Potter's about

IT was Sunday. Any Sunday from that time. The old man sat poking at an open fire with a blackened tongs. His son was reading that day's Sunday Press, picked up after 11 o'clock Mass. His son's wife was preparing the dinner. And the radio was on. With a rhythm as regular as the sea, all three would laugh out loud, then be still again. The small boy was perplexed. He listened, till they laughed again. He couldn't understand it. "Why is that funny Daddy?" he asked his father, hidden behind the quivering broadsheets. "I'll tell you in a minute," he said, ears to the radio and eyes to the page. But he forgot. And another wave of laughter would engulf the kitchen. "Granda, why are ye all laughing?" he asked the old man. "Wait till it's over and I'll tell you," the old man said. But the boy couldn't wait. He wanted to join in with all this jollity. "Mammy, what are ye laughing at . . . pleeeeeze?" "It's politics. Ask your father." It was not easy being a small boy in our house on Sunday afternoons during the early 1960s, when The Maureen Potter Show was on Radio Eireann.

She is 71 now, and preparing to play the role of Mrs Henderson in The Shadow Of A Gunman at the Gate theatre in Dublin. This is the latest role in a career which goes back to 1935. It is a "straight" role for our Queen of Comedy. She has never played Mrs Henderson before, but acted in Joe Dowling's highly acclaimed Gate production of that other O'Casey classic, Juno And The Paycock, in 1986. It toured to Edinburgh, New York, and Jerusalem. "I could hardly walk with the knee," she recalls of those days. "I was pushed around the airports in a wheelchair". Arthritis was taking its toll. Since then she has had a hip replaced and her two knees. Not easy for someone who danced so much and loved it, despite being able to move again with ease. "Tap was my forte," she recalls. "I really miss it. Now I get a standing ovation for standing. Still standing." It amuses her.

It all happened through dancing. She wouldn't go to school - "I just refused to go - until her mother agreed to enrol her in dancing classes. She began both on the same day, at the age of five. Both her parents were Dubliners and both had a good sense of humour, which explains a lot. Her father was a commercial traveller, while her mother had won medals for singing. Indeed, her mother sang in a concert at which both John McCormack and the soprano, Margaret Burke Sheridan sang "Child, child", entreated McCormack of Ms Burke Sheridan, after she had completed a popular ditty, "why do you sing such trash?"

The Potter Family - Maureen, her parents, and two brothers - lived at Fairview. "I'm a northsider."

There gas a garage downstairs From Maureen's dancing school. Ms Connie Ryan's on Abbey Street. The garage owner brought Ms Ryan to court for causing noise. Maureen was brought along as exhibit "A", so to speak. She had to dance a reel before the judge "in my softest pumps" to prove the garage owner's complaints about noise were not justified. Case dismissed. Of course, she was then a veteran of 10. At seven she had danced for a week at the Colmcille Hall in Derry. For 7s/6d. And she had won an all-Ireland dancing.

But it was in 1935 her panto/dancing career really began. Connie Ryan brought her to a Jimmy O'Dea audition and she ended up as a fairy in that year's pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk. The fairy guarded the gate to the Giant's castle, and did an impression of Dublin's famous Lord Mayor, Alfie Byrne. So the satire came young. It was the beginning of a long and beautiful professional friendship between herself and Jimmy O'Dea, which continued to his death in 1965.

She left school at 12 to join the Jack Hilton band, following an audition at the Theatre Royal. "I was on my school holidays and I got this telegram asking me to join them in London." There was a problem: no child under 14 was allowed work in Britain at the time. But there was also a solution: "I borrowed my best friend's - Nancy Lawlor - birth certificate, she was 14, and used it to get over there." The plan was that she would stay with the band for a few months. "I stayed two years." Touring all over England, playing a Shirley Temple lookalike and playing the trumpet. In 1938, they performed at the Scala in Berlin. Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, came to see them. "The Germans didn't have child performers, and the publicity was wonderful." She was known as Maria Philomena Potter. "And of course the Germans love the Irish."

