Hello, old stock! Ask Audrey's Reggie is up for a jolly good show at the Everyman
Pat Fitzpatrick: riding high as the posh protagonist of An Evening With Reggie
“Do you know what, this is the first time that I’ve talked about myself,” says Pat Fitzpatrick.
“All the time I’ve been just a journalist, and Reggie was the first time people were like, ‘We’d better talk to this guy’.”
Chatting in the kitchen of his Ballycotton home, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Pat Fitzpatrick is a self-aware and gentle man. Which is a bit disconcerting, seeing as he’s the absolute spit of everyone’s favourite superior, condescending, Cork Old Money boor, Reggie from the Blackrock Road.
“Hello, old stock,” he can’t help but greet me in Reggie’s plummy upper-crust tones, before making a shocking confession.
“I’m not from the Blackrock Road! I’m actually from Kinsale, and my mother lives in Bishopstown.”
Pat is 55, married with two kids, seven and nine, and, he adds, he went to Pres. Studying electrical engineering in college led to 20 years working in IT before his college friendship with Brendan O’Connor resulted in writing work with the Sunday Independent.
“This was late Celtic Tiger, just before the crash. when we were still all doing mad things, so I gave up my job in IT and became a full-time writer and freelance journalist,” he recalls.
“Then I was writing gags for the Saturday Night Show that Brendan was doing, the much-maligned monologue at the start, which was the hardest job I’ve ever done, but it was great exercise, because it made me learn how gags work.”
A spoof agony aunt column in the Cork News followed, called Ask Doctor Magoo, she’ll know what to do. When the Cork News folded, Doctor Magoo became Ask Audrey in the , and soon Ask Audrey was on Red FM too.
“I love it. There’s so much freedom in writing as someone else, the same as with Reggie. There’s a lot to be said for being someone else! Reggie was one of the characters, I hadn’t done him so much, but we did a live podcast in what was the Kino and I did Reggie, and the crowd just seemed to react to him.
“‘Hello, old stocks’ — I was in a sailing cap — ‘Hello, old stocks, I’ve just come from the golf course’ — I could sense the crowd just kind of perked up when I did it.”
He soon began tweeting short videos of Reggie and received a lot of positive responses.
“The first big one was during the pandemic, when they lifted the county restriction, and I was telling people in Kerry and Tipperary and Waterford to stay where they were, they weren’t welcome here. That was the one that took off. And then I realised, it’s about places. If you do it about a place, people laugh at themselves. Limerick people, Waterford people were sharing it.” He believes a lot of Cork humour comes from Cork people being very pass-remarkable, especially in the aside, he says.
“‘Of course, he wouldn’t have earned that himself you know’, the second sentence, the under-the-breath sentence. My mother’s family would be masters at that.”
He then began making outrageous comments about Northsiders, assuming he would be cancelled, not realising, he says, that Northsiders, who “think they’re the best people in the world”, would get the joke.
But that begs the question: what do people on the Blackrock Road make of Reggie?
“They love him! The reason I know all this is I do private shout-outs, which is, to be honest, how I’ve monetised this. ‘Hello, it’s Reggie here, happy birthday! I’m sorry to hear you only live on the Glasheen Road’. I get a lot of emails, ‘We’re from the Blackrock Road, well, we’re actually from the Castle Road’. You know, they’d be telling you they’re from the good bit.”
He feels there is a prevailing orthodoxy at the moment that everyone will be offended by every comment about them, which he says is not true, although he concedes that he avoids genuine nastiness.
“People have a sense of humour, and Cork is a particularly robust place, I think. I think it was Eoghan Harris who said there was an element of cockpit about Cork banter that actually comes from the fact that everyone was cheek by jowl in the markets in the city centre, so there was this rivalry and friendliness in the same breath and that made for sharpness of language where you have jousting the whole time, and you get that sense in the market.”
Reggie has a certain universal appeal, he feels, and he has a Cork cousin who lives in Warrington, in England.
“He was saying there’s a Reggie in Warrington, there’s a Glen Rovers in Warrington, there’s all the references he has, they have different names, but they’re the same categories that people use to judge each other. This is gonna sound really pretentious, but James Joyce wrote about Dublin. It does travel. People have always said ‘You should do one about Ennis now!’. The point is I know exactly the references in Cork, and I don't know anything about Ennis [Reggie voice] thank God.”
In , Pat promises, more will be revealed about where Reggie came from, not least the source of his money.
“Reggie would be a man about town, and into open-minded women, and all that stuff. He's RCYC, of course, and he goes on holidays in Martinique and Crookhaven, nowhere else, but he wouldn’t go ashore, he’d stay on the yacht in Crookhaven. And that's about it, because you don't need anything else, really. Married to Marjorie, open marriage, obviously. Two kids, One is called Hugo, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever named the other one, Clara, I think. But that’s it.”
He says Reggie reminds him of Boris Johnson, another fictional cartoon character to whom, at the time of writing at least, consequences don’t seem to apply.
“Reggie does all these things, and says all these things, and gets conned by Seán Mike Seán Mike O’Shea O’Shea, but there’s no consequences, he’s back again next week. He’s a cockroach, you can’t get rid of him. And I have that notion of him as well, he’s failed up, like a lot of these people, so he’s never had any consequences in his life.”
With , he says, director Pat Kiernan has proven invaluable in educating him in what will and won’t work over an hour in a theatre.
He teases that, in the show, Reggie has commissioned a new study on Norries; he will sing “at least one song”; and he will bring one lucky person up from the audience.
When I ask how Pat, or Reggie, might deal with a heckler, he replies darkly that we’re about to find out one way or another.
“Reggie’s life is a put-down to other people, so I think I’ll be okay once I’m comfortable with the flow of the text, and I’m comfortable with the text, I think I’ll be alright. There’ll be scope in it to deviate a bit, but this is the good thing about having a theatre director to tell you it gets flabby if you just start throwing in non-sequiturs and throw-away lines, and I get that. My instinct is to throw in barbs, but if you do that, you’d be there till midnight. It’s an hour, and people have other things to be doing, and it forces me to tighten the work.”
Finally, and if not exactly in a Daniel Day-Lewis sense, is Reggie almost a separate persona to Pat Fitzpatrick?
“He’s not that separate a character. I started him out as a much more nasal, outrageous character, and slowly he’s come back to being not that far away from me, to be honest,” he says, with a laugh.
“I’ve always been telling jokes and trying to make people laugh, so we’re about to see now if I can make them laugh for an hour.”
- An Evening with Reggie, written and performed by Pat Fitzpatrick, AKA Reggie from the Blackrock Road, and directed by Pat Kiernan, runs Saturday, April 2 - Saturday, April 16 (excluding Monday & Tuesday). Preview Thursday, March 31 - Friday, April 1. Live at The Everyman
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