It is the way of these things. "Our original contact with Double ZZ was that our insurance broker is a very good friend of Ronan McCabe of Double ZZ and he put the two of us in contact." Dublin can be a small place, and that's how things happen. What happened was that Murphy's Laughter Lounge, the comedy venue on Dublin's Eden Quay, teamed up with Double ZZ Productions - of Zig and Zag and Podge and Rodge fame - and the result was a new comedy baby, The Lounge, a new 10-part standup series for Network 2.
According to Peter O'Mahony, owner of the Lounge, he had been waiting for a couple of years for the right opportunity - and production company - to come along. "We left the production side to them, and they relied on us to put the shows together."
What they've ended up with is a stylishly-produced series that is mostly standup filmed in the Lounge, with a selection of acts from Ireland and further afield, drawn from people who have gone down best with audiences at the Lounge over the past two years. The performers include US comic Rich Hall, a longtime favourite with Irish audiences, both for his smart standup and his jailbird character Otis Lee Crenshaw; performer/writer Owen O'Neill, whose new sitcom for BBC is about to be filmed; Patrick McDonnell (Eoin McLove in Father Ted, and roving reporter with Don't Feed the Gondolas); trickster Paul Zenon; Dara O Briain (It's a Family Affair host, former Gondolas panelist, and standup); relaxed charmer Jeff Green; the mad comedy veteran Malcolm Hardee; and both Barry Murphy and Kevin Gildea (formerly of Mr Trellis, along with Ardal O'Hanlon).
Each "bill" includes four standup performers, roughly half of them Irish, with actor/comedian Deirdre O'Kane hosting proceedings. O'Kane, just back from performing for a month in the Fringe in Adelaide (with Dara O Briain and Eddie Bannon), and also a performer/writer with Bull Island, appears mostly in character - from Sonia O'Sullivan to Dana to Andrea Corr to Dustin to Bono - rather than doing straight standup. Some of her links are onstage, others filmed, sketch-type inserts.
A character-based MC is almost as unusual as a female MC. "I hadn't done standup as a character before - I'd only done characters in Bull Island," says O'Kane. "But you can say more in character. Mrs Merton is a classic - decide to be a dotty old woman and you can say anything." Women in particular, get away with less with an audience, she says, especially sexual material, so characters can allow some space or latitude. "I was surprised. I had been determined to stay straight, probably because I had been an actress. But I enjoyed it."
She mentions a new comic character she has created, a hairdresser who is "dreadful, racist, very un-PC, she's ignorant. But she's funny and she gets away with it - `them gays are great'."
A seasoned and comfortable performer, and a Lounge regular, O'Kane says it was less relaxed to perform for the TV series than on stage for a regular live show. Mind, O'Kane, probably because of her stage training, always manages to look at ease. "The plus of being a woman is that we can fake it very well!" She loved working with the ZZ team, particularly producers Ciaran Morrison and Mick O'Hara - "the lads really know what they're doing". Next on the agenda for O'Kane is a part in The Fitz, Owen O'Neill's new sitcom - she plays the deranged ex-wife of Pat Shortt's character, a brother in a family living in a house that straddles the border. "I'm a sort of female version of Father Jack."
Peter O'Mahony prides himself on having an audience at the Lounge that is "from 18 to 80", but the TV series is targeted at the youth audience that is Network 2's on a Monday - comedy night; the programme takes over the Don't Feed the Gondolas slot. And the target market is clearly in evidence from the quick-moving, club-inspired precredits sequence. The Laughter Lounge in the sequence looks curiously unlike the real thing: the venue had a makeover for TV which included a new set. The former Screen at O'Connell Bridge cinema never looked so swanky - and the venue, which seats about 350, seems huge as the camera pans over it.
"I'd always felt standup wasn't well represented on TV - it is very hard to capture the atmosphere of a live comedy show because at least 50 per cent of the experience is that you're actually in the room live with the person," says O'Mahony. "A half-hour's standup tends to be very boring if it's just one act after another if anybody's allowed to go on for too long. So we've tried to give four people five minutes each, with the pieces in between as continuity and to break up the standup." He is well-pleased with the results - "it was a great team, they had four or five cameras, and every camera was live - it wasn't edited on line but all in postproduction so as not to miss any shot . . . We put a lot of time into it to make sure the quality shows - we see it as a 30-minute showcase every week."
The Lounge begins on Monday, Network 2, at 10.25 p.m.
