Thermo Man Strikes Again

Ardal O'Hanlon does love his football. A fervent follower of David O'Leary's record-breaking baby boomers, he is rightly rejoicing in Leeds United's season in the sun. Who says you won't win anything with kids? But when it comes to Mick McCarthy's Republic Of Ireland, the comedian is jinxed: the last time he performed as a stand-up on his native soil - in Killarney's Great Southern Hotel last September - it clashed with the Croatia game in Zagreb (of course, missing that debacle was, arguably, a blessing). Now he's set to appear in Dublin's Olympia Theatre on the night of the Euro 2000 showdown with Turkey at Lansdowne Road - a match he is understandably loathe to miss.
O'Hanlon's enduring passion for the beautiful game - he reminisces fondly about Sunday afternoon kickabouts in Herbert Park with the comedy fraternity - is symptomatic of his desire, when confronted by his 'A'-list celebrity status, to keep his two left feet on terra firma. From the destitute fledgling stand-up scraping a living upstairs at the International Bar to the mollycoddled actor who is assigned a reflexologist on the set of his latest production (a fact he states with a combination of amazement and embarrassment), the most pressing thought in O'Hanlon's mind come 4.45 on a Saturday afternoon has never changed.
"People used to ask me how the book was selling when it came out," he says. "They didn't realise that that was so unimportant to me. What was important was how Ireland was doing; where were Leeds in the table; where was I in the Fantasy Football League. They're the things that obsess you; not the other stuff.
"Too many people in the public eye are too worried about their image and what people think of them. How you're perceived is out of your control. I don't have a PR person going around drip-feeding the media with stories about me or my family. I don't appear in glossy magazines with my new wallpaper and I try not to do too much on television. I try and make the distinction between comedy-stroke-acting, and appearing as a celebrity. I'm not interested in appearing on panel games with a big cheesy grin. That's asking for trouble."
So, no V.I.P. spreads or Don't Feed The Gondolas Christmas special for Ardal O'Hanlon then. Indeed, during our hour together in a deserted HQ one afternoon, O'Hanlon at every turn spurned ostentatious self-promotion in favour of rigorous self-deprecation. Humility, not hubris, is his way.
"I think there are two sets of people," he continues. "There are people who are motivated by fame, driven by fame, who actively seek fame. For them the medium isn't that important. They don't care whether it's presenting or comedy or acting: anything will do so long as they're on TV. They'll do the weather just to be on it! "
Then there are people - and I include myself in this category - who start off in tiny little places like the International Bar, work very hard for years and years, who see it very much as a labour of love, and who have no idea that anything good is ever going to happen. I always assumed otherwise. Like most of the comics that have come through the Comedy Cellar, it's all about fun. It was about the lifestyle. We played to 30 people once a week for five years. I'm still mentally there. Everything that's happened since is like a dream . . . a quite pleasant dream."

O'Hanlon's dream narrative begins, of course, with Father Ted. What's remarkable about Ted is how it managed to acquire and maintain a bona fide cult status despite clocking up astronomical ratings as it progressed and being showered with BAFTA awards by the comedy establishment. Not since Andrew Sach's Manuel has a gormless dimwit been so universally adored as Fr. Dougal Maguire.
But following the elevation of the character to the status of a popular culture icon, the question was, to paraphrase Jarvis, what exactly would he do for an encore? To his credit, O'Hanlon metaphorically bumrushed the show, actively avoiding being typecast by taking a serious drama role in Big Bad World; wrote a novel, The Talk Of The Town - as opposed to just talking about writing it - and fulfilled his primary ambition to make it as a stand-up, on his own two feet, so to speak.
That he is still one of the most bankable comedians in the country - he will play to 1,200 people in the Olympia this weekend - is testament to the consistently high standard of his material, which contrives to be simultaneously gentle and shrewd, dealing with the everyday in an often surreal fashion. Coming up in the new millennium is, amongst other things, a second series of Big Bad World but before that he stars in a new sitcom for the BBC, My Hero, which will hit the screens any day now.
"It's about a superhero called Thermo Man and his alter ego, George Sunday," explains O'Hanlon. "He rescues a nurse - in the Grand Canyon. And he falls in love with her. She's from a suburb in London. So he decides he's going to move to London and try and live with her. It's got echoes of Third Rock From The Sun. It's BBC 1 so it's quite mainstream. It's very gentle and inoffensive . . . and romantic. The lucky lady is an actress called Emily Joyce."
Was the role written with Ardal in mind?
