Ardal O'Hanlon
When Ardal O’Hanlon first auditioned for the role of dopey Dougal McGuire in Father Ted, Channel 4’s comedy about three dysfunctional priests living on a godforsaken island with their tea-obsessed housekeeper, he wasn’t sure he’d made an impact.
‘Arthur and Graham, the two writers, would occasionally turn up at my stand-up gigs, and they mentioned that they were working on this sitcom,’ recalls the 53-year-old. ‘They thought one of the characters might suit me, so I went for the audition and I really enjoyed it.
‘But they were the only two laughing. The producers and the commissioners and all those people were going “I don’t get it”. So it was touch and go whether I’d get the part or not. Luckily I did.’
Luckily indeed. Playing the clerical simpleton in what would become one of the nation’s best-loved sitcoms catapulted the Irish comic into a lengthy acting career – often, it’s fair to say, playing eejits.
But don’t be fooled. O’Hanlon has to have every wit about him to do his first love, stand-up, and is about to embark on a lengthy comedy tour.
‘It’s what I do. It’s my vocation in life,’ he says, adding that the title is The Showing Off Must Go On, ‘because what stand-ups do is essentially showing off.
‘Where I come from, showing off was a terrible thing to do, so I constantly ask myself why do I do it? And, more to the point, why do I still do it at my age? And the reason is there is so much to say. It just seems really urgent, because the world has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years.’
Showing off doesn’t come naturally to O’Hanlon, the third of six children growing up in the Irish border town of Carrickmacross. As a boy he was bookish and reserved, ‘so I think stand-up ultimately was a way of overcoming shyness.
‘When I started out, it was probably the scariest thing I ever did. I remember my first time distinctly. Myself and some friends set up a little club above a pub in Dublin and called it the Comedy Cellar, and we all did about 10 minutes each, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably and I was stammering and I was sweating and had a big red face.
‘But it worked! That was the amazing thing. It was the single most terrifying moment of my life, but it did work.’
For the first couple of years the nerves persisted: ‘I can’t convey to you the terror. But it was always worth it after a few minutes, when you relaxed and you realised everyone’s laughing.’
Eventually O’Hanlon headed to London, where the comedy scene in the mid-90s was exploding. Within a month he’d won the prestigious Hackney Empire New Act of the Year award, ‘which felt brilliant because it felt like a validation that I hadn’t completely wasted the previous five years of my life.’
Being cast in the multi award-winning (and still multi-quoted) Father Ted was an accidental turning point. Running from 1995 to 1998, it followed the exploits of Ted, a downtrodden priest living in enforced exile with perma-drunk, vomit-flecked Father Jack and dimwit Father Dougal, played by O’Hanlon with wide-eyed, childlike splendour.
‘I pinch myself every day,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe that it happened, number one, and that it was so popular. And I’m very, very proud of it. I never expected anything like that to happen in my life. It was just so brilliant.’
The only downside of portraying a pinhead with such aplomb was the inevitable typecasting. ‘When I went back to stand-up, particularly in the first few years afterwards, I had to really struggle to rise above that perception, and certainly when it came to other TV jobs nobody was thinking about me for radically different roles,’ he admits. ‘But I wasn’t exactly crying, thinking nobody’s giving me Hamlet.’
So he didn’t take it personally? ‘Oh no, no it’s great!’ he exclaims, his voice shooting up an octave. ‘I was always very happy playing the fool. There’s a great noble lineage of fools in TV and literature, so I’ve no problem with that.’
That’s just as well, as O’Hanlon had to be distinctly Dougalish as gormless George in the long-running BBC sitcom My Hero. But these days he’s affable rather than asinine as DI Jack Mooney in BBC One’s Death in Paradise which, with its escapist tropical sunshine and undemanding Scooby-Doo plots, rakes in millions of viewers every week.
Filming on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe isn’t, however, as idyllic as you’d imagine. ‘It’s an incredible experience, but it’s also incredibly demanding. You’re away for six months of the year, working in a very hostile environment – the weather can be very temperamental,’ says O’Hanlon, adding that they were once trapped by a hurricane (‘dramatic and exciting on one level, but pretty hair-raising on another’).
Then there’s the heat and humidity, ‘and the mosquitoes feast on me day in, day out. They’re waiting for me when I come home from work. Have you ever heard a mosquito laugh? It’s not a pleasant sound.’
Going back to stand-up is, then, something of a comfort blanket. ‘It’s always been the default, and it’s a fantastic way of expressing all your frustrations,’ he says. ‘ Most of them are very petty. You get pieces of slate in a restaurant instead of a plate. I got a square cup in a café the other day. A square cup! The tea went everywhere else but my mouth.’
But, he adds, today’s bigger issues – from Brexit to men’s place in the world – inevitably filter into his material. ‘I don’t like how divided society has become. We’re living in this really intolerant age, and social media is very noisy and very angry.
‘But comedy can be curative and restorative. It makes life more bearable.’
:: Ardal O’Hanlon tours the UK with The Showing off Must Go On until December 8. See mickperrin.com for tickets.
Ted Talk
The comedian’s top Father Ted moments are the My Lovely Horse video (‘one of my favourite scenes in all of comedy history’), and playing crazy golf in a torrential downpour with Father Stone. ‘It was the coldest, wettest day, but they brought in rain machines for extra rain. That was typical of how they did things, but it was always fun.’
Celebrity fans include the late Bee Gee Maurice Gibb, who was reportedly buried with a Father Ted box set.
Co-creators Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan are currently writing a musical based on the show, called Pope Ted.
O’Hanlon met his wife, Melanie, when they were teenagers. ‘We grew up in the same small town, so there wasn’t much choice. I’m joking! We get on very well, and it gets better with age.’ They live in Dublin and have three children, Emily, 21, Rebecca, 19 and Red, 16.
An edited version of this interview was published in Waitrose Weekend on February 22nd 2019. (c) Waitrose Weekend