Last year, in a front-page story in the Sunday Independent, the music mogul and TV star told of how Doyle – a former Kilbarrack schoolteacher turned internationally bestselling novelist – had snubbed an offer of a multi-million-euro movie idea from Simon Cowell.
Walsh had recommended Doyle as the ideal candidate to write a script based on a film idea by Cowell. However, at the time, Doyle claimed to have never heard of the multimillionaire X Factor supremo.
“Of all my time in show business, the biggest disappointment of a well-known personality I have ever come in contact with was Roddy Doyle,” Walsh told the Sindo. “I rang him one day with a fantastic offer. Simon Cowell had an idea for a movie that would be huge and I thought of Roddy, that it would be a great opportunity for him, and I rang him to put it to him.
“He was just so rude. The rudest man in show business,” Walsh continued. “I said, ‘Roddy, Simon Cowell has an idea for a movie and I thought of you’. It was a huge opportunity. Huge! But he just said, ‘Simon who?’ He claimed not to know who he was.
“And he was just as rude to me. That was it, I thought. Never again.”
Doyle maintained a diplomatic silence when the story originally appeared in April of last year. However, in a Hot Press interview with Olaf Tyaransen which is due to be published next week, the 55-year-old author claimed that the conversation with Walsh happened in 2003 or 2004 – and he genuinely hadn’t heard of Cowell at the time.
“It was a bit mystifying,” Doyle admitted, when asked about the Sunday Independent story. “And funny enough, more people stopped me and congratulated me as if I’d done something. I was in the airport with a friend of mine and this guy came up to me and he nearly pulled my hand off. ‘Fair fucks to you for what you said about Louis Walsh!’
“It’s a good while ago,” he continued. “I have a visual sense that, when I answered the phone, I was in the house I used to live in. We moved, I think, in 2004 so it happened years before the story appeared. You got the sense from the paper that I had I just put down the phone that day. That’s why it’s a bit mystifying. I was aware that there was a thing called The X Factor, but I had never seen it. That came later when my kids were older, my daughter particularly. But at the time I hadn’t seen it.
“So I got a call and it’s Louis Walsh. He said, ‘Do you know Simon Cowell?’ And I said ‘No, I don’t’ and he said ‘He’s the guy I do X Factor with’. I was aware he was a bit of a hate figure, but I’d never actually seen him in action. And he said, ‘Well, he’d like to talk to you about this film idea, can I give him your phone number?’ And I immediately said 'no'. It would be a waste of time because there’s nothing in that world that I want. So he said ‘Oh’ and I think we said goodbye to each other and that was it.
“And then six or seven years later, somebody phones me and says, ‘What did you say to Louis Walsh?’ So it’s a non-event really. And underlined the wisdom of saying 'no' in the first place. I think it might have been a quiet week for Louis. He called me ‘the rudest man in showbiz’! And my wife said, ‘Sure, you’re not in showbiz!’”
That may have been true then, but with a stage musical version of his debut novel The Commitments, scripted by Doyle and directed by Jamie Lloyd, set to open in London’s West End in October, the acclaimed author is now very much in show business. Not that he’s neglecting his day job. Doyle’s tenth novel The Guts – which makes The Barrytown Trilogy now The Barrytown Quartet – has just been published by Jonathan Cape.
You can read Olaf Tyaransen’s full interview in the next issue of Hot Press, out August 15th.