Goering, Goebbels,"and their two big wives" visited them backstage. Hitler's chauffeur "fell for Connie Ryan, and used to bring the girls to all the clubs in Berlin, and I had to go to bed". She remembers the atmosphere in Berlin, the loudspeakers everywhere "blaring Hitler's voice", the black bread which cost the same as a gourmet meal, with the balance of the cost going towards the fatherland.

When Hitler invaded Austria the reaction in Britain was so strong - "the papers were baying" - they had to return to London. As they were leaving, they were presented with a silver and blue wreath with words from the Fuhrer written on it. She brought it home to Dublin. "My mother took one look at it, said that filthy man Hitler, and threw it in a bin."

Maureen was in Blackpool the morning war was declared. Walking along the seafront "with rolls of barbed wire in the water, and we could hear Chamberlain declaring war on the wirelesses in the houses as we passed". Her mother "got me sent home."

She started with Jimmy O'Dea again in Jimmmy and The Leprechaun, at the Gaiety. She was the leprechaun. And they began to do further pantomimes revues, and BBC broadcasts - The Irish half hour with Jimmy O'Dea - from Bangor in Wales, and from Belfast. "I was very lucky in that as a child performer I didn't stop, but was kept going all the time."

She met her husband, Jack O'Leary, in 1943. He was then a lieutenant in the Irish army. A friend of his was interested in stage lighting and both of them were shown how backstage worked at the Capitol Theatre one night. Afterwards she went for coffee with them. She found him "very funny". She was performing as Clogs in Little Miss Baggy Britches. The following night she spotted Jack in the audience, and slipped. "I literally fell for him."

They became good friends "for years and years and years". They didn't marry until 1959. "He still writes my stuff" - for her show at the Clontarf Castle - "he's been very lucky for me."

It was in 1959 also that The Maureen Potter Show began on Radio Eireann. It lasted six years, and was noted for its political satire, as well as her monologues on Christy, a fictional wayward son. She has two sons herself, both living in Dublin. And there were seven episodes of Me And My Friend, with Rosaleen Lenihan, as well as three wonderful Christmas Shows, one of which includes that unforgettable tourist sketch where she switches from harridan to sweet, high-stepping Irish colleen in a blink. These shows were produced by Gay Byrne. "He was great to work with. Marvellous."

And she recalled the Late Late Show tribute to her in 1976. "I really was surprised. It was a great success." But in all her years of slagging off politicians, whether on radio, TV, in the pantos or Gaels Of laughter, ("Jack [her husband] used to take a fairy tale and turn it into a political story") no politician ever commented on the satire to her. She only met De Valera once. It was at a charity "do". "He kept calling me Betty - he was blind as a bat you know - and I took umbrage.

She regrets the decline of standards in the variety tradition. Audiences seem prepared "to take a lot more swearing" today. She remembers notices in English theatres explaining that you could use the word "God" just once onstage, "twice if you were lucky," "Bloody" was never allowed. She feels such language is "not really necessary", and points to the British comedienne Victoria Wood who is "brilliant" without recourse to it.

ASKED whether she is the last in a line, with no young comediennes to follow, she simply retorts "June Rogers." She also praises Rosaleen Lenihan, warmly.

She loves actors. They are "the nicest people in the world". They are part of the reason she continues to work. And "the audience's response. To make an audience laugh is great." She likes to take on straight roles "just to see if I can do it". And she can. She has performed opposite such greats as Siobhan McKenna in Arsenic And Old Lace. "We were the two old dears, she was a great mate - Cyril Cusack, Miceal Mac Liammoir. Hilton Edwards, and Donal McCann. And she is full of praise for her colleagues in The Shadow of a Gunman - "beautiful actors, so young, so, good" and their "beautiful director Lynne Parker "a joy to work with". That's Maureen. Generous, generous, generous.