Looney Soup

RTE’s brand new comedy sketch show Stew, which aired for the first time last Monday night, is the latest attempt by the national broadcaster to tickle the nation’s fancy.
The omens are certainly good for the six-part series, which comes with an impeccable pedigree. Produced by Grand Pictures, who brought us ground-breaking comedy dramas such as Paths to Freedom, Fergus’ Wedding and Spin the Bottle, Stew was devised by two of the country’s most experienced comic practitioners – stand-up veteran and comedy actor Paul Tylak and writer/performer/musician, Paul Woodfull.
The show, described by RTE as, “a pacey, character-driven sketch show with a wide variety of comedy from classic slapstick to surreal to black humour,” is directed by Orla Walsh and features the cream of homegrown comic and acting talent, including Darragh Kelly (Paths To Freedom), Barbara Bergin (Fair City), Tara Flynn (The Nualas), Patrick McDonnell (Fr. Eoin McLove from Father Ted) and Katy Davis (Dead Bodies).
The first show in the series introduced an impressively broad selection of familiar character types, including a grumpy old duffer, a jealous wife, a self-pitying alcoholic, a neighbour from hell and a pair of painfully accurate and very familiar looking zany breakfast DJ types. It also includes more contemporary observations on the new multi-cultural Ireland, including a pushy, ambitious Pakistani parent.
Until now, Paul Woodfull was best known for his musical adventures with U2 parodists The Joshua Trio and his other equally audacious outfit the Glam Tarts. More recently he has tread – or more accurately, staggered – the boards, as the drunken, vomiting, republican ballad singer Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly. He is currently working on a comedy musical about the Roy Keane/ Mick McCarthy episode in Saipan with Arthur Mathews and Mick Nugent. He explains how he became involved in Stew:
“Basically myself and Paul [Tylak] had the same booking agent who put the two of us together and we started working on some ideas,” he says. “It worked out pretty well and what happened was, she was talking to Jenny Griffin who commissions comedy in RTE. She became interested in what we were doing and she encouraged us to approach a production company.
“That’s what we did and they commissioned a pilot, which they liked, so we were then commissioned to write the series. It was a good way of doing it. The pilot had very high production standards – we’ve even used bits of it throughout the series rather than waste the material. But it got other people interested in the project. We asked Arthur Matthews if he’d be interested in helping out and he came onboard as a script editor.”
The series, in which the writers also appear as various characters, recalls other similarly minded UK shows like The Harry Enfield Show, The Fast Show and Little Britain – albeit with a heavy Irish emphasis. How would Woodfull compare it to what we’ve seen in the past?
“People will make their own minds up about it in terms of comparisons ,” he says, “but I thought a lot about how these things were done outside of Ireland. I think there hasn’t been as much of an emphasis here on the writing element of comedy. We had a lot of meetings and brainstorming sessions and we wrote loads of stuff, we had about three times the material we needed. Arthur [Matthews] was good at cutting us down to size and making it tight.
“Some of the sketches are quirky observations on the kind of people that we’ve all met, but it’s not satirical in any way and there are no impressions of real people. We all felt it had been done too often in the past. But Paul and I have done a lot of characters over the years; I tend to do narky or arrogant characters. I do quite like playing a victim. It gives you a lot more freedom.”
Are any elements of Stew likely to be controversial in any way?
“There’s a couple of things in there which some people might find controversial but it’s difficult to go any further down the road in terms of controversy. It’s all character-based stuff. It’s not issue-led like some sketch shows. The actors were great; once we came up with a fully developed character it became easier to write for them.”
Other key features of Stew, according to Woodfull, are the fact that it’s set in the present and not in the past, it’s location rather than studio-based, and it’s both urban and rural in terms of the characters.
“There was a brilliant crew working on the series, he adds. “They were great to work with from our point of view. There was a tight schedule and there were times in the project when things could get scary from our point of view. But the director Orla Walsh did a fantastic job. Grand Pictures seem to know how to put a good bunch of people together and that goes right down to the make-up and hair people. So at the end of the day if you think the thing isn’t any good, you can blame us for not coming up with material that was funny enough.”

Stew goes out on RTE 2 Monday Nights at 9.30pm