First encounters

In conversation with FRANCES O'ROURKE

PEARSE McCAUGHEY

is group creative director of advertising agency Cawley Nea\TBWA. He and his wife Mary live in Cabinteely, Co Dublin, and have three children, aged 19 to 22

'OWEN AND I go back to the 1960s, to boy scouts – our group met in a garage on a lane off Baggot Street. I grew up on Fenian Street and went to Westland Row CBS. We were campfire leaders; we were both too silly, didn't make patrol leaders – we were more patrol entertainers.

“There was a priest in Westland Row parish who ran concerts and packed out the Mansion House. In a sketch that Cecil Sheridan wrote for us, we played two old Moore Street dealers. We did that show for a couple of years.

"After the Leaving Cert, Owen was working for a record shop; with the help of a friend I wormed my way into copywriting and have been doing it full-time ever since. I recruited Owen as a copywriter but he never really liked it. He's a very good writer. He wrote a play in the early 1990s called Fear of Feathersthat was really well-received and he's written a lot of radio plays for the BBC.

"Our aim after school was to get on stage, and we went to the Brendan Smith Academy together – this was by night, we both worked during the day. We formed Reckless Theatre and started to stage stuff we thought was avant garde – Ionesco in the Stag's Head, The Threepenny Operain the Embankment in Tallaght. We once got a Dublin Corporation grant of £180, hand-delivered by Gay Mitchell.

“I didn’t have the acting obsession, vocation – I felt, I can’t wait for the phone to ring. I enjoyed rehearsals, the lead up, but was more interested in writing and directing. We wrote for Pajo’s Junk Box and I wrote for Gerry Stembridge’s youth TV show: it was meant to be about careers and jobs, but he turned it into a satirical show.

“Owen made the decision to act full-time early on. He says if I’d stayed acting, we’d be going for the same parts. I say no, I’d have gone for the George Clooney parts! I didn’t want acting that much, the insecurity of it. I married Mary, our three children were born and I decided to stick to the day job.

“Our families are friends, we’ve holidayed together. Owen is a very loyal, very family-oriented person. I’m making him out to be a saint, but he has an inner Victor Meldrew, an inner grumpy old man. But he’s also an enthusiast with wide interests. I’ve never been to his house and come away without a new book or DVD or CD .

“He’s incredibly good humoured. I was always the straight man, he was the funny guy. And he’s my absolute confidante, I would tell him anything – not to be touchy, feely, but if I needed objective advice, he’d be absolutely honest. Lots of guys don’t have that.”

OWEN ROE

is currently playing Da in Daby Hugh Leonard the Gate Theatre, Dublin. As well as acting on stage, he has worked in radio, films and TV. He and his wife, actor Michele Forbes, have two children aged 13 and 17, and live in Killiney, Co Dublin

‘PEARSE AND I have been friends since we were 10. We met at boy scouts, we were both campfire leaders. I grew up on Camden Street, went to Synge Street CBS; Pearse went to Westland Row CBS. We were both show-offs: we wrote plays, songs. Even at that age, I had an interest in music hall, in stars such as Norman Wisdom, Max Miller, and we had a shared interest in comedy. We were probably very irritating, constantly quoting Monty Python and Marty Feldman.

"Our first time on stage was in a show staged at the Mansion House. We were still 10 or 11, and we rehearsed for a month a sketch [actor/panto star] Cecil Sheridan had written: the night before the show, he changed everything! They were great days: you'd be standing in a field with a bowie knife in one hand, an axe in the other. It wasn't quite Lord of the Flies, but sometimes close.

“After leaving school, we both studied acting at the Brendan Smith Academy. There was a young girl sitting at the top of the stairs when we started, the girl I eventually married, Michele Forbes.

“Pearse and I formed a theatre group called Reckless. Taking acting classes was all fine, but we thought we could learn our trade by doing, by making big mistakes in small venues.

“Then Pearse went into advertising and I did too for a while – we were writing scripts and jingles. Once we were asked to come up with names for new beers: we picked actors’ name like Steiger and Hoffman. No one ever made the connection. It’s a very lucrative world, but I had to leave. In the office one day, an account executive was discussing a script and said, ‘I don’t like the word “in”.’ I took a dictionary, tore out a page and said, ‘It’s gone – and so am I’. I couldn’t handle the suits.

"Pearse and I did work together after that: we co-wrote sketches for RTÉ's The Sunday Showand for a segment of a children's show, a soap opera called Fáilte Road Cafe.

“We’re still close friends: I’m an only child and he’s the brother I never had. Pearse would have been a fine actor: he was very intense, the angry young man; I was probably the comedian, didn’t take it that seriously. But I absolutely knew that’s what I had to do – like Ray McAnally said, it’s not I want to act, I have to act. But Pearse couldn’t handle the lifestyle, the insecurity.

“I still trust his judgment about my acting implicitly, he’ll tell me where I’m going wrong. I know that if either of us committed a heinous crime, we wouldn’t turn our backs on each other. I don’t have any friends as close as Pearse.”