Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

The exact moment a bubble bursts

My TV feature from Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent, September 18.

Who would ever have predicted that Hugh Laurie, the bumbling Brit hitherto best known for Blackadder and starring with his pal Stephen Fry in Jeeves and Wooster, would end up becoming the highest paid dramatic actor on American television?

Laurie’s phenomenal earning power was recently revealed by US magazine TV Guide, who calculated that the 51-year-old now earns $400,000 (e312,000) per episode for playing Dr Gregory House on the offbeat medical drama House. When you factor in that the average season for a US network drama is 24 episodes, Laurie’s annual pay comes to around e7.5m.

Up until this year, Kiefer Sutherland was the biggest earner in American TV drama, taking home $500,000 (e396,000) for every episode of the recently-finished real-time action thriller series 24. The other dramatic stars rolling in the dosh, according to TV Guide, are Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay from the unrelentingly grim Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Both actors are paid $395,000 (e308,000) per episode, while Marg Helgenberger, who plays Catherine Willows in the original CSI, banks $375,000 (e293,000) every week.

But it’s in the comedy category that the pay figures become truly astounding. Troubled actor Charlie Sheen, arrested earlier this year on a charge of domestic violence, pockets a staggering $1.25m (e975,000) per episode for the alarmingly average sitcom Two and A Half Men (dubbed ‘Two and A Half Laughs’ by its critics).

What’s even more incredible about Sheen’s case is that the recent problems in his private life seemed only to bolster his earning power on the show. In February of this year, at the height of the controversy with his wife, Sheen announced that he was quitting the comedy to deal with his issues. But then in May, he signed an agreement to stay with the show for another two years for a reported $1.78m per episode.

Sheen’s co-star Jon Cryer is the second highest paid comedy actor, with $550,000 (e429,000) per episode, while the Desperate Housewives troika of Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross and Eva Longoria Parker tied in third place with $400,000 a show (e312,000).

A whole category onto themselves – in every respect – are the late night, talk show and reality star titans. Oprah Winfrey, who begins the final season of her daytime talk show this month, took home $315m (e246m) last year. Trailing at a much distant second was Judy Sheindlin – aka Judge Judy – earning a still-respectable $45m (e35m). David Letterman on $28m (e22m), Jay Leno ($25m/e20m), and Ryan Seacrest ($15m/e12m) complete the roster in that category.

What these figures don’t tell us – or don’t seem to care much about – is whether or not these stars are actually worth that kind of moolah. But unlike here in Ireland, where stars and media personality’s pay never fails to convulse the commentariat and stoke ‘storm-the-Bastille’-esque feelings amongst the Liveline faithful, nobody seems to question or criticize these celebrities earning power.

Of course, these people are in a different universe entirely. But their earning power, kind of like our well-paid radio and TV hosts, stems from their ability to pull in the audiences and transform their product into a lucrative commercial behemoth. In the case of Hugh Laurie, his show House is certainly popular. Indeed, last year Eurodata TV Worldwide proclaimed that House was the most watched TV show in the world, drawing in anything between 81.8m and 1.6bn viewers from 66 countries (it was knocked back into second place this year by CSI: Crime Scene Investigation).

Laurie himself is an exceedingly bright star in the American showbiz firmament; his slow-burn success, Cambridge-educated wit, and masterful hold of the American accent only add to his charm. Likewise, Two and a Half Men, even in its seventh year, continues to draw an average of 15m viewers in the US every week, which are astonishing numbers in an age of fragmented TV audiences.

It’s probably fair to say that Charlie Sheen is a very lucky beneficiary of the fact that the traditional, laughter-track sitcom has been on its knees for half a decade or more, and that TV executives are desperate to retain any star who can keep the genre afloat.

More than anything else, however, these earning figures are definitive proof, if any more were needed, that television is no longer considered the poor relative (compared to cinema) of the entertainment world. The boundaries between movies and TV, once so clear and delineated, are now more fluid than ever.

Even going back as recently as 1998, it was considered a showbiz milestone when Helen Hunt, a TV actress best known for her role in the smug sitcom Mad About You, won the Best Actress Oscar for the movie As Good As It Gets ahead of ‘real’ movie actors like Kate Winslet and Judi Dench. Moonlighting from TV into movies – and vice versa – just wasn’t done because it didn’t pay either in terms of prestige or the mighty dollar.

