On the couch ...
with author Sarah Carroll
Recently, I was watching some show that might have been called Special Forces: is is Worse than Actual Real Hell and enjoying it mightily. It was then the phone buzzed. Pausing the action midframe, when some chap was getting shoved into a tank of icy water lled with piranha, I chatted idly with my mate. “Anything on the box?” “Nah, just the usual stu : some guy in a cage of icy water with esh-eating sh. And you?
“Nah!”
So goes the witty repartee of the couch potato, the walking dead who constitute the great unwatched of this world and very likely the next. “Did you know that couch potato was rst coined by some guy back in the 1970s who mistook his wife for a Kerr’s Pink?”
“Nah, you’re just making that up mate! Next you’ll be telling me that Catch-22, the book that couldn’t be lmed, until it was, has been made into a TV series by George Clooney.”
Well funny you should say that . . .
“Talking about books that are hard to lm, what’s the latest on the lm adaptation of At-Swim-Two-Birds?”
“Do you mean the 1939 Flann O’Brien novel that Brendan Gleeson optioned in 2004 and was doing the devil with having got Colin Farrell and Michael Fassbender and Cillian Murphy and every other Irish actor worth his or her salt on board for what was likely to be a cast of thousands in a screenplay with a million twists? Do you mean that At-Swim-Two-Birds? “ e very one!”
“Well it’s currently on hold.”
“Ah shame. Well if they can make not one but two lms about Mrs Brown, surely they can rustle something on the greatest Irish comic novel of the 20th Century?”
A long, some may say pregnant, pause follows. I brie y consider pressing play. en the line crackles to life.
“I have an idea. What about we make our own version of At-Swim-TwoBirds? You could be, erm, what’s the main guy’s name again? And I could be his sidekick. All we would need then is a horse, a donkey and some windmills. Piece of cake!”
“I think you might have a totally di erent classic there mate!”
“Ah yeah I was thinking about another book they couldn’t make into a lm. Sure there must be millions of them out there. Maybe we should make one about ourselves: two couch potatoes who get caught up in the craziest adventures ever a er they get swallowed up by the TV.”
“Or how about we sign up for one those Special Forces Hell shows? “Hmm. Hasn’t that been made already?”
“Maybe we should watch some more TV? We might get some even better ideas.”
And with that I pressed play again.