Deirdre’s delight as Noble gets US distribution deal

Ahead of an upcoming comedy fundraiser the Moone Boy mum gets serious and talks stand-up, Sonia and solitary Middle East men with Richard Fitzpatrick.

DEIRDRE O’KANE acts as the mother in the hit Sky TV comedy series, Moone Boy, which is set in Boyle, Co Roscommon around the year 1990.

One of the things that stick out from the show is the characters’ attitude to money. There was not much of it around at the time in Ireland, remembers O’Kane, who grew up as one of five children in Co Louth in the 1970s and early ’80s.

“I love that the family in Moone Boy haven’t a penny,” she says. “There was something very freeing in that being the norm. It was just, so what? No one has anything. You try and knock as much craic as you can and get on with it. There’s one bit in the programme where the kids keep asking for things, and we keep responding, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and you know they’re not going to get anything. I do that with my own kids: ‘Can I get this?’ ‘Yeah, maybe.’ There’s no chance they’re getting it.”

O’Kane stars in the biopic Noble, which is directed by her husband Stephen Bradley. It is one of only 300 films from 50,000 produced this year to get a distribution deal in the United States. O’Kane was struck by the children’s rights campaigner’s unconventional mind-set.“When Christina Noble’s mother died when she was 10 — and her father was an alcoholic — that was the end of the usual constraints that we all know, which is parenting and school. She is less bound by convention. She’s less inhibited. She’s like an advertisement for leaving some people alone to be imaginative and to dream.

“She suffered for that massively, but she gained this incredibly free spirit and fearlessness. Because she lived homeless in the Phoenix Park for two years, she communed with the elements and definitely developed a relationship with the universe and has less fear than your average human.”

O’Kane was a stage actress for a decade by the time she first performed as a stand-up comic at Dublin’s International Bar in 1996. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” she says. “I could hear my heart beating so loudly. I remember thinking this isn’t normal. It was pure terror.”

She makes an interesting point about how a stand-up can adjust a routine to harvest a laugh when material might hit a wall, using the example of the athlete Sonia O’Sullivan’s run of near misses and misfortune in the 1990s.

“If some material doesn’t work, you have to acknowledge that, and get a laugh for the fact that it didn’t work. I remember making a joke about Sonia but it was too close to the bone, not enough time had passed. They say comedy equals tragedy plus time. You can talk about anything as long as enough time has passed by. “People were upset: ‘Don’t say a bad word about Sonia because we’re all heartbroken.’ If it had been three months later, they might have laughed, but I remember addressing it: ‘Oh, you’re obviously still heartbroken,’ and got a laugh that way, as opposed to thinking, I thought it was funny, and getting grumpy.”

O’Kane, who is in Dublin on Saturday, November 22, for a fundraising gig, recalls doing a tour of major cities of the Middle East with Dara Ó Briain. At one of the venues, there were no female members in the audience.

“I remember coming out to a room of turbans,” she says. “I said to them, ‘What have you done to your wives? Where are they?’ It was bizarre, a really quite mad experience, but it was funny. They really went for it.”

• Deirdre O’Kane headlines a fundraising comedy gala in aid of Poppy’s Wheels and the Parent’s Association of Scoil Mochua Special Needs School in Clondalkin, Saturday, November 22 at Whelan’s in Dublin.