As The Dry arrives on RTÉ One, John Byrne meets up with members of the show's cast as well as director Paddy Breathnach and writer Nancy Harris.
It’s a bit hectic, really. If you’ve ever seen the legendary Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera, you’re bound to recall the scene where Groucho’s cosy cabin becomes increasingly packed with people, ranging from cleaners to a manicurist to catering staff and even a young woman looking for her Aunt Minnie.
Well, the board room in the offices of Element Pictures in Dublin reminds me of that scene, as various folk related to The Dry arrive and take their places as they meet the press to promote the show. There are two separate interview sessions and only so many chairs. Something's got to give.
Anyway. Let's get on with the show.
Written by Nancy Harris and directed by Paddy Breathnach, The Dry is a seven-part dramedy series that lands on RTÉ One on Wednesday 1 March. Belfast actress Roisin Gallagher stars as Shiv Sheridan, a thirtysomething who's on the dry after years of partying in London and returns to her native south county Dublin.
But while she’s determined to get on to a new phase of her life, there’s a lot more arrested development going on in the rest of her family. Imperfections are plenty, and it doesn’t look as though anyone else in the Sheridan clan could be bothered doing anything to improve matters.
As well as sister Caroline (played by Siobhán Cullen) and brother Ant (Adam Richardson), there are parents Tom and Bernie, played by Ciaran Hinds and Pom Boyd.
Also featured is Moe Dunford as Shiv’s ex, Jack, who adds another level of complication and a romantic reminder of how things used to be, before she went to London and then gave up the gargle.
Vikings star Dunford’s got a story to tell that ties in nicely with The Dry. It’s a personal one, as it concerns his own father, who underwent an experience similar to Shiv Sheridan's. Frankly, it’s a testament to the man’s determination to not just rebuild his life, but ultimately transform it.
Moe recalls: "When I was going to acting college I met my dad on Dame Street [in Dublin]. I was going to Temple Bar and he was going to Trinity. I said: 'What are you doing?’ and he replied: 'I'm going to college.’ He was in the armed forces, he did a multitude of jobs, he also ran a pub for a while . . .
"He was an addict, an alcoholic I should say," Dunford adds. "He turned his life around at 50 and went to Trinity to be a psychologist, and went on to work in prisons and in addiction centres.I brought him to Vikings once, I asked him what he thought. He knocked on the walls and he said ‘This isn't real,’" pointing out to his son that we worked with addicts rather than actors. Moe was impressed.
His dad returned that sense of familial pride when he saw The Dry, noting how it showed that alcohol and addiction are as likely to haunt anyone, regardless of their social status. These things effect the well-off just as easily as those struggling economically. Addiction is truly democratic.
Moe recalls: "When he watched episodes one, two and three, he said: ’It's one of the first shows I've seen which shows the idea of AA, how it works, asking yourself difficult questions, and how alcohol doesn't differentiate between class.’ It was a proud moment to show dad and how he got that message."
One of the great thing about The Dry is its ease of movement from serious matters to the more humorous or even absurd. Take Ciaran Hinds’ character Tom, for example. He seems chirpy enough, if a little distracted. There’s clearly more going than he pretends, though initially you'd think it was less.
In an upcoming episode, Hinds has a sexual encounter behind a bin in a lane off Dublin’s Grafton Street. The other half of this laneway love-in is played by none other than his real-life wife, Hélène Patarot.
We’ve seen Ciaran in film roles as diverse as the granddad in Belfast to a nasty piece of work in KIN, but getting down and dirty by a dustbin wasn’t on my Ciaran Hinds' bingo card. Time for The Dry director Breathnach to do a bit of explaining.
"I had to convince him to do it," he recalls. "He wasn't resistant to it, he just wanted to hear what I had to say about it. I referred to Nancy Harris putting it in the script and they were behind a bin and it's film sex."
Naturally curious, I wonder if we’ll get to see more of Ciaran than might have been previously expected. "You don't see his arse," Paddy explains, "but it's very funny." The scene or his arse? Ah, never mind.
These days, of course, such cinematic moments take a lot of preparation. As Paddy elaborates: "There was an intimacy co-ordinator there. I had worked with her before and she was absolutely brilliant. I was a bit nervous asking how it was going to work, but she was fantastic and brought a huge amount to the thing. In that instance, they're husband and wife in real life, so I think they felt nervous."
As well as that scene, Paddy is overall delighted with how The Dry turned out. With season one already doing the rounds of the global TV landscape, there’s optimism that a second season will be coming our way sooner rather than later. Which is a lot better than never.
"It was a great joy to do," says Paddy, who’d be more accustomed to directing on a film set rather than a TV show, with an impressive CV that ranges from I Went Down to Rosie. His earliest cinematic effort involved making a video for a band I was in back in the 1980s, but I think we’re both happy to leave that particular skeleton dead and buried.
This time around The Dry "started off as one of those things where I was scratching my head a lot, wondering how we were going to approach it," he recalls. "And as it went on it just got easier and better, and finally became a joy to do. I think all of the people and all of the relationships, the people we were working with were fantastic.
"I don’t feel I have to sell the show," he adds. "I’m really, really happy with it. And I kind of think it does its own work and talking, and I expect people to like it. Most things I’ve done," he starts to laugh, "I’ve not been uber-confident about. But I actually think people will warm to the show."
What I particularly enjoyed from watching the opening two episodes is the way the characters embrace their foibles, almost like they’re not foibles at all. Which is how any reasonable person deals with their emotional San Andreas faults.
Looking at Nancy Harris, who couldn’t have written The Dry without having experienced the ups and downs of family life, I decide to throw a chestnut at her to see what she says. Dysfunctionality really appeals to Irish people, doesn’t it?
Nancy smiles. And she’s a good smiler too. "I think it appeals to everybody," she says. "And with families, we can’t get away from them, they are our joy and our pain, and so that’s what we wanted to look at. Addiction is sort of a prism . . .
"Paddy and I had endless chats, because we were like, well if you took out alcoholism, what is the show about? It’s about somebody who’s trying to change, and how that could be any of us.
"And whenever you try to change, in family, people can unconsciously collude to try and keep you the same. Because they have to change as well.
"That was my starting point and I just thought it was an interesting way of looking at a family and looking at a drama. I think that appealed to us: dysfunction, change, who we are in our lives."
The Dry, 9.35pm, Wednesday, RTÉ One
All episodes will be available from Wednesday on the RTÉ Player
