Ardal O'Hanlon on his new novel and the 'pinch me moment' of scoring a role in Father Ted

Virgin Radio

23 May 2022, 11:21

Actor, comedian and writer Ardal O'Hanlon joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about his second novel, Brouhaha, and about how he got the Father Ted gig back in the day.

Ardal’s new book is out this Thursday 26th May, and comes 24 years after O'Hanlon's first novel, The Talk Of The Town, He told Chris: “It is my second novel, 25 years in the making! Quite a long gap, but I wanted to get it right and I wanted to make sure I had the right story, and a story I wanted to tell. Because it’s a big commitment, writing a book!” 

Speaking about creating the book, he continued: “I started the novel about six or seven years ago, and I had a pretty good draft, and then I got sidetracked. I got this really nice job in the Caribbean with the BBC, Death in Paradise. So I had to park it, and I was reluctant to leave it, because I was really enjoying it at the time, so it took the pandemic to come along when I had nothin else to do, and I was trapped in Dublin. We weren’t allowed to leave the house, let alone the country, and it gave a great sense of structure to my day and focus to my life.”

Brouhaha is a mystery/black comedy, set in a small town on the Irish border during the uneasy transition to peace. Ardal said: “So, this is a funny, bleak, existentialist thriller, if you like, set in The Border Region. But you’ve also got the Troubles dimension slightly, that creeps into the novel. It can’t not do, when you grow up in that part of the world. But for me, a big thing was the humour. It is that black humour that you get in the border region. It’s the deadpan tone, which has informed me throughout my life. It’s inspired my stand-up comedy. You don’t quite know where people are coming from. Are they being funny? Are they being serious? Is my life in danger? You just don’t know.”

He added: “I also think the people around there have a unique way with words, so it’s just trying to capture all that, in a noir-ish, Fargo-esque type of story.”

The plot sees a character called Sharkey asking questions about the death of their best friend Dove Connolly, and about Sandra, who has been missing for over a decade. This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. Ardal told Chris: “Most good novels start with a death and a disappearance, surely?”

He added: “This community can’t move on until we find out what happened to this person.”

Ardal first entered many people's consciousness with his iconic performance as Father Dougal McGuire in Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted. When explaining how that role came about, he said: “It was through the stand-up. I was working away in London, nightly, and having a fantastic time, I mean, for the first time in my life. I was well into my late 20s by the time I moved to London and started taking my own job seriously, and the writers of that show used to come to see me from time to time.

“They just said to me after the show, ‘We were thinking of you for this part,’ and I was going, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ You’d heard it all before. To be honest with you, I wasn’t thinking in terms of an acting career, I was very happy with the stand-up.”

He continued: “So, a few months later I get a call saying, ‘Will you come along for an audition?’ And I went along, and I remember just being handed a piece of paper. I hadn’t seen anything before, and just reading it, and no-one was really laughing, apart from one of the writers. The others were all just stoney-faced, the Channel 4 people, and the [production company] Hat Trick people.

“A few weeks later, they offered me the part! It was one of those ‘pinch me’ moments.”

Ardal is one of the contestants on the current series of Channel 4’s Taskmaster. He said: “That was something I would not have done three or four years ago, because I would be shy about being myself on television. Suddenly, you realise the pandemic could have wiped us out, so life’s too short to be worrying about anything like that.”

When speaking about a career that has taken in stand-up comedy, acting and writing, the multi-talented artist told Chris: “I’ve never had a strategy, I’ve never had a plan. Sometimes I think people don’t take you seriously as a writer, for example, when you produce a novel, because you’re associated with these other things. But I love the variety. I think I prefer it that way. It’s the rollercoaster of life. It’s not knowing what’s around the corner.”

Brouhaha is out this Thursday, 26th May.

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky, weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or  catch up on-demand here.