It's enough to bring a tear to your eye. From Monday on Network 2, a new series, The Green Green Grass of Home, will bring Irish comedians back to their roots, to the places where they were born and bred. The six-part series kicks off next Monday with Dubliner Ed Byrne, who returns to his home town of Swords before heading to New York for a spot on the Conan O'Brien talk show. Further programmes in the series follow Tommy Tiernan back to Navan, Owen O'Neill to Cookstown, D'Unbelievables to Thurles and Hospital, Kevin and Anne Gildea to Moylough and Jason Byrne to Ballinteer.
It's the sort of blindingly obvious idea which you'd think someone would have thought of before now - but it's excellently handled by Galway independent company Power Pictures, who made the excellent A Year 'Til Sunday, about the Galway football team's 1998 All Ireland triumph. "Eoghan O'Neill's one is particularly great," says series producer David Power. "He hasn't been back to Cookstown for 25 years, so it was actually quite a nerve-wracking experience for him. He went to London at the age of 17, planning to stay and work for a few months, and he never came back."
Power points out that the central conceit of the series makes perfect sense. "Because, even if they're playing clubs in London or wherever, a lot of their material comes from their home towns." The point is proved in Monday's opening programme, with Ed Byrne's musings on his mother's ugliness and his father's predilection for fart jokes intercut with the proud parents themselves, at home in Dublin.
But The Green Green Grass of Home doesn't stick to a rigid template; the programmes are quite different from each other, reflecting the personas of their respective subjects. So, while Byrne's programme is zippy, fast-moving and wisecracking, brother and sister Kevin and Anne Gildea's memories of growing up in the Co Galway village of Moylough are more wistful, surreal and contemplative, with absurdist animation inserts from their sister, Una.
"Although there is that common thematic thread of bringing them all back home, they're all very different in style, and to an extent in content," says Power. "Some are quite bizarre, blurring the lines between fiction and fact. Others are more straightforward. Anybody we approached, we told them we were interested in anything they might have to contribute, so we had a sort of blank page to start with on each programme. The styles of performance are very individual, but what they have in common is that they're all highly polished."
The scene in the US is depicted in the first programme, when Byrne goes to New York, because his agent thinks it would be a good move. Over there, comedians might play four or five venues in one night, mostly to small audiences and not making much money; and it's all about getting noticed for TV. Whereas in the UK, especially, there's a big club culture which is self-sustaining.
London looms large in The Green Green Grass of Home, several of whose subjects live there - comics, it seems, are the navvies of the modern entertainment business. There's something bizarre, in these days of hyperboom and labour shortages, about the fact that the only people who have to emigrate to make a living now are comedians (The Green Grass of Home doesn't include the usually-obligatory slagging of RTE - but, to be fair, that's not its brief). Power points out that three of the six programmes are devoted to performers who live in Ireland. "I think it's an indicator of the strength of it now that they don't actually have to go to London - Tommy Tiernan lives in Galway; D'Unbelievables are still here. D'Unbelievables are an amazing phenomenon. We spent about five months with them while they were putting together their current show, D'at's Life, and that particular programme really gives an impression of how they pick up ideas from all around them, and then work them up into the material for their shows."
"We actually found that what worked best for the programmes was to go relatively easy on the comedy footage," says Power. "This show isn't six half-hours of comedy - it's more about mixing the comedy content with a documentary feel, giving a sense of who they are and where they've come from."
The Green Green Grass of Home starts on Network 2, on Monday at 9.30 p.m.
