Meath, he, along with his parents and twin sister, moved to Termonfeckin, near Drogheda, in Co Louth, when he was about eight years old. It was “lovely in the sunshine”, he remarks, but was a town “with such an unappealing name that you could probably get 10 per cent off the house prices there”. Momentarily we get sidetracked by an Irish-names-of-towns conversation: Mathews likes to use the name Tobarball in his work, and I tell him that my London-born husband, on entering Heuston Station in Dublin by train for the first time, thought he had arrived in a town called Trolley Point.
ANYWAY, BACK TOTermonfeckin. The family moved so that his retired father, who was 56 when Mathews was born, could play golf in Baltray. He had been a farmer and they had had a comfortable life, but the agricultural acorn seems to have fallen on barren terrain, Mathews growing up with an entirely urban sensibility. He recalls sitting in a field of corn, listening to She Loves Youby The Beatles, but, beyond that, memories of his father, a keen amateur jockey, and his way of life are scant. "I wasn't really very close to him," Mathews offers, with a degree of finality.
At 12, Mathews followed in his father’s footsteps to board at Castleknock College, where he claims a fairly unremarkable career. Were you funny in school, I ask him, thinking of an observation made by a mutual friend that Mathews is like one of those really quiet, deadpan blokes hiding behind their spectacles down the back of the class, who say nothing for weeks and then, when they do open their mouths, unexpectedly crack you up.
“Was I funny?” Mathews considers. “In a school of 500, I was probably the 73rd funniest.” He is not being taciturn or difficult. In fact, the opposite is the case: he is friendly, warm, appreciative, generous with his observations. There is, however, something restrained, vaguely elusive there. I imagine that if you are part of a double-act for years, you swiftly develop a role, and that in his case, Mathews would have been the quiet, sardonic one alongside the infinitely louder Linehan.
But it was Mathews who initially created the character of Father Ted, performing Crilly-esque monologues before he took to the stage as a drummer with The Joshua Trio. It was Mathews whom Linehan tried to emulate in the early Hot Pressdays, and Mathews whom Declan Lynch recommended to his then boss with the words: "Employ him – he's the funniest man I've ever met."
I suspect the windswept barren landscape of Craggy Island, where desolate chair-o-planes rock balefully in howling gales, is a pretty good indication of Mathews's gleefully bleak interior landscape. That disturbingly bizarre empty landscape, which looks like an unwanted plot on an Irish moon, is also the setting for Mathews's forthcoming film, Wide Open Spaces, a comedy produced by Grand Pictures and directed by Tom Hall, whose previous credits include the superb Bachelors Walk. The film, starring Ardal O' Hanlon, Ewen Bremner and Owen Roe, will be released in Ireland in mid-July and is described as "an absurdist comedy about breaking up with your best friend" (a response, maybe, to the dissolution of his and Linehan's bromance?). It is, Mathews says, the story of two drifters (O'Hanlon and Bremner) who end up working for the unscrupulous Roe, a leather-jacketed entrepreneur (to put it nicely) who plans to open a Famine theme park.
“If you don’t make decisions about your life, you end up in all these places you don’t want to be,” says Mathews. “This is the story of what happens when loads of people owe loads of money and are at the peak oil of dishonesty and chaos – and it’s also delightfully short at 85 minutes.”
If Mathews has written a metaphor, not just for his own career but for our frenzied, leaky times, the word around town is that it is an extremely funny one, the work of a man in form. Later I watch a YouTube clip in which Owen Roe’s character, Gerald Ring, enlightens his audience as to why he chose to paint a replica Famine ship pink and turn the hull into a salad bar: “It was after I got my house feng-shui-ed . . . You don’t want it all doom and gloom, do you?” It’s funny; bleak and funny.
Although much of the work that Mathews and Linehan produced had a universal rather than a particularly Irish feel, one senses that Mathews's comedic sensibilities are more firmly rooted in this strange domestic garden of ours. His 2001 novel, Well-Remembered Days– the bogus memoir of Eoin O'Ceallaigh, staunch Catholic, fierce nationalist and dogged anti-sex campaigner – pretty much stakes out his territory as a viciously inventive and astute social satirist. This creative viewpoint is now to be further embellished in the six-part series, Val Falvey, which originated from a suggestion by Jennifer Griffin, development executive for RTÉ entertainment, that he write a political saga about a rural TD and which Mathews describes as "the first overtly satirical piece I've written".
