Perhaps best known for his sardonic wit anchoring Irish television shows like 'The End', 'Good Grief Moncrieff' and, latterly, 'Don't Feed The Gondolas', Sean Moncrieff has established himself as one of Ireland's most recognisable broadcasting faces. Having taken a hiatus from our screens to concentrate on writing, Moncrieff has just released his first book, an action-packed thriller called 'Dublin'. Here, he recalls some of the jobs he undertook on his journey to becoming a journalist, broadcaster and fully-fledged novelist.
Sean Moncrieff: Before I left school I had a summer job in Ballinasloe in a headstone factory. They'd get these pieces of stone and polish them endlessly with these sandstone round things. My job was to take the sandstone off the metal brackets and heat them on a grill, lever them off, put some gluey stuff on them and then put them on again. There were no proper tools, it was just a file and a screwdriver to pick it up with and then turn it over. They never gave me gloves so the glue would all run down and I had a hole burned in each of my hands for the entire summer. Strangely enough, I kind of enjoyed that job.
While I was repeating the Leaving, I got a job as a janitor and cleaned toilets for 6 months. I hated every minute of it. When I left, the head of the janitors said to me "yeah, I don't think your heart was in this job". I found it very difficult to imagine how anybody's heart could be in that job.
I went to the College of Commerce in Rathmines to do a journalism course and after that I did what we used to call 'markings' for one of the papers. That basically meant that you'd ring them up at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and then they might or might not send you to cover a flower show or an angry residents meeting, or something like that. It was ok because it was all a novelty and it was my first time doing stuff. I can remember doing a flower show and ringing up and getting on to the news editor and saying "I've got my copy". He just said, "Do you not read the newspapers?" and slammed down the phone. I wasn't aware that a major news story had just broken so there wasn't much room for flower shows that day. I did that for about 2 or 3 years. Of course in those days freelancing was a nice word for unemployed!
During that period I actually worked in a burger joint for about 6 weeks, which was horrible, really horrible. The money was terrible and it was just a horrible job. After 6 weeks I couldn't stick it anymore and just didn't go in. They were hassling me for about a year afterwards to give the uniform back, which was basically made out of paper!
I did a night degree and then I went to England and worked on a trade magazine. I stayed there for 3 years, which is surprising because I loathed every second of it. My first job was as technology editor, about which I knew absolutely zilch. I actually asked to be made redundant from that I hated it so much. I was freelancing for a while before I got a gig as a researcher on at TV show. It was while working there that I found out in the course of working in broadcasting that working in TV mightn't be bad.
Then I returned to Dublin and I read about 'The End' in the Irish Times. After I got the producer's name and number I rang him up, did a screen test and, surprisingly, got it. We improvised quite a lot of it as we went along, working the props into the script and things like that. 'The End' lasted for two great years and then at the end of the second series I was asked to do a summer show in place of 'Kenny Live'. That was 'Good Grief Moncrieff', which ran for 11 weeks in 1996. When that ended I did a stint as a reporter on 'Black Box' before 'Don't Feed The Gondolas' came along in 1997. I did that for three years, before leaving to write the book last year.
Now that I've finished the book I'll be returning to do some television some time in the autumn. The new show will be a pop psychology programme, there will be a shrink and me and every week there will be a different theme, like greed or self-confidence. For example, have the Irish become greedier or more confident? We will test these themes by commissioning a survey every week and doing candid camera pieces as well. For instance, in one of our tests we got actors to jump the queue for an ATM machine just to see how people would react. We also got two cars coming in opposite directions to stop and have a chat in the middle of the street, to time how long it would take people to get out of their car and tell them to move.
Sean Moncrieff was in conversation with Tom Grealis
'Dublin' is published by Doubleday, priced £9.99