"Not really," he reples. "Somebody else actually did the pilot. But for some reason, they changed their minds and they called me in. And I decided to do it."
Are there any similarities between George Sunday and Dougal?
"Your question assumes that I'm versatile!" he quips. "They're actually very similar. I can't do anything else. All I can do is gurn! If anything he's even less well-adjusted than Dougal. But there's a romantic element, which makes it slightly different. Having said that, because I've done Big Bad World in the meantime, I didn't mind it. Doing My Hero was almost like a reaction to Big Bad World. I thought, 'right, I've tried that drama stuff, let me get back to an out-and-out comedy role'."
Would he like to do more serious drama roles in the future?
"Not necessarily," he avers. "To be honest, I'm not that in control of my life or my destiny. There are unseen forces at work here. Seriously, I react to what I'm offered, to whatever comes through the post in the morning. As it happened, I was offered Big Bad World and I jumped at the chance because it was so different to Father Ted. It's very difficult to make a choice because it's three months out of my life and lots of people see it and make judgements about me as a person, never mind about as an actor."
As you read this, the star of the county Monaghan is in L.A., shooting a short film in Hollywood. Those doors, it seems, just keep on opening. But, as is his wont, O'Hanlon is keen to play it down.
"It's a no budget short film called Another Bobby O'Hara Story," he says. "I play an Irish gangster. Two guys asked me to come over to Hollywood and blow an office party away. It's something I've always wanted to do! And any excuse not to have to write the book I'm working on at the moment. I said, 'brilliant, ten days in LA!'. That said, it's never been an ambition of mine to go there. I certainly couldn't live and work there. I hate the idea of having to hustle in LA."
Given that he's been juggling acting, writing and stand-up comedy for some time now, what does he consider to be his first love?
"Sculpture. Nobody knows about that side of me yet. I haven't revealed that before." He's joking, of course, as a belated grin announces. But seriously. . . "I see still very much see myself as a stand-up-stroke-writer. That's what I like to do: stay at home and write either jokes or novels. Whatever can't be reduced to a joke, I try to put into the more considered writing, which is the novel. But I suppose stand-up is the fulcrum because it combines both acting and writing."
He then informs me that he will be roadtesting new material in the International Comedy Club on the night of this interview. I trot along, as curious as a dead cat. Given that the line-up also includes Anne Gildea and the return after a year and a half's absence of Dermot Carmody, there's a sense of nostalgia about the evening, of well-travelled comedy veterans returning to their alma mater to keep their hand in. The point is hammered home by compere Paddy Courtney, so much so that O'Hanlon, as he explains jocosely on stage, feels like he's about to be presented with a commemorative bowl of Waterford Crystal. His new material is definitely up to scratch, even if it's so new that he has to consult his notes on a couple of occasions to remember it. But, hey, that's showbiz . . .
"The only way to do it," he says, "is to try and creep in and almost hope people won't notice you and just whisper the material in a kind of pathetic manner. But you've got all the other comics doing their stuff and then you come out with your new stuff that you've worked on that morning and they're going, 'Jaysus, he's a big load of shite!'."
But what happens when something genuinely doesn't work? Say, when you've got a pissed-up crowd who aren't in the mood to listen to the world according to Ardal?
"You can't blame an audience," he says. "Sometimes, if it's a ridiculously bad venue . . . for example, a field, and there's three sheep in the corner of the field, then it's not going to work that well. You're not gonna get a great reaction; you'll probably get baaa-ed off the stage. But if something doesn't work, then you have to look at yourself. You have to say: what was I doing differently tonight?
"Unfortunately, there's no secret. And I've never spoken to a comedian who actually has a formula or a system that they can draw on before they go on stage. The material will only get you so far. The rest of it is a matter of energy and confidence . . . they're the indefinables. But that's also where the magic comes from."

O'Hanlon flew the Dublin comedy coop five years ago, after deciding that there just weren't enough venues in the city to earn a sustainable income, thus becoming, to use Joe O'Connor's phrase, one of the Ryanair generation.
"It was quite depressing because you simply couldn't make a living here. From time to time, other venues would crop up and stay alive for a couple of months at best. We'd done all the colleges, all the little arts festivals, the prisons." The prisons? Like Mountjoy?
"Well, Wheatfield," he replies, "for the special category prisoners. When you've played Wheatfield, you're kind of ready for anything. I used to play in South Armagh in sheds, and places like that. The most important part of my education as a stand-up was playing those difficult venues. Going to London was quite daunting for me. I was leaving on my own, not having a clue how it was going to go. I had a handful of gigs, maybe ten at most, lined up. It was taking a plunge into the unknown."
