For years, poet, performer, presenter, hat-wearer, and national treasure Pat Ingoldsby resisted the idea of being at the centre of a documentary.
Until as recently as 2015 – having parted ways with children’s television and our state broadcaster – Ingoldsby could be found on Dublin’s most-pounded pavements, selling his self-published poetry collections and gabbing entertainingly with passersby.
In recent years, the polio that kept him at home during childhood – listening to BBC Radio and his peers playing outside from the sofa – has entailed a retreat from his street-life, a misfortune that makes this lovely, heartfelt documentary portrait all the more welcome.
Those expecting a linear, definite journey will possibly be disappointed. (And besides, they probably have no business watching a film with “Pat Ingoldsby” in the title.)
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The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby is loosely chronological, nonetheless, moving through the artist’s early years in Malahide, his improbable stint at an insurance office and several years in Britain at a Vauxhall factory.
Along the way he encounters fellow artists Brush Shiels, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Don Baker (who makes for a valuable talking head and who wonders, rightly, if Ingoldsby’s literature might have made it past more gatekeepers if he hadn’t been a TV personality).
Ingoldsby’s descent into mental illness is twinned with his own sense of being out of place, a feeling that is ultimately conquered by Gestalt Therapy, that vocal offshoot of psychoanalytic practice.
He finds his place – and champions in the persons of Vincent Hanley and Denis O’Grady – within children’s television, where his own surreal magic plays to an adoring audience.
There is something healing about watching Ingoldsby, a man who is both outside of and ahead of his time, battling against the tide of 1960s (and onwards) Irish conformity.
This pleasing collaboration between producer Tom Burke (Losing Alaska), and Seamus Murphy (A Dog Called Money) lets Ingoldsby’s witty, exquisitely-crafted poems do much of the talking. The poems, like the man himself, make for electrifying company.