But within a year of Hunt’s Oscar success, the dynamic began to shift fundamentally within the business. This corresponded with the emergence of the leading American cable channel HBO, and with the decision of US networks to invest more in long-form TV drama with classy and high-quality production values on a par with any Hollywood movie.

To their credit, Sarah Jessica Parker and Martin Sheen were arguably the first movie stars to realise television’s potential when they respectively signed up for Sex and the City in 1998, and The West Wing in 1999. It must be remembered that this was considered very risky at the time: SJP, in particular, turned down the role several times.

Their concern was understandable. Switching to TV was viewed as a sign of ‘failure’ or the last resort of desperate has-beens (the 1980s were littered with such examples, like Charlton Heston and Barbara Stanwyck signing up to star in Dynasty spin-off, The Colbys).

The gamble paid off handsomely for SJP and Sheen though. She, of course, still earns tens of millions of dollars, and achieved unlikely icon status, through Carrie Bradshaw, while at the height of The West Wing’s popularity Sheen was paid more every week to play the US president than his real-life counterpart George W. Bush earned every year to be the president.

These days you can’t keep major stars from appearing in weekly TV shows. Glenn Close (Damages), Sally Field (Brothers and Sisters), Toni Collette (United States of Tara), and Holly Hunter (Saving Grace) are among some of the respected female stars who have all made the switch.

The trend isn’t dying off either. Three-time Oscar nominee Laura Linney will hit TV screens later this autumn in the edgy TV drama The Big C, while no less a star than Dustin Hoffman has signed up to star in a HBO series called Lucky.

It works the other way too. Katherine Heigl has graduated from TV drama Grey’s Anatomy to achieve success on the big screen, as have fellow TV stalwarts Steve Carell (from The Office), Heroes alum Zachary Quinto, 30 Rock comedy queen Tina Fey, and, increasingly, Mad Men hunk Jon Hamm. Interestingly, neither Hugh Laurie nor Charlie Sheen has felt the need to make a movie over the last few years. When the TV pay is that good, why the hell would they bother?

Courtesy of Prose Before Hos

My feature on the 2010 TOGs Convention in today’s Irish Examiner

It’s not hard to spot Norman Macintosh at the train station in the British east midlands city of Leicester. The licence plate of his car reads ‘C2 TOG’, while the back window proudly boasts of a sticker reader ‘TOGS: I Stop For No Particular Reason’.

Norman is my point man for a day-long visit to the 2010 TOGs Convention, which took place last weekend in the grounds of the University of Leicester.

For the uninitiated, TOGs stands for ‘Terry’s Old Geezers/Gals’, a group of long-time and fiercely devoted fans of Limerick-born broadcaster Terry Wogan, and this annual bash is like their Glastonbury.

TOGs emerged as 72-year-old Wogan’s official fan base during his many years on radio and TV, but especially during his tenure as presenter of the phenomenally popular BBC Radio 2 breakfast show Wake Up To Wogan, which he hosted from January 1993 until last December, and, at its height, drew 8m daily listeners (Wogan now hosts a two hour show on Sunday mornings).

In his autobiography Mustn’t Grumble, Wogan describes TOGs tongue-in-cheek style as being “well stricken in years, while remaining about 25-years-old of age on the inside.”

He continues: “They have a fierce resentment of anybody younger than themselves, and can be recognised by their use of arcane phrases as, ‘Is it me?’, or, ‘Do I come here often?’

The 70 or so TOGs that gathered last weekend don’t take offence at that synopsis either; in fact, they positively revel in it. “It’s a way of looking at life,” explains TOG Susan Shepherd. “You get to a point in life where you don’t care what anyone thinks. Why should you? It’s just fun.”

The majority of TOGs in attendance are aged 40 or over, and chat regularly through the online forum of the TOGs website. Many meet up several times throughout the year, while in May just gone, some 350 TOGs took part in a 12-day cruise aboard the Queen Victoria liner.

More than anything else, the common thread between TOGs and their idol is a shared wit and wry sense of humour. A case in point is how all the TOGs go by innuendo and pun-laden nicknames that can often require some thought to understand. Norman Macintosh’s, for example, is ‘Tudor Raincoat’. “I had considered ‘Plantagent Anorak’ at first,” he adds with a smile.

