A comedy about mad characters situated in rural Ireland where people say "feck" a lot. No, it's not Father Ted: The Sequel, it's The Fitz, the debut sitcom from the multi-talented Irish comic/writer Owen O'Neill. "Right, we'd better get the Father Ted thing out of the way first," says a clearly exasperated O'Neill, speaking from the wings of a London theatre, where he's about to perform a show. "Just because the show is populated by eccentric Irish characters who live in the countryside, doesn't mean people should make comparisons that can't stand up. This show goes back to 1991 but, because of the situation in the North, couldn't be shown until now. People who know my work will know this to be true."
The Fitz, which began last night on BBC2 and runs for the next five Fridays, is about a family, the Fitzgeralds, all of them with blazing red hair and a streak of eccentricity that lies somewhere between the lovable fool and the plain stone mad. There's Ma (Ruth McCabe) and Pa (Eamon Morrissey) and their six kids: Bobby, Joe, Jackie, Teddy, John F and Kennedy. They live in a house that straddles the Border - half is in the Republic, half in the North - and all manner of mayhem ensues as the series progresses and we learn more about this highly dysfunctional but curiously likeable mini-tribe.
If O'Neill is sensitive about the Ted comparisons, it's because the advance English publicity on the show has talked about little else. An article in this week's Guardian which said: "The BBC pulled its punches (with The Fitz) and copied an existing show - Father Ted" and which later went on to patronise with: "The Fitz is a real missed opportunity at a time when the Irish are transforming from the butt of racist jokes into a modern, post-industrial society," provoked O'Neill's ire.
Not that O'Neill is that bothered by what the critics have written, he's just determined to get the truth across about a programme that in one way or another has taken up 10 years of his life. "Ten years ago, I used to have two characters called Big Robert and Wee Mary in my stand-up routine. The sitcom I wrote for them was based in a pub which straddled the Border and it was going to be called Yellow Bullock. It went through all sorts of development stuff and a while later I was doing the Stand-Up show on BBC and doing material about this family who all had bright red hair.
"The producer of the show said I should put the family in the sitcom, which I did, and Channel 4 were interested in showing it. They loved it but were afraid to go with it for two reasons: first the characters said "feck" a lot, which they took as "fuck" - remember this was pre-Ted - but more importantly, there was a lot of material about British soldiers and the then situation in the North. I was told that if a bomb went off in London they'd have to pull the whole show and the expense would be enormous. So, in a sense, the reason you're getting The Fitz 10 years down the line is due to the peace process. Funny, I know."
Like most of O'Neill's best work, The Fitz draws heavily on autobiographical experiences. He is one of 14 children from Cookstown, Co Tyrone ("when I moved to England when I was 18, I always told people I was from a family of five, I was scared in that silly teenage way that they'd think I was a gypsy") and some of the sketches in the show are directly taken from his own experience growing up in a large family (and in British TV terms, the six Fitzgerald children constitute a big family). "If it's not something that happened in our family, it's something that happened to another family in our street, or something we heard about another family somewhere else. But really, most of it is out of my own imagination. I tend to take things that happened in reality and exaggerate them or twist them around."
The Fitzgerald children are played by D'Unbelievables (Jon Kenny and Pat Shortt); Bronagh Gallagher (The Commitments etc); Eamonn Owens ([ IT]The Butcher Boy); Deborah Barnett and Billy Carter - who plays the transvestite son, Kennedy. "I noticed there was a complaint in one of the English papers about Jon Kenny's character, John F, because although grown-up, he couldn't read or write. This was construed as some sort of stereotyping and was seen as being anti-PC. The real reason is explained in episode four where we learn that John F left school when he was five because the Janet and John books were taken off the curriculum. Somebody then has to go to Dublin to see if they can find out-of-print copies of the books because that's the only way John F will begin to learn how to read and write," O'Neill says.
"I mean, that should give people a sense of the sort of humour we're doing. Other episodes see the transvestite son appearing as Shirley Bassey in one of these Stars In Their Eyes competitions and he ends up falling in love with a British soldier - which I suppose is a bit of a parody of The Crying Game; and in another episode, this total stranger appears at the breakfast table claiming to be another son who's `been in his room for 25 years' and has to prove himself to be a real Fitzgerald, which he does by being able to say how many press-ups the Ma can do when she's drunk."
O'Neill is at pains to point out that the first show was probably the most unrepresentative of the whole series. "It was the most overtly Irish of the six - there was a priest, the church and the Virgin Mary in there - so maybe that's where all the comparisons with other programmes are coming from, as obviously the reviewers seemed to have based their articles on the first episode. As the series progresses, you'll find that the family could well be Norwegian or South American - it's more to do with the inner workings of a slightly mad family than any sense of nationality."
Such is BBC2's confidence in the programme that it has already commissioned a second series, which O'Neill is currently writing - "That doesn't happen, they usually wait to see what the reaction to the first series is like." He is also putting the finishing touches to his new one-man show. His previous works, Shouting From The Scaffold (about his experiences as a labourer in Britain) and Off My Face (about his mad, bad drinking days - he's now a teetotaller), were darkly comic and poignant pieces of work that displayed the sort of depth and understanding you simply weren't supposed to get from a stand-up comic.
His new show, It Was Henry Fonda's Fault, is similarly autobiographical. "When I was 12, I was mad into the cinema and the usher in the local cinema back home knew I was a huge fan of Henry Fonda and films like Grapes Of Wrath (which made me cry when I first saw it) and Twelve Angry Men. He told me that he used to work in Hollywood and was Henry Fonda's stunt double. I was transfixed by his stories about Fonda and always remember him saying to me `Henry had really small hands, just like a girl's'. Years later, I realised he was probably just spoofing me up, trying to impress me. Two years ago, though, I took Off My Face to Los Angeles for a two-week run and one afternoon I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard and I came to that theatre where all the stars' hands are in concrete. I looked around for Henry Fonda's hand prints and there they were: small hands, just like a girl's . . ."
The Fitz is on BBC2 on Fridays at 9.30 p.m. It Was Henry Fonda's Fault is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the Fringe Festival from August 15th to 26th and will come to Dublin later in the year