Colm O'Regan: My plan is to write a TV drama using characters that swank home for Stephenses' Night
Colm O'Regan. Photograph Moya Nolan
You’ll read it here first. My next plan. To write the Irish TV drama blockbuster to end them all. Forget ‘Holding’ or ‘Smother’ or ‘Normal People’ or ‘Very Long Conversations With Friends’ or 'Lads In Shadows Saying He Needs To Be Kilt'.
I’m talking about Stephenses Night. A one with actual normal country people. Coming home for Christmas and all meeting up in the local for a night that will change their lives forever.
It’s title comes from the Irish issue with plurals in words. See also Easons, Jameseses Hospital, Tescos, Lidls, Chris Eubanks, Jeff Hendricks.
Stephenses opens on Christmas Eve. The Crowd Who Are Back Home For The Christmas swank into their only Mass of the year in their Dublin Coats. Confidently striding at least three rows closer to the altar than anyone in their family would dare to previously. A mortified mother being brought out of her comfort zone up to where the People Who’d Be Prominent Locally sit.
There are simmering resentments obviously. Not from the locals. But from the returnees. They are disappointed to find out that those who ‘didn’t get away from it all’ are fairly happy actually and living in an architect-designed house about five times the size of a house you’d get for the same money in Dublin. While the wistful enigmatic returnee dreams of a semi-d in Ongar, their primary school classmate has an atrium. And is doing a similar job as the Dublin émigré because they can work remotely and only need to go up once a month for meetings.
I haven’t worked out the details yet of all the characters in Stephenses. There will of course be the down-to-earth checky-shirt-wearing Local Ride who teaches the High-Flying-Impatient Lawyer woman about what’s really important in life: Planning Permission.
Will I put myself somewhere in there? Obviously. So many of these shows are fantasy-fulfillment for the writer so there will definitely be a hard-pressed father of young children who gets a couple of sleeps and sits in front of a fire with a book and biscuits and tea. But also somehow gets all his bits of jobs done in the time between Christmas and New Year.
The pinnacle will be Stephenses night. It begins in the morning with ‘Something Local’. There is flirting at road-bowling or a long-puck competition or a drag-hunt. To give it a bit of dark Wickerman feeling, maybe the Wren Boys will be out mocking people who named their daughter Wren.
“Maybe I’ll see you later” says the local hussy to the fella who got a rake of points in his Leaving Cert in 2002 and is now in software.
It’s all set up to boil over in the massive night out in the evening. Dubs don’t realise how big a deal Stephenses night is down the country. In the same way the Joseph and Mary had to go back to Bethlehem to be counted, so too do the country people have to back to the pub of their birth (they played pool and smoked one eighth of a Benson and Hedges in as a teenager) to account for their movements since.
There will be a fight obviously. I will probably loosely recreate the fight I got into in the square in Macroom on Stephenses night 1998 with a couple of lads back from Birmingham for a funeral. Any excuse really to include the immortal line uttered by one of the fighters when I tried to drag him off my friend. “Tell your goon to take his hands off me.”
All my life I wanted to be a goon, perhaps one day a henchman. That was as good as it got. It’ll be great to see it all on the big screen.
- Speaking of fighting the good fight, Colm’s critically acclaimed and award-nominated latest book (and dulcet-toned if on audiobook) Climate Worrier is out now.