Mathews is 50 this year. He says it’s hard to imagine writing political satire in your twenties and thirties, and maybe he’s right. Maybe it does take mature reflection to appreciate and absorb the absurdity that we often witness in Irish politics.
“Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach, not having a bank account was classic. This is a fertile time to create political satire in Ireland,” Mathews reflects. “There is something funnier in Irish politics than in British politics. There’s a different class of people involved.”
With Val Falvey TDcoming fast on the heels of his film's release, I ask Mathews if it is more than coincidence that, after a few years of flying below the radar (apart from co-writing the hit musical I, Keano), he is now suddenly attacking on two fronts.
“There’s no reason that things have happened simultaneously,” he says. “The projects, both started around 2004 and 2005, have simply come to fruition, and although they are linked, they are different, they don’t look the same.”
He also makes the point that just because the work may not be visible for periods of time, it doesn’t mean he’s not writing. Projects take years to develop and, for Mathews, whether in London or in the Dublin home he shares with his partner, literary agent Faith O’Grady, once he has his laptop with him, he is at work. That his latest projects are linked, not only by production company Grand Pictures but also (perhaps unsurprisingly, given their calibre) by O’Hanlon and Roe, who are reunited as the reluctant politician (O’Hanlon) and his handler and spin doctor (Roe), must be a pleasure for Mathews. He’s working with his old mate Woodfull and with two superb actors at the top of their game.
Like many writers, Mathews describes a tendency to be solitary, and although he is happy to develop ideas alone, this recent period on set and in the editing suite, which he describes as “more like a normal job”, is stimulating, enjoyable even. As he says, squinting at the insistent sun: “It’s probably good to get out.” One can sense an excitement burning around the edges of his restraint when Mathews talks about the work. Because of a Sunday-night slot before the watershed, which meant certain episodes had to bite the television dust, we will not see the story in which Val Falvey gets the plum job of organising prostitutes for the Ard Fheis.
Mathews confides this without too much resentment, and it seems clear that although the show has been pruned of bad language (which is generally a lot less offensive than bad scripts), the national broadcaster is trying to support the effort to make a “pretty hard-hitting satire”. “Really,” Mathews insists, obviously sensing some scepticism.
I ASK HIMwhether Ardal O'Hanlon, son of Dr Rory O'Hanlon, Fianna Fáil TD and medical doctor, was a useful source of political gossip, and he tells a lovely story. O'Hanlon senior had two separate queues in his surgery, one for ailments, the other for politics, and one man, after getting to the top of the ailments line, said to O'Hanlon: "To be honest, doctor, there's nothing wrong with me, but could you get me a job on the radio?"
Mathews and I stand to look for a bin. It is time for him to go back to the editing desk, but before he goes, he picks up one strand of conversation that time has not allowed us to follow: music, his other great passion apart from comedy. He bemoans the lousy conservatism that has consigned RTÉ radio's JK Ensembleto an afternoon slot (Mathews recently recorded a couple of programmes for the slot, which he describes as "a great thrill"). With a rush of enthusiasm for aural gratification, he implores me to listen to the inspirational God's Jukeboxon BBC Radio 2, and with deadpan certainty he tells me that he hated the 1980s not because of the endless courses foisted on him by unemployment, not because of poverty or boredom, but because it was a terrible decade for music.
He has a new idea for a musical tickling his voluminous brain, the shorthand version of which is that a good old rock’n’roll club gets turned into a 1980s revival club. If this idea has legs, we can anticipate a rather violent production.
Regardless of whether this idea makes the cut, however, one senses there is a flood of others where that came from, and that Mathews will continue to make his entirely independent presence felt.
Arthur Mathews:
Born
Co Meath, 1959
Career highlights
With former writing partner Graham Linehan, Mathews wrote or contributed to numerous television comedies, most notably Father Ted, Big Trainand Brass Eye.
Co-writer of I, Keano, a spoof comedy musical about Roy Keane
His novel Well Rembered Days– Memoirs of a 20th Century Irish Catholic was published in 2001
Forthcoming
His new film Wide Open Spacesopens in Ireland on July 17th
His new televison series Val Falvey TD, a political satire, will begin on RTÉ in the autumn