Maeve Higgins on her love of Little Women, Father Ted and hip-hop
Maeve Higgins is an official 'International Trailblazer' for Culture Night.
I loved Father Ted and how silly and imaginative it was. I remember it killing me when I was younger.
The whole show was like a cartoon with these out-sized characters who never really learn anything who keep making the same mistakes.
It has these smaller characters that you’d look for like the dancing priest and Graham Norton’s character was so over the top.
I haven’t watched it again since I was a teenager, and I have had public spats with [co-creator] Graham Linehan on Twitter, but I still like Father Ted.
I’m sure it still stands up – there were so many good jokes in it.
I was the exact right age for the show My So-Called Life when it televised. I didn’t know this then – but I do now – that it was very much from the girl’s point of view.
The Claire Danes character is the one who experiences everything whereas a lot of high-school dramas or comedies are from the boys’ point of view; girls are secondary or just props.
It resonated with me even though I was having a very different experience in my own teenage life in Cobh where I was friends with my sisters and reading all the time whereas she was kissing Jared Leto and having open warfare with her mother.
Those two things would never have happened in my life. It’s a good depiction of a young woman’s inner life.
When you’re a teenager there’s so much going on inside you that you can’t express – for that reason I liked seeing somebody else working it out on screen.
There was an aspirational side to it, too – everybody was beautiful and spoke their minds and had sex with each other, which I was not doing.
I first saw The Blues Brothers when I was nine, which is way too young, but we just had it on video cassette.
We only had a few videos. We loved it – all seven kids, we’d watch it again and again. We knew all the lines. We’d always make my dad do the John Candy lines.
Whenever we got in the car, we’d be like: “OK, we got the sunglasses. We got our cigarettes.”
It’s an exciting film. They have a mission. It’s funny. The acting is amazing.
There’s brilliant music in it, which is great for dancing.
I loved seeing two grown-ups being so bad. I liked how they broke all the rules.
They were sort of semi-criminal, but also they were trying to do good – they were trying to raise money for their old orphanage.
I don’t have to explain why it’s such a great film; I just can’t explain why we loved it so much!
Home and Away was a big craze when I was a teenager.
My mother didn’t want us to watch it.
She thought it was trashy.
She would never stop us from watching it. She wasn’t censorious, but she would just say: “Aren’t you embarrassed watching this?”
The film Margaret went into my head and hasn’t left. Margaret came out in 2011, but the release was delayed for years.
It’s a long film – the director’s cut is three hours. Anna Paquin is the lead.
Mark Ruffalo and Kieran Culkin are in it as well.
I saw it in the IFI in Dublin. It’s about this 17-year-old living in New York and her growing up, a Bildungsroman.
Nothing huge happens plot-wise, but huge things happen in her inner life.
There’s scenes like when she’s in a diner talking with her friends where you hear all the other conversations that are happening.
The sound design is very good. It’s one of the scenes that dropped into my head and stayed.
It’s one of the best films I’ve seen. I re-watched it during the lockdown; it comes into my head two or three times a week.
The music you listen to as a teenager definitely lodges in a weird way.
I was a teenager when Mos Def’s first album Black on Both Sides came out and only yesterday I was quoting him in something I was writing.
I listened to American hip-hop like most kids my age in Ireland in the 90s – mainstream artists like Jay-Z and later Kanye West.
It was music that was in the charts.
Then I got to figure out the rappers who were more speaking to me like Mos Def, The Roots, and today Denise Chaila.
I like hip-hop because of the wordplay and cleverness and dexterity in the lexicon.
Growing up, I was an introvert. I used to listen to them on my discman.
I wasn’t going to nightclubs in Cobh. Maybe a few times, but it wasn’t for me.
When I was 10 or 11, I read all of the Little Women series.
We owned those books so it wasn’t so much a question of choice. I read them repeatedly. They’re long books.
That level of concentration that I had – I cannot match now.
Now I’m such a mess because I’m addicted to Instagram and so on whereas back then I read Louisa May Alcott for six hours a day for a year.
The BBC’s In Our Time is my new obsession. It’s presented by Melvin Bragg, this grumpy man who knows a lot about the world.
He doesn’t have time for chit-chat. So many podcasts are chatty. They take their time – it’s part of the medium, but he’s not interested in chatting: “Hello, welcome to the show. Today, we’re going to talk about the Roman Emperor Augustus. When was Augustus born? Why did he reform the Roman system of taxation?”
When you’re listening to it, it’s kind of like a firehose of information.
They’re dense and they discuss quite arbitrary topics like mushrooms but they make for really fun, fascinating listening.
