There s a maxim that states that if you really want to understand a country, you must visit its prisons. Alternatively, you could try looking at its comedians. In the case of Northern Ireland, you could do worse than study the scripts of the Hole In The Wall Gang, the Northern comedy ensemble who have if you ll excuse the expression made a killing lampooning the bigotry and prejudice endemic on both sides of the sectarian divide. For the HITWG, laughter is indeed the best medicine or rather antidote to the sanctimonious humourlessness of most political discourse in the North. And, of course, though the Gang are first and foremost satirists, there is ultimately nothing frivolous about what they are trying to do.
When we started off, says the Gang s Damon Quinn, we had this programme called The Show, which was actually a rip-off of RTE s Nighthawks. It was lambasted because it was the only thing in about 15 years which had tried to do anything about politics in the North. It was well ahead of its time but it got absolutely slammed. I remember there was a big newspaper headline once: THE SHOW MUST GO . Down at the bottom, there was a tiny paragraph: Man Shot Dead . And on the third page, hidden away, there was: Berlin Wall Falls .
Now you ve got people like Paddy Kielty, continues partner-in-crime, Michael McDowell (for the record, not the Republic s Attorney General), who started to do stuff about the Troubles on TV. It s becoming easier. It s very healthy now. There used to be a time when you d get up and do a joke and an impression of Ian Paisley and that would be enough everybody would fall around the place laughing. The audience is getting more sophisticated now, and that won t do anymore.
After the departure of Nuala McKeever late last year, the Hole In The Wall Gang now consist of five members, three of whom Quinn, McDowell and Tim McGarry write the material. Quinn and McDowell made the trip down from their native Belfast to help promote their BBC sitcom, Give My Head Peace, which after a successful run on TV was recently granted a commercial release on video.
Give My Head Peace grew out of out of a one-off television special the group did for the BBC, called Two Ceasefires And A Wedding, which won an award from the Royal Television Society. Like many TV comedy shows, its genesis was on radio (the Gang did a satirical show called Perforated Ulster, which they describe as a Northern version of Scrap Saturday) and made the jump only after figures had suggested that that there was an audience out there for the troupe s highly political tongue-in-cheek humour.
The modus operandi of Give My Head Peace is to set up stereotypes of characters in Northern Irish life from terrorist sympathisers to meddling RUC officers and exaggerate their traits to such an extent that they appear ridiculous. But they are adamant that an intricate knowledge of Northern politics is not needed to enjoy their comedy.
The show s very slapstick, argues Quinn, that s why it appeals to kids. A lot of the storylines would fit into any comedy show it s not exclusive to life in Northern Ireland. One of the scripts ( Hollywood On The Falls ) is about a Hollywood star who s come over to Belfast to research his role for his film about Eye-urr-land . That could have been set anywhere.
The writing nucleus of the Gang met up and started performing sketches when they were students at Queen s University in Belfast Quinn is a former lawyer ( there are those who say that I was much funnier in court, he quips) who hails from the same area of Catholic west Belfast as Gerry Adams while McDowell comes from the Protestant community. As a group, they have been very conscious that their satire must be aimed at both sides equally.
We performed shows to the entire Sinn Fein front bench, remembers Quinn, in the days before they were in government, when they were still social pariahs. Gerry Adams came backstage and all these photographs were taken we had no option and when the BBC found about it, they said, you did what?! . So we realized that we had to get one of us with Ian Paisley too.
Have there been people who fail to see the funny side of what they do?
Yes. They tend to be po-faced peaceniks, answers Quinn, who think you shouldn t be making jokes about the North because it s too serious. My answer to that question is always the same: look at M*A*S*H, one of the most successful sitcoms ever done and set among the bleak background of the Korean war, with Hawkeye operating on people blood everywhere, fellas lying in bits and he s cracking jokes about Honeycup! And it worked. It s all down to your skill as a writer.
But it s also got to the stage, adds McDowell, that should a politician have a go at us, he s gonna look like a wanker.
Following the success of Give My Head Peace, the Hole In The Wall Gang are busy writing material for potential projects for both RTE and BBC. One such venture is provisionally titled, Comedies Of Error, an historical comedy which looks at the events of 1798 and 1916, among others, from a sort of Blackadder-type perspective.
We have this running character called Barry Simpson, says Quinn, who plays his own ancestors down the years of Irish history. He is the postal worker who volunteers to work his bank holiday in 1916. He is chief safety officer on the Titanic. He is an ice cream van salesman who started the Troubles in Derry in 1969.
Another project, Aye, Sure, Commissioner!, is set in Ireland in 2020.
The idea is that the country will be run by two civil servants, one in Dublin, one in Belfast, says Quinn. The idea is that they re on the make. It s like Yes, Minister meets Bilko . We could have President Adams, and a statue to Ian Paisley in Dublin, and Mary Robinson as Pope, Michael Flatley with his new show, Lord Of The Zimmerframe . And the tribunals are still going on!!!
All too likely, that one.
Give My Head Peace The Video is released through BBC distribution. There is an accompanying book featuring selected scripts published by Blackstaff Books.