TD 1
“I found the most explicitly, intimately, sexuall
y, glorious porn I’ve ever read.” P: “It’s the same here, I’ve fallen asleep several times here and people have come in and woken me up.” T: “My house is the same. if you steal something out of my house you have to put something in first.” T: “I was watching your documentary.” P: “The only reason I am doing this (the interview) is because of Tom, one of the most beautiful people I know, and Seamus.” T: “I’m doing one at the moment. I have a guy coming over tomorrow. He did two-and-a-half hours last week and I was absolutely knackered. No idea what I said or how I came across.” P: “Well they were at me for years, different filmmakers, I wasn’t even seeking them out and then one day Seamus appeared out of nowhere on the street and we talked and connected and I liked his values and honesty and his feet on the ground. In the middle of our conversation he saw something go past which interested his camera and he was gone like a shot and came back an hour later. I said, ‘this is great, this guy is real’. So that’s the reason I did it in the first place.” T: “I’m glad you did it because it is very entertaining. It’s a nice thing to do this for them (this interview) because they did something for you. Tell me this I was interested to hear one of your first enthusiasms was Mr James Thurber.” P: “Thanks to Father Mullen in St Paul’s College, Raheny, fifth year. He was an enlightened English teacher who didn’t need somebody to be on the course and thanks to him I read, Robert Benchley, Thurber (both American humourists)… The Night the Bed Fell (a short story by Thurber). He became blind, didn’t he?” T: “He did and said the imagination doesn’t go blind which is very nice.” P: “I suddenly remembered the most extraordinary poem I believe has ever been written by anybody in any language and I was at a loss as to understand how I had forgotten it for a while. Some of the lines in it are so wickedly, viciously, accurately true, it’s like a whip across your naked shins. It’s Paddy Galvin’s poem The Mad Woman of Cork. T: “Oh I love The Mad Woman of Cork. Do you know who was a great man for reciting it was Paddy Finnegan (the poet who was known by many as the man who sold the Big Issue outside Trinity College), that was his party piece, he recited it to me on a bench on the canal one afternoon.” Pat muses on his bucket list now that he’s turned 80. P: “I’ve never been under O’Connell Bridge and someone contacted Vivienne to say they are looking into organising something, the reason is claustrophobia. I’m adding another - drive a car.” T: “I don’t think poets drive cars, I’ve never met a poet who drove one.” P: “Another one is get a tattoo, milk a cow, see my bottom - the number of men I know who have never seen our arse and have no interest in it…I’ve never read Ulysses. The only way I was able to approach it was when I would open it at random and there was one time when I found the most explicitly, intimately, sexually, glorious porn I’ve ever read. Another time I found absurd insanity which beautifully predated Monty Python. I’d just hop in and out.” T: They wouldn’t let Spike Milligan take a parachute jump. (Pat received a(nother) biography on Spike for his birthday) I thought he might have had an influence on you?” P: “Well The Goon Show did… the thing about RTE was originality was the enemy. I happened in there by accident. Until the day I had no further involvement there, I was the enemy because I wasn’t officially A still from The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby attached to any programming department. I happened to arrive out of the blue, I had a hit play in the Abbey and there was a man called Denis O’Grady who was working back stage with Eamonn Andrews in the BBC and then came back to work as head of presentation in RTE. He thought I’ll have an announcer sitting in the studio during the afternoon and from time to time they can have a little chat with someone - that was the very thin edge of a tiny wedge. I was invited in to talk about my play and I knew going on television for the first time, I wanted to be remembered so I appeared on RTE wearing my hat with a head of cabbage hanging off the side and the response was amazing. “O’Grady said we have a problem here at the moment, we are showing a BBC programme called Take Hart by Tony Hart and he is asking children to send drawings to him, they are coming here and we can’t do anything with them…do you think if that Pat fellow with the hat could come in once a week and show a few of these pictures to the viewers? The first time this happened was with Vincent Hanley, the craic we had and then, bit by bit, this man kept appearing with different things appearing on his hat. And then Vinnie said wouldn’t it be great if he just fucked off for a coffee and I just did it by myself. Suddenly I had five minutes a week and a slide with Pat’s Hat written on it and a bit of music on a tape. And there was tiny little embryonic unofficial programme I managed to expand, bit by bit. I was having fun and the fun got wilder and wilder and I became a huge fucking star. I look back on it fondly because of certain people who it was a joy to be around, Larry Gogan was one. There was only a handful of them – genuine, lovely, people. The rest of them were all con artists. I saw behaviour from all of these people who were iconised, I saw the reality behind the scenes.” 18