THE LAST LAUGH
Jim Murty on Aidan Gillen’s comic turn as the late, great Dave Allen
Dave Allen at Peace BBC 2 RTÉ One, Easter Monday Lenny Henry: The Commonwealth Kid BBC1, Easter Monday My Dad, The Peace Deal And Me BBC1, Wednesday
Ihope God’s got a sense of humour [because the Church sure as hell doesn’t].’ Dave Allen left the last part unsaid, the inference hanging in the air, much like the glove that the Pope had teasingly removed from his arm in that controversial striptease skit. And on another occasion: ‘Thank God I’m an atheist.’ Only Allen was anything but, or he wouldn’t have been able to mine the Catholic Church for such comedy gold.
He started digging from an early age, provoking and questioning the Sisters who taught him and soaking up their mannerisms, and the punishment they dished out: ‘The Gestapo in drag,’ as he would later call them.
We join ‘Davy’ at school in short trousers with his big brother promising to look out for him at the start of the Aidan Gillen-driven drama Dave Allen At Peace. Only Davy was to find out early that he would have to look out for himself in life after John (Conleth Hill) took his eye off him and the tip of one of Davy’s fingers became severed.
As props go, it would serve him well in his career, as would the tip his raconteur dad Culley (Tommy Tiernan), who left a huge void in his life when he died when Davy was just 12, would give him.
Culley, a general manager of the Irish Times advised him to tell a thousand tall tales about it, and many of them would crop up later in his monologue/sketch shows.
If Dave Allen At Peace at times seems disjointed as it jumps between his childhood and his career, then Gillen does well to point it back in the right direction.
While he has been criticised in some quarters for failing to capture Allen’s sense of danger, and for giving a straight character performance in the vein of John Boy in Love/Hate and Charles J Haughey, Allen was a one-off. This was only ever going to be a brush stroke.
For a truer sense of the comedian, the repeat show Dave Allen: God’s
Own Comedian (2013) which ran after the BBC showing puts more meat on the bones of the great man, with Allen talking with candour about his life, the Church and his career.
It was reassuring to hear that many of today’s comedians worship at the altar of the great con- trarian. Dave Allen had never really been at peace with the threat Alternative Comedy posed to his popularity in the Eighties.
In one scene in Dave Allen At Peace, a young comedian with the look of a Lenny Henry picks out the grey-haired Allen at the bar. He asks him what he does: ‘A comedian,’ deadpans Allen, and ‘you, what do you do?’ – Allen having more humour in his little finger...
Henry burst onto the public consciousness in the UK as an impersonator on New Faces in the Seventies.
But he is probably best known for trying to put the fun into fundraising through Red Nose Day.
Now he is a serious Shakespearean actor... and not a comic one either!
Lenny Henry: The Commonwealth
Kid sees the English-born comic revisit his parents’ homeland of Jamaica to explore Jamaicans’ take on the Commonwealth.
Whether their apathy is down to their view of the Commonwealth or simply a lack of connection with him, it raises the question of comedians and their search for themselves. My Dad, The Peace Deal And Me sees Patrick Kielty look for answers in his native Northern Ireland. Kielty was raised in the North during the Troubles and was only 16 when his dad was killed by UVF paramilitary gunmen.
And yet Kielty went on to embrace the Good Friday Agreement and turned the joke back on the terrorists in his comedy, by donning a Balaclava to spoof them.
Now living in La-La Land with his TV presenter wife Cat Deeley, Kielty is as far removed from the religiously tribalistic world of the North as it is possible to be.
Kielty shows us that comedians, like the rest of us, are forever informed by the past. But isn’t it liberating when they confront their demons by laughing at them?
Good night and may your God go with you. PHILIP NOLAN IS AWAY