Filmmaker Seamus Murphy on The Peculiar Sensation Of Being Pat Ingoldsby: "I knew he had a timeless Dublin voice"

Irish photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy has returned to Dublin – if only to make a film. The recipient of seven World Press photo awards for his remarkable work, Murphy has travelled the world capturing incredible images and footage of people in the States, Afghanistan, Kosovo and beyond – but his latest project is closer to home.

Now based in the UK, Murphy, who previously filmed PJ Harvey in his film A Dog Called Money, came back to Dublin to make a film about one of the city’s beloved but now-camera-shy characters: former television presenter and poet Pat Ingoldsby.

The film uses Ingoldsby's poems and candid anecdotes to paint a complex portrait of his beloved Dublin, and how both he and Ireland have transformed over the years – politically, socially, culturally and even architecturally. While many people may remember Ingoldsby as the eccentric 1980s presenter of Pat’s Hat and Pat’s Chat, the film allows Ingoldsby to reveal his poetic, absurd and philosophical side as he speaks about his life.

Pat Ingoldsby.

Having long since retreated from public view, Ingoldsby’s unique view of Dublin is still important, and in fact Murphy only initially wanted Ingoldsby to be part of a small project he was working on. Instead, the two men created Murphy’s new film, The Peculiar Sensation Of Being Pat Ingoldsby.

“In 2013 I was making short film for the The New Yorker about Dublin,” explains Murphy. “It came to me that Pat Ingoldsby would will be a fantastic voice to have in this film, because I felt it needed something far more Dublin than I was getting. Almost like a timeless Dublin voice, which could be somebody very contemporary, but it could also be somebody from a century ago, and Pat’s got that.”

Looking for Ingoldsby, Murphy was told to keep an eye out for him outside the Bank of Ireland selling his poetry, but Murphy was also warned – “I was told to be careful because he’s very prickly, he hates photographers and people approaching him with any type of camera.”

And indeed, when Murphy went looking for Pat, he wasn’t there. “He was completely elusive, he was a ghost!” says the director.

But as Murphy discovered, Ingoldsby isn’t prickly, he simply guards his privacy. After years working in RTE presenting television programmes, appearing on radio, and trying to break into Ireland’s literary establishment, Ingoldsby made the conscious decision to retreat from the public eye.

He instead started self-publishing his writing and selling it himself, supported by local bookshops. His poetry is often absurdist and beautifully observed, as he writes about the characters he encounters around Dublin and their struggles with loneliness, addiction, homelessness, and the ways in which we try to connect with each other.

“Before I worked with him, I'd sort of heard about him,” says Murphy. “I'd seen him on the television when I was a teenager. I'd be passing through the room and I'd see this character. I could see he was a cool guy. I could see that he was very unusual for RTE. I knew about his persona, and I knew that he had mental health issues - a bit like Spike Milligan, he had depression, but he was sort of a genius.

“He was kind of a guy who was completely unpredictable and incredibly creative and imaginative, and very, very funny. My brother-in-law loves poetry as well, and he might have read some stuff out to me in the pub or something, and I was really impressed by it. So it was a kind of a distant knowledge of Pat, but it was of this very impressive, iconoclastic character.”

When Murphy finally tracked down Ingoldsby, the two quickly developed a rapport, and the filmmaker became even more aware of what an important and singular Dublin voice Ingoldsby had, both in his poetry, and in his philosophical and empathetic way of viewing the world. As he would eventually go on to discuss in Murphy’s film, the poet grew up in Catholic Ireland and had an unhappy childhood.

As a boy, he had polio which left him with significant physical and health challenges, and he also suffered from depression. Committing to Gestalt therapy – a form of therapy focusing on personal awareness, responsibility and freedom - gave Ingoldsby an ability to hold his own experience while also empathising with people around him, particularly the most vulnerable in society. But whether telling stories or writing poetry, he manages to combine empathy with great humour and heart.

“What I love about Pat’s poetry is his sense of the absurd, because let's face it, life is pretty absurd,” says Murphy. “He nailed it. But at the same time, he's very respectful of people. That’s part of his own challenges – his physical challenges and his polio, and his mental health - he's incredibly respectful of the people he met on the streets who he wrote about in his poetry. He’s this incredible, Dickens-like character documenting the streets and the people of Dublin – the people that you probably wouldn't really get to know that well.

