The Irish Are Coming. Ryan Tubridy

it, the big cameras and, suddenly, it was kind of like, this is a pretty f**king cool job.’

      Success didn’t come easily or quickly and Jonathan had to graft to get good parts. Countless auditions were coupled with ‘talk’ of major parts in films like Minority Report and Spider Man (and at one point, the next James Bond!), none of which came to pass – but there was good news as the roles started to trickle in. His presence was required and lauded in television projects like Gormenghast (2000) and movies that include Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Vanity Fair (2004), Matchpoint (2005) and Mission: Impossible III (2006). Jonathan’s star was on the rise, but as he has said himself, ‘Overnight success takes about ten years.’

      A major break came when Jonathan was cast as Elvis in a CBS mini-series (2005). Not only could he transcend the Irish accent and take on a plausible American one but he got the pelvic moves and facial twitches dead on. A Golden Globe quickly followed and the future looked bright. However, within a year, his mother Geraldine died aged just fifty. It was a traumatic time for the young actor and there were stories of dramatic bust-ups with his girlfriend and drinking bouts that ended badly. In a move that distances him from the old-school hellraisers, at the age of just twenty-nine, Jonathan checked into rehab. At the time, he told reporters, ‘I am not a hellraiser. I drank for a year and then realised it didn’t work for me any more.’

      For a while, he replaced the pub with the gym but admitted it was hard to give up drinking, especially when filming in Dublin. He was a man in mourning, in the public eye and in trouble and in some ways there’s a deeper tragedy underlying Jonathan’s hellraising, one that lacks the sheen of the boozed-up glamour of O’Toole or Harris. Since then there have been a few messy and troublesome scraps in airports and more stints in rehab, but I can tell you that when he came on my show he was slurping nothing more intoxicating than the coffee. He was very calm and a proper gentleman in the Peter O’Toole mould, rather than the tabloid creature that has been created around him. He’s got money now but rather than investing in the fancy cars and bling, he’s bought himself homes in London, Dublin, Morocco and LA – which all sounds eminently sensible for a poor Irish lad made good.

      It should be noted that throughout the whole torrid time, Jonathan was keeping the acting show on the road with arguably his most acclaimed performance to date as Henry VIII in the phenomenally successful mini-series The Tudors, a role that won him an Irish Film and Television Academy Award in the Best Actor in a Television Series category, 2008. It’s a role that he appeared to relish and one he was more than proud of: ‘People have said Henry VIII didn’t look like me. Fair enough. But no critic can tell me that how I play Henry isn’t right, because I play him a hell of a lot closer to history than people admit. He was an egotistical, spoilt brat, born with the arrogance that everything he had was his by right.’

      Meyers was following in the footsteps of Charles Laughton, Richard Burton, Robert Shaw and Keith Michell but he took the role by the scruff of the neck and did it his way – including all the sex scenes, which he said were ‘like having sex in a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon’.

      Jonathan’s own life story couldn’t be further removed from that of the most married monarch of them all but you can tell there’s plenty more to come from him. Although he’s already shown his versatility in going from the King of Rock’n’roll to the King of England, I personally think this actor’s best years lie ahead of him if he can keep the demons at bay.

      He rejects the hellraiser label, saying: ‘I kind of like people having this idea that I’m this wild rebellious guy. But the reality is that I’m not, and I’m not quite sure I want to reveal how boring my life is. Of course, as a young Irish actor you’re tarred before you start. It’s the enduring cliché.’

      What I think he’s got in common with the other Irish hellraisers is the ability to play edgy, troubled and explosive characters – perhaps because he’s got all that Celtic rage bottled up inside him. Let’s park this one for now as ‘work in progress’.

      * * *

      It’s curious that all three of the hellraisers I’ve featured here came from difficult backgrounds and fought to achieve their success. They’ve got an irrepressible, restless spirits and boundless raw talent. Perhaps that self-destruct gene can be channelled into creativity, supplying the high-voltage electrical power that each of them possesses as an actor. Of course, you don’t have to have an intense love affair with liquor to be a great actor – there are loads who don’t, some of whom I’ve featured in Chapter 7. But the drinker’s unpredictability gives them an edge and makes you feel you don’t quite know what they’re going to do next – even when they’re sober.

       2

       THE COMEDIANS

      IF YOU WANT TO SEE how much Anglo-Irish attitudes have changed over the last decades, just take a look at the humour. The Bernard Manning era when every paddy was an idiot and ‘How many Irishmen does it take to change a lightbulb?’ jokes were ten-a-penny have long gone. It would be like doing a joke about a Pakistani or a black woman or a gay man: it’s not only politically incorrect but can be illegal and every right-thinking person considers them bad taste. Of course, in Ireland we’re allowed our own self-deprecating humour but it’s got to be on our own terms. We’ll crack a joke about ourselves and call ourselves paddies – but the British are not allowed the paddywhackery now, and some Irish people even got a bit hot under the collar in the 1970s when Dave Allen dipped into it.

      Perhaps it’s because it’s not too long ago that the Irish were seen as Punch magazine cartoon images: the potato-eating famine refugee, the drunk navvy or the balaclava-clad terrorist. As recently as the 1980s and maybe the early 90s these were the stereotypes propagated, particularly in right-wing elements of the media. Every Irish comedian who came over to Britain from 1967 to 1997 had to drop in a few gags about terrorism just to get it out of the way because otherwise it was the elephant in the room. But the peace process changed everything, virtually overnight. It changed the acceptability of being Irish in Britain, it changed the nature of comedy and it changed the portrayal of Ireland in the media. Neil Jordan’s 1992 (pre-peace-process) film The Crying Game was revolutionary enough for showing an IRA man falling in love with what he thought was the girlfriend of a British soldier. But now in 2013 we see Gillian Anderson in The Fall, which is about a psychopath running around Belfast killing women and there’s not an ArmaLite or a terrorist cell in sight. It’s a huge cultural, political, historical shift in the right direction.

      By the beginning of the twenty-first century, comedians had torn up their jokes about terrorists, drunken builders and women with twenty-five children. All that is a clichéd bore. We don’t laugh at Irishness any more; we laugh at what’s genuinely funny – and that’s what’s made it possible for us to enjoy the ironic post-peace-process sitcom Father Ted. Maybe in the past we would have been a bit more sensitive about the three priests banished to Craggy Island for their misdemeanours but now it’s just pure comedy and we’re all laughing together.

      It’s not that the Irish are po-faced when it comes to humour. On the contrary, we use it to end an argument, to alleviate sadness or to poke fun at ourselves, but all self-references must be on our terms. And if there’s one thing that’s always been fertile territory for Irish humour, it’s having a dig at authority. As a people we’re instinctively, unfailingly anti-authoritarian, probably because of all those centuries of resisting British authority. It’s bred into us from an early age; it’s in the water. The first comedian I’m going to talk about in this chapter is the one who first made his name for attacking the biggest authority of the twentieth century: our very own Catholic Church (those of a sensitive disposition may want to make the sign of the cross before reading on).

       DAVE ALLEN: the funniest man in