O'Hanlon's humour is unmistakably Irish. When he first brought it to London, did it translate well or were the audiences unsure what to make of him?
"I would have been back on the next boat if it hadn't made an impact straight away," he answers truthfully. "I was too long in the tooth, almost, to be arsing around doing open spots. Luckily, they went for it. It baffled me why they did, but they did. What it taught me - and it might sound corny to say it - was to always be true to yourself: never ever tailor your act to please an audience, or say things because you think that's what they want to hear. That's a mistake. You end up with a formulaic set: you think, 'right, I better do a joke about a kebab, and I better put on a Cockney accent'.
"It did me no harm being Irish in London at that time. But I didn't know that. I was still under the impression that Irish people couldn't get a flat! (laughs). But that wasn't the case, as I found out."
These days O'Hanlon, as they say in author biogs, divides his time between his London apartment and his house in Blackrock, where his wife and kids are stationed. He aims to move back permanently to Ireland in the next couple of years. Lately, he's also been spending time in a remote area on the Tyrone/Monaghan border, writing his second novel, which he says will be a satire set among the media world of Hampstead and Dublin 4. But why write fiction when he's so successful as an actor and stand-up comedian?
"There are things that I could only say in a book," he answers. "It's very hard in a normal conversation to express yourself clearly. For me, that's why I write books. It's because I want to communicate my thoughts. It's really for my own benefit. It's to try and make sense of things. The only way, as far as I can see, is to sit on your own in a room for hours and hours and hours and craft it. It's therapy, in a way. But I don't make any claims for them."
What books or authors does he make claims for?
"When I was 18 or 19 and repeating my Leaving, that's when I read the books that made the biggest impact on my life. They were the standard books: all the pretentious French novels, Koestler, Catcher In The Rye, etc. Since then, I haven't really had favourite authors. It changes from day to day. It depends on what I'm reading. I suppose I've become more critical as I've got older."
You see flaws that you didn't spot when you were younger?
"Absolutely. But I think all books are flawed. They're all just versions of the truth. The thing about novels is that they kind of promise the truth. And of course, you're only going to be disappointed if you expect that. The reason why I want to write is that I've never read a novel that equates with what I want to say or represents my life. What I'm saying is that everybody has to write their own book to be totally satisfied. .. and even then, you won't be because words can only get you so far. You need music too. . . and the sound of the sparrow (laughs)."

What you don't read, Ardal O'Hanlon would probably agree, is to be monstered in the press, something which happened to him when a front page tabloid story tried to paint him as a depraved drug apologist. It's clear from the way he talks about this matter that it has left a deep imprint on his consciousness, with the result that he is decidedly cautious when dealing with the men and women of the Fourth Estate.
Ardal explains the chain of events. "Somebody took maybe two or three lines out of what was quite obviously a very flippant interview with a women's magazine - a quite surreal interview as it turned out - and somebody decided they were going to put it on the front page. It was a meaningless, nothing story," he says. "It was like a punch in the stomach. You're not equipped to deal with that. I'm not a hard person, really. I never saw myself as a target or thought that anything I said could be twisted in that way and splashed on the front page.
"Because I'm a comedian, I'm not going to censor myself. My job is to say exactly what I think about anything, as flippant as it may be. In my profession, you have to have some sort of uneasy relationship with the press. But aside from anything else, it proves the point that there can never be a serious drugs debate in this country. . . or certainly, people in the public eye can't contribute to a serious drugs debate because whatever you say is going to be turned around and used in evidence against you.
"I'm not prepared to take that on. Life's too short. I've a young family. I've an old family as well. . . and none of them wants to be embarrassed. And I don't want to be embarrassed. So it's quite difficult because I've got plenty of views on those kind of issues and I'm very hesitant to air them."
He does point out, however, the double standards in operation when it comes to the abuse of more socially acceptable drugs.
"Our attitude to alcohol in this country makes us particularly hypocritical," he says. "People are so ardently anti- any kind of drugs and yet they just pour alcohol into themselves, which absolutely decimates families. And the statistics say that more people die from painkillers than any of the other drugs that scare civilised middle class society so much."
Soon, it's time for the photoshoot to begin. But it's been an interesting discussion: Leeds United, reflexology, Thermo Man, Wheatfield Prison blues, killer painkillers. . . should give the tabloids something to chew on! n
* Ardal O'Hanlon plays the Olympia Theatre on Sat 13th November at 8pm as part of the Murphy's Ungagged Comedy Festival, with special guest, David O'Doherty.