You have to say it. You can think of nothing else. As it was for Basil Fawlty, who couldn't not mention the war in another legendary, short-running comedy series, the phrase trembles on the tongue . . . "Ah, have another coffee, go on, go on, go on . . ." But you resist. Pauline McLynn would surely punch your lights out for sheer moronic predictability. And if she didn't, your children certainly would, for making such a terminally sad sack of yourself in the presence of a towering hero of this or any other millennium.
A fiercely apologetic man shuffles up. Armed with a shred of paper and a dry biro, his mission is to extract an autograph for his daughter. McLynn grins, finds a working pen and obliges with the lengthiest autograph in the business: "To Stephanie. You'll have a cup of tea, ah go on, go on, go on . . ." There. See, children? Nothing tortured about this thespian. Relax. Even without the sideburns, the flowing moustache, the great hairy mole, the blinding hatpins, the lethally wobbly pot of scalding tea, she is a threat to no one. Oh - not counting the child she threatens to cook into a spicy Child Surprise every night this Christmas. So this poor "child" - Judith Ryan - is in fear of her life a lot of the time? "Yes, yes, indeed she is," McLynn says, nodding gravely. "She certainly is. Oh - and in the play as well . . ."
The real surprise is not so much that a conversation with McLynn is peppered with unforced hilarity but how much she sounds like Mrs Doyle when she chortles or lowers her voice in mock gravity. Or even when she doesn't. In London - where she stays with her brother, sister-in-law "and their three kids and two cats and where the local vet's is a very chi-chi place where they take American Express and use keyhole surgery, excuse me, on the cats who're getting spayed, you wouldn't pay for it yourself" - it's the voice they recognise. The lads in Stockwell post office never have to look up : "Oi, it's Mrs Doyle, innit?" Stephanie's Dad on the other hand, recognised her on sight - a double-edged sword when you think about it. "Gawwd . . . I must look really old," she says, a bit horrified. After all, the rat-like Mrs Doyle will hardly see 60 again and looks every minute of it. Visitors to Galway are stunned to find that McLynn's father can still form a coherent sentence and is not, in fact, 105. His daughter is only 36, for God's sake, a no-frills, pretty, clear-skinned 36 at that, who wears glasses a lot of the time and had a heck of a time even getting an audition for the part of Mrs Doyle because they said she was too young for it. Maybe Stephanie's Dad is psychic.
In any event, after pitching women into premature labour with her propensity for falling out windows, having a ferret named after her and winning the Best Comedy Actress award in 1996, Mrs Doyle finally hung up her woolly hat this year. Even before the sudden death of Dermot Morgan - who with his usual exquisite timing, finished the third series just before he went - there was no talk of another. "As far as we know, we were all going to have moved on from it anyway. But you can imagine if we'd all still been alive, and the lads had had some good ideas, and we'd all been available, we might have gone back . . . yeah, like a Beatles reunion, I suppose. But now John Lennon has gone and ruined it all."
There is nothing phoney or maudlin about McLynn. At the mention of Morgan's sudden, tragic death, she fails to pull the stricken gaze on cue. Instead she recalls in even tones how the cast had had numerous bottles of champagne thrust upon them at the wrap party. "So we had all had this lovely day after, having a top-of-the-range I'll-just-drink-champagne-day in our different places around London. Then Sunday morning, really, really early, a call came from his assistant, John Fisher . . . It was incredible. So I had a half bottle of champagne - you know the fizz never goes out of champagne? It didn't from mine anyway, though it had been open since the night before - and my sister-in-law ran a bath for me and put lavender oil in it and put me into it with me bottle and I had a big old cry."
The tone is still determinedly upbeat as she remembers the heroic pub crawls at Christmas, in league with Morgan's cousin, Donagh - "the image of Dermot" - a civil servant who possibly works in the Taoiseach's office, she thinks, and who was not, she adds swiftly, the Deep Throat for Scrap Saturday. "Yeah, Dermot was fairly manic about work but that went for play as well. We would meet every Christmas even if there was nothing going on and just trawl around Dublin capturing people. I remember him pinning an (voice drops respectfully) ooolder actor that we just met on our travels to the bonnet of a car and straddling him and going `Take that and that . . .' Ah, fantastic fun. I can't think of anybody else like him who's still around. He really, really was unique."
As for the series, that, she says, was "really weird". "I don't think any of us realised just how huge it was until Dermot died and we were 20 feet high on billboards around London. I had organised to go to three football matches that weekend we were finishing up; and, after he died, I remember thinking `what'll I do now' and then thinking I'll go to the matches because (lowers voice in mock piety) that's what he would have wanted. And he would have too (voice rising again). He would have slapped me if I hadn't. There had been a bit of slagging going on because Chelsea were going to be playing Aston Villa and I'm a Villa fan and he was a Chelsea fan. But to be going around the town after the matches and just seeing Father Ted everywhere was incredible . . . and those huge obituaries, even in the broadsheets."
It's history now that before London and Father Ted, Morgan had reached an impasse with RTE and was effectively in exile. What is not so well known is that Pauline McLynn had hit a similar wall. "There was nothing for me here either. I had always done radio out in RTE but I wasn't being offered anything in television. Apart from interviews or whatever, there's been nothing. I think RTE only think of me in the comedy end of things anyway and that being the case, they haven't anything to offer there either."
