Keys to My Life review: Jon Kenny heads back to his hometown of Hospital
Brendan Courtney and Jon Kenny on Keys To My Life, on RTÉ One.
In the closing minutes of episode six of Keys to My Life, Jon Kenny thanks presenter Brendan Courtney “for the journey”.
Because the comic actor has not just been on a bricks-and-mortar tour of the homes of his life – he has been on a journey back to who he was.
“Shop, Mam,” he says, minutes after stepping in the door of the drapery shop his mother ran in the Co Limerick village of Hospital after she was widowed and left with five young children.
That shouted utterance was how Kenny and his siblings alerted their mother to the presence of a customer – back in their childhood home above the shop that “was tiny at the time”.
Later – in the 150-year-old cottage in Lough Gur where he moved with his wife in the late 1980s – Kenny again channels who he was in this house. Here he and Pat Shortt – the other half of comedy duo D'Unbelievables – created and shaped their sell-out show, a sensation for a decade right up to the Millennium.
And suddenly Kenny’s doing a skit for Courtney. Hearing traffic outside, he says: “My God, that road’s gone busy. There was a time when I lived here there wasn’t a car would pass up that road. You’d see an ass going up, maybe twice a day… Now you couldn’t let a chicken out.” And the two are holding their sides, with Kenny commenting “the madness is after coming back into my brain”.
Kenny’s journey is also one of realisation – of what was there back then that he didn’t see. In Hospital, recalling his mother “feeding five mouths out of here”, he says: “She was an amazing woman. I don’t think I realised it at the time, how difficult it was.”
Looking around, he’s emotional, welling up. “It’s all full of memories… full of things I never said. It’s got regret, but… awful happiness and awful joy as well.”
There’s a strong sense of home as a launching pad – not just what happens within its walls, but out of it.
From a childhood village street “full of characters”, Kenny tells Courtney how he’d “meander into laneways” behind the public façade of shops and observe people in their backyards and kitchens. There’s a suggestion that some of the characters he later fleshed out in comedy acts were born here.
Kenny acknowledges the tough bits of his life – school beatings for poor spelling (he had dyslexia), his cancer diagnosis at the height of his comedy career. But as we visit with him the homes of his past, there’s a sense of happy places – which fits with a man whose approach to life is to “go with the flow”.
- Keys To My Life is on RTÉ One on Sundays, and on the RTÉ Player
