The great wide open

Arthur Mathews is sitting by the canal – the nice syringe-free stretch behind Pepper Cannister Church – saying the most fantastic things. No, he’s never read The Third Policeman. No, he’s never really read Flann O’Brien at all. Arthur Mathews. Author of Well Remembered Days. Co-creator of Father Ted. Never read Flann O’Brien. I attempt to process this information by sticking these unlikely components together.
“Couple of the newspaper columns, maybe,” he shrugs, throwing me a scrap. “Lots of people think I have. A couple of years ago a documentary crowd phoned me up, asked me to go on camera to talk about Flann O’Brien. I had to explain that I’ve never read a single book and send them to Tommy Tiernan. He's a huge fan.” 
This oversight does, of course, create a dilemma. If Mr. Mathews were to read this country’s pre-eminent surrealist now, it would deprive him of the pleasure of informing join-the-dots journalists such as myself that everything they thought they knew about Arthur Mathews is wrong: “It’s a real problem,” he says. “I’d really like to. I know I should. But every time a journalist asks me about Flann O’Brien as an influence, it would ruin my answer.” 
No matter. We have a Plan B. If Arthur Mathews failed to school at the feet of Myles na gCopaleen, he did, at least, pick up on several of his disciples, most notably Frank Hall.
“I loved Hall’s Pictorial Weekly,” says Mr. Mathews. “I saw that series ’A Little Bit Funny’ which is such a brilliant title. It’s not really funny. Maybe a tiny bit. So I was always aware of Frank. He’s one of those people that was always funny in anything he was in. Otherwise a book that was very influential for me was Zany Afternoons by Bruce McCall, the Canadian guy who used to do cartoons for the New Yorker.”
By now, it’s quite clear that I can’t really suggest that Mr. Mathews’ good-natured knockabout brand of satire is directly from the Flann O’Brien school. Damn. It’s such a neat idea. Both writers are custard pie satirists, they trip on the absurdity of Hibernian arrangements without demanding a radical or even sensible political alternative. Like situationists or Dadaists.
“Oh, like the guys who went around pushing nuns into puddles for the laugh,” nods Mr. Mathews. “Yeah. Okay, I’ll go with that one. I agree with that. A situationist.  I can live with that.”
We can also agree on the primary target. Crap Ireland, a ridiculous place where corruption never goes unrewarded and a condition that seemed to disappear in the early ‘90s; Crap Ireland is what Arthur Mathews is all about.
“I don’t know,“ says Mr. Mathews. “A lot of Ireland is still Crap Ireland. Has it got crap again since the recession? Maybe. But people like me never really believed that Crap Ireland had gone away. The idea that Ireland was a world economic leader just never seemed right. I knew Crap Ireland would come back. It’s a return to the proper order of things.”
There’s a lot of Crap Ireland in Wide Open Spaces, a new film from Batchelor’s Walk alumni, Tom Hall, directed from a screenplay by Arthur Mathews. (There’s also a touch of The Third Policeman but we’re not talking about that anymore.) An eerily prescient, recession-friendly tale of ne-er-do-wells, dodgy politicians and a Famine theme park, Wide Open Spaces revels in a peculiarly Irish school of crapness. Ardal O' Hanlon and Ewan Bremner are the vaguely Beckettian duo who, on the run from irate eBay customers, take up purgatorial labouring posts for cute hooer, Gerald (Owen Roe). The lads’ unusual and tangential duties include debt collection, fence painting and hiding Gerard McSorley, a tricky T.D. with reporter Kelly Campbell on his tail.
The skies are defiantly grey. The humour is black. The coffin ship is pink.
“This is what I mean about Crap Ireland always being with us,” explains Mr. Mathews. “Two of the things in the film – one guy making up a long story about needing to drive somewhere to get out of paying up, and the other scene when he hits someone on a bike and it turns out he owes him money, both of those things actually happened to Mick Nugent. I wouldn’t like to be chasing people for money nowadays.”
Throughout Wide Open Spaces, there are echoes of The Restraint Of Beasts, I note.
“I actually had read that,” says Mr. Mathews. “Graham (Linehan) was working on an adaptation of that for ages. But it’s one of those books. They’ve been through millions of drafts but can’t quite get the ending to work. Because it doesn’t really have one.”
By now, we’re all familiar with The Arthur Mathews Story. As a youngster, he moved from Meath to Termonfeckin, where, he found inspiration in the Crap Ireland around him.
“A lot of stuff I’ve worked on is completely instinctive”, he says. “When you read books like the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, it's really natural to want to respond to them. Or a few years ago, when my aunt died, we were clearing out her house and I found a brilliant booklet called ‘How To Be A Catholic In England’ which she brought over with her in the ‘50s. I love all that stuff.”
Mr. Mathews first hooked up with Graham Linehan and Declan Lynch – he has since collaborated with both – during his tenure at the all seeing, all knowing Hot Press magazine: “Declan Lynch was there from the beginning, more or less. I came in around the same time as Damien Corless and Fiona Looney and George Byrne. It was good to be there. It was good to be around people who had the same sort of sense of humour and outlook. I got a bit of it in college but going into Hot Press, that blank punk second generation of Hot Press, everybody was on the same level.”
And you all know the rest. Messrs. Mathews and Linehan go to London, work on such seminal comedy shows as Harry Enfield and Chums, create the mighty Father Ted and leave fingerprints on everything from Brass Eye to I’m Alan Partridge. Beyond this creative partnership, Mr. Mathews has found success with the excellent spoof novel, Well Remembered Days: Eoin O’Ceallaigh’s Memoirs of a Twentieth-century Irish Catholic and I, Keano, a mock opera co-authored between Mr. Mathews, Michael Nugent and Paul Woodfull.
As we meet, he’s just taking a break from the editing suites where he’s working on Val Falvey T.D., a six-part TV show for RTÉ. More situationism from Crap Ireland, I venture.
“Yeah,” he says. “There’s just something that bit funnier about corrupt Irish politicians. In Britain, they’ll try to make reasonable excuses. Here, they’ll just tell you they don’t have a bank account.”

Wide Open Spaces opens July 17