You underestimate her at your peril. This is a self-employed businesswoman, a versatile working actress with an impressive theatre CV, including a host of Gate and Abbey credits. In the past, a reasonable flow of poorly-paid theatre work was greatly subsidised by her other incarnation as queen of the voiceovers, a lucrative sideline she remembers with gratitude: "God bless advertising."
You might think she's on the pig's back now but you'd be mostly wrong. "Well this year actually, I've enough money to pay my tax when the time comes - and that's a miracle. At least, jeez, I think I do. But I wouldn't have said things were all that comfortable before that. I mean, when the Father Ted thing was happening, we didn't get terribly well paid for it. It was better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick but it wasn't even a fraction of what people think. I heard someone saying `you must have made £200,000 last year', " she says, eyebrows raised.
So how much did they get? "For a series? £20,000 for the first - then anything between £20,000 and £30,000. It depended on how many episodes were involved; like the first was only six. And we signed a thing that said we'd take just 10 per cent more for each of three series." Crikey. "But we didn't know how it was going to take off. And they didn't have to make three series so we had to tie ourselves in." And despite the 20-foot billboards, were they tied to the deal? "Ooooh, yeah . . ." Big hollow laugh.
"I think an awful lot of people were millionaires after it but not us. The world rights were included in the salary. When the videos are sold, I think we're on a percentage of that but even that's a percentage of the wages you were on. So it was a learning curve, the Father Ted thing."
She is perceived as an "incredibly loyal and generous person" by someone who knows her well, the implication being that much of the dosh finds its way into the pockets of other needy actors anyway. So there is no bijou Chelsea residence, and the Imp service from Cabra ("like Mussolini, Bertie makes the buses run on time") fills in for the flash car. "No, there's no villa or that sort of thing. This was just getting out of debt. I'm not pleading poverty now but there was one year when there wasn't an actual series, just a Christmas special that we did, and you should have seen my wages that year. They were very tiny compared to what people think."
But the graph does point skywards. "Oh yes. It's like people seem now to be thinking about you in different ways, which is great." So she was offered a part in the BBC's Vanity Fare but had to decline for a previous engagement with Ballykissangel. Meanwhile, parts in the works include spitting fire as the Aunt Aggie harridan in Alan Parker's film version of Angela's Ashes and butterflying around as the giddy Lady Susan Fox Strangeways (pronounced Strangways, you ought to know) in another costume drama adaptation, this time of Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats, directed by David Caffrey.
Next year sees her take another plunge into TV comedy with a series called provisionally Dark Ages, set just before the first millennium when apocalypse, destruction, locusts etc were being keenly anticipated and in which she plays the rampantly upwardly mobile wife of the main man.
Amid all that, there was her fabulously public wedding - attended by a whirl of celebrities and old friends - to Richard Cook, begetter of the Kilkenny Cat Laughs comedy festival and founder of the Bickerstaffe Theatre Company (which, oddly enough, is the one producing The Gingerbread Mix-Up wherein she attempts to cook up Child Surprise). Though he's the brother of her longstanding Irish agent Lisa Cook, this was a whirlwind romance, begun when he turned up at an art exhibition she opened.
"I just thought, I've been single for a while so I'll have a bit of that young fella, and indeed I did. So now we're driving along in the car - I made him get a car because he's 72 miles away in Kilkenny for God's sake - and he says: `Gaw . . . Pauline, things have really changed for me, haven't they? Here I am with my own part in a pub, I have a car, I have a wife . . .' "
The part in the pub is shared ownership in a Kilkenny hostelry known as The Cat Laughs (for some reason, firmly fixed in McLynn's head as The Rat Laughs). Her next project is to excavate him from "that studenty flat" of his. "I tire of it, of the magnolia walls and the Blu-tacked posters," she says in still-besotted tones.
And then, there's the novel. The woman who read English and History of Art at Trinity is writing a book, the kind she'd like to read if she was lounging by a pool. She's a quarter way through and delighted with it. "I find it really therapeutic. Sometimes I read it back and think `God, how did I think of that? - that was all right'. Well, there are two things like that really. In the whole thing."
The protagonist is a private detective in her 30s, "living with a guy who's a complete wastrel, they've no sex life anymore and even though she doesn't think it's a crisis to reach her 30th birthday, she's feeling `mind you, I could drum up a good crisis if I really put my mind to it . . .' I think she's nice." Given that McLynn subscribes to the theory that novelists "base their books on little bits of themselves", friends should have a grand old time sorting the "bits" from the makebelieve. She hasn't yet looked for a publisher but she yearns for someone with a whip and a deadline.
Who ever said this woman was scatty? Though we are interrupted several times, she always remembers where she left off. She is tri-locational, went off the drink for November, washes her own clothes, is in love with her Dyson vacuum cleaner, and maps out a professional schedule as intricate as any 3,000-piece jigsaw, while tearing around the Andrews Lane Theatre, threatening several hundred screaming children with the deadliest poison in the entire forest, abetted by a cat called Pardon (Stanley Townsend) with an unfeasibly long tail. What did she put in that tea?
Pauline McLynn appears in The Gingerbread Mix-Up at Andrews Lane Theatre until January 6th (no shows tonight, tomorrow, December 26th or 28th, or January 4th). It transfers to Kilkenny's Watergate Theatre on January 7th for three nights. Tel: 01-679