Soap opera director Tim O’Mara: Sharing a flair for the dramatic
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying soaps attract large and loyal fan-bases and are among the best-loved programmes on TV.
But even if the “soapie” is beneath your elevated taste, you have to admire the commitment, imagination and skill it takes to churn out gripping episodes on an almost daily basis.
Writer/director Tim O’Mara has 500 plus episodes of Emmerdale under his belt. He was recently in Ireland to direct four episodes of Fair City, two of which aired last week, with another due for broadcast tomorrow night, and his last on April 14.
Tim, who started out as a teacher of drama and english in the UK, says he contacted Fair City executive producer Brigie de Courcy to ask if he could come and work on Ireland’s longest-running homegrown soap, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last September.
“It was really as a tribute to my mum,” Tim says. “She died at the relatively young age of 67 and one of my last memories of her is of holding my son Ollie in her arms at his christening when he was just three months old.”
Tim’s mother, Kathleen O’Connor, was from Cork, although she never told him exactly where. His father, Denis O’Mara, hailed from Corbally Road in Limerick.
Tim grew up in the UK but had an affinity with Ireland and when his four kids were young, they regularly holidayed in Courtmacsherry in West Cork. In fact his two sons, Oliver and Oscar, now aged 28 and 22 respectively, previously represented Ireland in the student Rugby League World Cup.
Tim came to Fair City armed with an impressive CV which includes directing 200 plus episodes of Coronation Street, as well as episodes of Casualty, The Royal and Byker Grove.
He had an early brush with writing and producing for radio in London before before being approached by a friend about starting a production company.
It wasn’t long, however, before he was poached by Picture Palace, a company he says made mainly commercials but were “looking to get into drama”.
The timing was right because Channel 4 was in its infancy and looking for material made by independents outside the system, with a strong focus on drama.
A viewer had written to Channel 4 saying while they couldn’t imagine writing a full-length drama, they thought a four-minute drama might work,” Tim says.
The idea was that it would be marketed under the heading 4 on 4. Channel 4’s new commissioning editor liked the idea and they approached Picture Palace with the 4 on 4 concept. “And so we set about making a series of short drama,” Tim says. It was a “great introduction” for him.
“We had to find first-time actors, writers and directors and get it all working. Quite a few careers were launched on foot of it and it was really good for me. If you can make four minutes a day work on TV, what you are really doing over a week is a half-hour drama,” he says.
With confidence and experience growing, Tim started up his own production company, Roar Talent, which lasted 10 years. By now he was writing seriously and got a number of commissions including See How They Run, a drama centred on a family in a witness protection programme which took him to Australia, and Jeopardy a sci-fi drama series set on Australia’s Gold Cost which won him a BAFTA.
He was subsequently approached by television production company Bentley/Chrysalis where he was made head of drama and development, introducing the perennially popular Midsomer Murders for ITV.
Since the start of the Millennium, he’s been involved in the big reputational soaps in the UK. More recently, he’s directed Hollyoaks. He even gave EastEnders a go, but his attempt to introduce wacky humour bombed.
“I only lasted for two episodes.I introduced a talking dog. They thought it was a little leftfield. It was about to be produced when the executive editor intervened.
“I was kicked out the door but I was writing Jeopardy by then,” he says. Nowadays his bread and butter is soaps. Directors tend to get booked for blocks of episodes and the work is steadier, he says.
“The thing with reputational soaps is that you can work on one for six months and get booked in for another and it allows you to bring up a family, ” he says. Tim sees substantial differences between the way soaps are shot and delivered in the UK and in Ireland.
“Shooting a four-episode block in Emmerdale, you get 10-12 days, in Fair City, six days. Fair City has set itself a really difficult task to achieve the quality that they need — you do find yourself up against the clock a lot.
“Saying that, Fair City does amazingly well to turn around — the quality it does in six days. There are very long days on location, starting at 8am and finishing at 8/9pm.
“The actors have a lot to learn in a day. It gets compared to Emmerdale and Corrie where they have an extra four days to shoot, so given all of that, they’ve done well. It’s been a real experience for me,” he says.
Tim says viewers should also bear the budget in mind when comparing soaps. Each episode of Emmerdale costs around €150,000. Fair City’s comes nowhere close to that.
“You’re looking at TV thinking it’s all a level playing field and it’s not,” he says.
Fair City has just one crew while Emmerdale has three crews rotating so at any one time there are three directors on, each filming opposite each other, so actors go from one unit to another. It means different scenes can be filmed simultaneously.
Tim also sees a “definite divide” in the the way storylines for Corrie and Emmerdale are written and the writing on Fair City.
“It’s very event-led in the UK, but it’s more about relationships here, more social issues. The storylines run a bit longer, it moves at a more gentle pace.”
There’s also more use of cliff-hangers in the UK, he says, often to get viewers to watch two episodes of the soap on the same night, and there are more sensational storylines, like the 2010 train crash when a goods train derailed off a viaduct and crashed into Coronation Street. Tim says RTÉ doesn’t have the budget to produce storylines of that scale and “so they have to cut their cloth accordingly”.
He thinks Fair City plays well to its strengths. “They are very clever about inter-relationships and how they play off each other,” he says, citing the current interplay between Carrie Crowley as Jackie and her ex-husband Pete, played by Enda Oates.
“The acting is wonderful, very subtle, some of it is electric. I think I’ve managed to grow their relationship and make it believable,” Tim says. Tim had five weeks to get his four episodes in the can. He was first given storylines backdated over previous weeks to familiarise himself with what was going on. He then sat down with the producers and chatted about what would work and what might be overwritten and what they were capable of shooting. Tim has a lot of experience working with multiple cameras on a shoot and believes it makes for a pacier production.
He spent his first three weeks with Fair City setting up, the fourth filming, the fifth editing and presenting his efforts to Brigie de Courcy. “She makes notes, says what she likes and dislikes; if the relationships are done well; if we cut too much.
“There was a lot of emotion to drive all the scenes I directed and the cuts all worked,” he says.
So is it difficult to switch between soaps in Ireland and the UK given significant budgetary differences and crew sizes? No, says Tim. “Effectively they are all trying to do the same thing. Actors are actors.”
At the same time, he concedes Fair City was “the toughest of all schedules I’ve worked on... but because of the efficieny of the crew, we did it”.
Will he be back for more? Not in the short-term, but he does have a project on the backburner that will require a return to Ireland.
He’s written a movie called The Ringer, set in Clonakilty, which centres on the intense rivalry between two local villages preparing to compete in an amateur rugby league match.
One village imports two professinal players from Australia in a desperate attempt to gain bragging rights.
The two Australian brothers cause all sorts of consternation, not least when a local girl engaged to a local garda falls for one of them.
Tim is hoping to raise finance for the project in a year or two. But for now, it’s back to that fictional village in the Yorkshire Dales that took it’s inspiration from one of our own very first home-grown soaps — The Riordans.
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