“But he got to know them, and because he is a certain kind of person and because he doesn’t judge people, his poetry really speaks on an interesting level about Dublin streetlife. It’s the mix of the very beautiful, absurd, sometimes very highly romantic side, and then a really gritty, realistic side. He has an incredible range of poetry.

“And the reason I wanted to make a film was I wanted to actually share that love of his poetry and as you say, exactly, people might just walk by him on the street, or some people might know him from television but don’t know his poetry. I want to spread the word about his poetry, because I think he’s a very distinctive voice.”

Ingoldsby was somewhat overlooked by Ireland’s literary establishment and became aware of how being in the public eye wasn’t good for his ego and mental health. Before Murphy’s film, he has largely eschewed being interviewed, filmed or photographed – but as he gets older, Ingoldsby has become more open to speaking about his work.

Pat Ingoldsby. Credit: RTE.

His attitude towards the media – the awareness of the danger it can pose to one’s sense of self, but also the possibility of art being celebrated and remembered – speaks to his complex character. Ingoldsby had a difficult childhood, but became a children’s television presenter who gave so much joy.

He grew up in Catholic Ireland where so much was repressed and unspoken, and so now he speaks openly about trauma, mental health and treatment. He has physical difficulties and challenges due to polio, and so has immersed himself in the world of language, words and expression.

“Yeah, you're right,” says Murphy. “He's like the reluctant celebrity, the accidental celebrity. That was the thing that fascinated me about when I started interviewing him. And the way I started interviewing him was slightly by stealth, because the agreement was he wouldn't be in the film, or he certainly wouldn't be interviewed in the film.

“So I would come along and ask him to read his own poetry because he's got an incredible delivery, and I really wanted to get his voice. So I went to his house to do this rather than book a recording studio, which would cost a lot of money. I knew it was going to take time. I wanted him to be comfortable at his home, and I rigged up a recording situation.

“But in the middle of first day, he kept telling all these stories about the poetry – and the stories and poems bleed into each other, because his poetry is often very similar to telling a story. People will say, ‘Oh I love that poem about when he talks about his father walking down the stairs with him in his arms. And I’ll say, ‘Oh that’s not a poem, that’s actually him talking about it.’ They’re indivisible.”

Stories turned into conversation which turned into interviews, and Murphy started filming. The result is a film that is intimate, honest and beautifully observed, complete with Ingoldsby reading his own work and wandering around Dublin, meeting the characters he has known and loved for years.

Shot during the pandemic, the film features poetry about “the invisible people” – older people, people with chronic illnesses and those who had to cocoon during Covid, who were often left feeling isolated, alone and forgotten. It speaks not only to the isolation, disconnection and grief that many of us are experiencing since Covid, but also highlights Ingoldsby’s ability to always empathise with the vulnerable and overlooked.

“There is a poem at the end that was written during lockdown, and I did wonder whether or not to put it in,” says Murphy. “Thinking 20 years down the line, 30 years, does this need to be in? Then I thought no, this is such a huge thing in our lives, I think it was it was important to sort of mark it. And there are a lot of things that make it so relevant for Pat – one, that he was confined to his home, and number two, that it was a virus. It was a virus that infected him as a child and has marked the rest of his life, which was polio.

“There’s a poem at the very beginning of the film where he says ‘How did you find me?’ and he’s talking to the polio virus. So he's very familiar with viruses and what they do to people. But also, during Covid, we were able to talk on the phone and we had a lot of phone conversations, and he was talking about how lucky he was. He has a very full life. And he has these amazing neighbours who were looking after other people, younger people.

“But he was thinking about the pandemic, people being invisible and people of his age who were left alone. It’s saying, don’t judge us so quickly, don’t write us off, don’t dismiss us, don’t forget us. This awareness of the vulnerability of humans informs everything he does - whether it’s his writing, or how he deals with people when he was selling his books on the street.”

For Murphy, the film is about Ingoldsby, but it’s also poetry, connection, community and Ireland right now.

“I made the film thinking it should not just be for an Irish audience,” he says. “Now it may be that the greatest appeal is to Irish audiences, because they understand everything and they may have a memory of Pat. But I did want this to be a film that exposed people to Dublin, and a sense of Dublin that isn’t touristy Dublin, but is real Dublin. And Pat to me is real Dublin, he’s the richness of Dublin, the wit of Dublin, take-no-prisoners Dublin!”

The Peculiar Sensation Of Being Pat Ingoldsby is in cinemas now.