VB: You centred very much on those two characters. WB: Oh yes, yes and how they would interact with people in a little, tightly knit community, you know, that wasn't accustomed to blow-ins. Briain McLoughlin was the original producer of Glenroe and he was very keen to show the merging of the rural and the urban traditions by putting Glenroe at the end of a bus run from Dublin, just outside Bray, which it is. So that moved me up from Avoca out to Bray.
VB: I didn't see much of the urban-rural interaction in Glenroe. It seemed to be very rural based and that was it. WB: Yes. You're quite right. There were lots of scenes initially in Bray and Dick's business was very much an urban-based thing. That business, we burned it out, we lost our location or something, but it went for other reasons and he set up his business in the local village. So, I moved towards the town and moved away again.
VB: So the original purpose of Glenroe showing that interaction - in fact that got lost? WB: Yes, except in Glenroe itself, in the village itself, we introduced things that showed the way that agriculture was going towards agri-tourism, where Miley had to turn his farm into a show farm, into an open farm, where kids at the time could come and visit and so on and where Stephen turned his farm into a golf course. Those to me sort of reflected the way maybe the country wasn't moving towards the town but the town was certainly moving towards the country.
VB: There was lots of adultery in Glenroe and none at all in The Riordans, does this reflect changes in Ireland? WB: Well, there was a wee bit in The Riordans. That's another thing that I got into terrible trouble about in The Riordans was the case behind the bush where Benjy [Tom Riordan's son, played by Tom Hickey] kissed a girl behind the bush on the Shannon. I was told that it would have to come out and I said, if that comes out, I will write no more. Eventually they left it in. But that was the kind of prissiness that we were subjected to.
VB: Adultery was the staple diet of Glenroe for a long time. WB: Well, we had Dick, we had Dirty Dick, you know who would get up on a gale of wind, as they would say. Outside of Dick, there wasn't too much. Miley was always very pure. He had a roll in the hay very far into the programme - the 12th year or so.
VB: The pub was a very central feature of Glenroe - was that because you saw the pubs central to social life in Ireland or was it because of some convenience factor? WB: Convenience. How do you get all these different characters together? You have a lot of little loose ends to tie up, you know, where it's not worth going to somebody's house or to their farm or their farmyard or whatever. The pub is the place where you'll get them all together in the evening. You can get four or five bits of a plot advanced in one scene. The same as the church, we used to have a scene every week outside the church after Mass, and they could exchange all the gossip of the week and you could fill the audience in on things that had passed since last they saw us. I knew that this would be unreal to think that we had these vast crowds going to Mass every Sunday morning.
VB: Travellers featured fairly centrally in Glenroe. WB: Yes. Yes. And it was good that we were able to cast a Traveller to play Johnny and he's turned out to be a terrific actor, Michael Collins. He's a very good actor, a very intelligent actor. And we had Liam Heffernan playing the main Traveller, he plays Blackie. Of course Liam is not a Traveller at all but people used to say to me: the fellow playing Liam, he's great as the tinker, you know but that other fellow he's not really like a tinker at all. Which kind of proved the thesis.
VB: Fidelity to religion remained a fairly central part both of The Riordans and Glenroe, which maybe isn't truly reflective of what happens in Ireland, what has happened. WB: I think a great deal more in The Riordans than in Glenroe. In Glenroe we didn't have that much religion and we illustrated the whole business of the priest leaving the church, not because he was chasing a woman or something like that but out of conviction, you know that his vocation wasn't a true one. I thought that was good, then we brought in a priest of the old school but he came in just as I was leaving again. I was fairly glad, because I didn't want to write all this.
VB: Did you have much interaction with the actors in Glenroe? WB: Yes. A fair bit. I was very fond of Emmett Bergin, who played Dick Moran and Geraldine Plunkett who played Mary - she's a lovely woman - and Liam Heffernan.
VB: You were quite close to John Cowley? WB: Yes. But John forgave nobody after The Riordans ended. He thought we were all in a great conspiracy.
VB: What have you done since Glenroe? WB: I've got a lot of films. I wrote one called Rat. It opened in Boston and got very good reviews but it didn't get a big distribution. And since then I've got two films that are due to be shot this summer. One is called The Medium - it's for David Kelly and Milo O'Shea - and the other one is called The Godmother, which is set half here and half in Greece. It's supposed to be starting this summer too.
VB: In the longer term, what are you planning on doing? WB: I don't have any plans. I have decided that if I don't get this one going - Death of a Soap Opera, and it's a very black one, usually I'm writing fairly way out comedy. But if I don't get it going as a film, I'm only going to give it a few weeks to see if there is any interest or not, then I'll rewrite it as a novel because it is a better novel, I think. I've never written a novel so I don't know how that will go.
VB: Thank you very much. WB: Oh thank God, I was very nervous about that.