Straight to the limit

It's always a cause for some celebration, and some trepidation, when RTE dips its notoriously conservative toe into the waters of comedy. But the broadcaster deserves more than the usual brickbats when it takes a risk with a new, rough and ready format - Straight to Video, a new series starting next week on Network 2, is just such a beast.

Scripted by comedian and writer Karl MacDermott, and directed by Martin Mahon, who has several shorts to his credit as a director, as well as being a respected documentary producer and a former Programming Director of the Dublin Film Festival (when it was something to be reckoned with), the series takes the form of six spoof video diaries.

The diaries chronicle six everyday tales of social maladjustment, shameless fraud and hopeless failure in modern Ireland. Characters range from a Cavan farmer intent on getting into The Guinness Book of Records by setting a new world record for mother-carrying, to a gombeen man raking in the profits from gullible tourists with his Leprechaun World attraction, and a sweet-natured nun looking forward to a holiday with her old school friend, only to discover said friend is a committed kleptomaniac.

Straight to Video began as an idea of MacDermott's for a radio play about an unsuccessful writer sending an audiotape to his parents in Australia to tell them how well he was doing. "I was doing a show called The Mahaffys for BBC Radio 4," he says. "So I suppose most of my ideas at the time related to radio." He likes the way the BBC uses radio as a proving-ground for potential TV talent, and agrees that RTE could follow that example. "And I like doing radio, because I enjoy writing dialogue. At the the end of the day, though, the rewards in radio aren't great."

At this stage, MacDermott is one of the veterans of the Irish comedy scene, although he has always preferred the more carefully crafted art of the one-man show to the cruder weapon of straight stand-up. He was critically acclaimed for his performances at the Edinburgh Festival in the early 1990s, "before guys going from Dublin to the Edinburgh Festival became the second biggest story in The Irish Times," he notes wryly.

MacDermott showed the script to Mahon, whom he had worked with before, and the director/producer suggested it would work much better as a mock video diary. Initially, the two planned to make the story with their own resources, but RTE then advertised for new comedy ideas. The pair put in the script, with three other ideas in the same format, "and RTE asked us to come back with six of them," recalls Mahon. The original script shows up as The Colman Show, the last story in the series.

"We knew this field was very open, because it hadn't been done before," says Mahon. "The only real spoof on video diaries I've seen has been Steve Coogan's Pauline Calf character, which is a very different kind of a thing. We had loads of ideas about the different ways we could take it, but we wanted to have a spread of ages and sexes, rather than it just being all young men."

If you find Straight to Video a little jarring on the eye at first, don't be surprised. Mahon was determined the stories would look like amateur home movies. "What I really wanted was raw unedited takes," he says. "At one point I thought of putting static snow on the screen, and maybe some camera shake, but we didn't want to scare viewers away. The thing is, if you look at real video diaries, they're actually quite professionally post-produced."

Shoehorning some of the scenarios into the video diary format was quite a challenge, according to Mahon. One episode turned out to be 10 minutes too long. "We realised that a couple of the stories could actually have been features," he says. One of the attractions of the concept for RTE, presumably, was its low cost. "We shot each of these stories in four days, which is a pretty demanding schedule," says Mahon. "But one of the reasons I knew we could do it cheaply was that it was all single-camera and long takes." The post-production was also relatively straightforward, he says. "It was usually just about selecting the best takes, although we did move around some of the sequences within the stories."

Ultimately, he says, RTE had two questions: "Was it going to be visually boring and what about casting?" In fact, the casts are one of the most impressive things about the series. In the end, Mahon says, he got "pretty much everyone we wanted". The result is an impressive roster which includes such well-known names as Milo O'Shea, Anna Manahan and Des Keogh.

The format allowed Mahon to produce the entire series on a Spartan shoestring. "Most of the programmes are composed of around 16 shots," he says. "The whole circumstances of the production dictated the performances. I told the actors that it was going to be more real. I told them to be afraid - very afraid. The shots are so long that if an actor missed a line at the end of a five-minute scene, we had to go back to the start again."

Mahon believes that the discipline of shooting such long takes had beneficial effects. "I don't want to go overboard," he says. "But there's a certain laziness for actors in thinking: `Oh, they can drop that close-up in later'."

The idea, says MacDermott, was that anything "real" or accidental would be incorporated into the scene. "Once you started shooting, other things might happen, and the actors were warned to just go with that. Unfortunately, nothing did happen."

Which raises the interesting question about fly-on-the-wall, docusoap or video diary programming: does it actually work in Ireland? Certainly, up to now (and even more so with the arrival of Big Brother), the British seem much happier baring their souls and their flesh on the telly than do their more retiring Celtic cousins.

"People in Ireland don't really like airing their linen in public," agrees Mahon. "Maybe it's just the size of the country, or it could be something to do with not being able to express our emotions."

Mahon and MacDermott have collaborated before on short films, and Straight to Video has the same vein of kooky, quirky humour with an undercurrent of pathos. "Karl would go more for the comic elements within the story, and I would be looking for the tragedy within that comedy," says Mahon. "They were commissioned as a comic series, but some are much more tragic than others. I thought we had six good stories and wanted to make the most of them."

The result is a series unlike anything you've ever seen before on Irish television. "When we finished them in March, I had a look at them all, and said `Oh my God, did we really push it that far?' " says Mahon.

So is this the start of a more adventurous comedy policy at our national broadcaster? "I know people have been griping about RTE for years," says MacDermott. "But I do think that Network 2 are now starting to do some interesting things. I'm happy with these - I think some of them are actually quite funny."

Straight to Video starts on Network 2 on Wednesday at 10.55 p.m.