Other names I encounter at the convention operate along similar lines: ‘Norma Snockers’; ‘Adele Laptop’; ‘Edina Cloud’; ‘Sue Pandaroll’; and, my personal favourite, ‘Sir Ian Capita Damascus’. After some intense conferring, the TOGs decree that my honorary name will be ‘Dec Oration’. Wogan himself – who couldn’t make it this year, but has come to the last three conventions – is known as ‘The TOGmeister’.

The first TOG convention was held in 1999, and every year there is a different theme. Last year, it was ‘AUSTRALIA’ (‘All Up-Standing TOGs Rally at Leicester in August’), and the year before ‘GUATAMALA’ (‘Gather Up All TOGs And Meet At Leicester in August’).

This year’s theme is in honour of the Scottish town of ‘ALLOA’ (‘At Leicester Lads Once Again’), so they dress in Alloa’s colours of blue and white. Planned activities include a garden lunch-party, a slap-up dinner, karaoke, fancy dress party, an epic Scottish-themed quiz, Highland games and a demo of piano organs.

The first task of the convention, however, is to pay tribute to Charles Nove, one of the three regular newsreaders from Wogan’s radio show. The other two – Alan “Deadly” Dedicoat and John “Boggy” Marsh – as well as regular contributor Canon Roger Royle are also on hand to mark one special moment from Nove’s illustrious life and career. Last January, Nove was driving a vintage bus in the London New Year’s Day parade when a 1916 Dennis fire engine travelling behind him skidded on ice and ploughed into the back of the bus.

Nobody was hurt, but Wogan and some other radio colleagues (including Wogan’s successor Chris Evans) subsequently started slagging Nove on air for ‘reversing’ into a fire engine.

As a measure of how much that story has become part of the TOGs mythology, organisers have arranged for a vintage bus and a local fire engine to come to the grounds to re-create the incident. Nove gamely goes along with it all, much to the delight and encouragement of the gathering TOGs. “The truth is irrelevant anymore,” he says, smiling.

So what is it about Wogan that has inspired such love and affection amongst so many of his listeners? Newsreader John Marsh, who, along with his wife Janet, became the star of a regular, double entendre-friendly skit on Wogan’s show, says it’s simply because Wogan is “just a genuinely nice guy”.

“I don’t think it would have worked if he was putting on an act all the time,” he continues. “He loves what he does, and can communicate with people. He doesn’t shout with them, he doesn’t lecture them.”

TOG ‘Lucy Equipment’ adds: “It was never about Terry. A lot of radio stars today make it all about them just because their name is above the title.” ‘Edina Cloud’ says that the crux of Wogan’s appeal is that when he’s on radio he makes people laugh. “His laugh is infectious. He only has to start chuckling and he sets everyone off.”

Louise Bennett – aka ‘Louby Lou’ – explains that she’ll always be grateful to Wogan for highlighting the work of British soldiers, such as her own son George, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the Iraqi invasion in 2003, Louise has been baking and sending 200 ‘Buns of Mass Production’ a week to British forces overseas; she recently dispatched her 22,000^th bun to the Gulf.

“I started sending buns to Terry three years ago, and he would explain why I was doing it. I was always grateful that, for even a few seconds, 8m listeners would stop and think of these guys and their families,” she says.

An important point about the TOGs is that they are not just a regular fan club – they have a serious, business side too. As Norman Macintosh explains, TOGs like himself are very much involved with Terry Wogan’s long-time charity Children In Need. The annual TOGs calander, as well as a variety of comedy CDs of ‘John and Janet’ stories from Wogan’s show, have raised well over 4.5 million pounds for the charity in the last decade. The TOGs voyage alone this year collected almost 80,000 pounds for Children in Need.

Being a TOG also transformed Norman’s personal life: he met his wife Lesley (‘Hellen Bach’) through TOG gatherings six years ago, and how the couple are the full-time administrators of the fund-raising company Charity Goods.

“I originally started getting involved with the TOGs calendar, which Hellen was in charge of,” he recalls. “We had a minor disagreement about it, and she ended up firing me! She got in touch a little while later to talk and sort it out, so we met on a Saturday afternoon and fell in love there and then.”

Needless to say Wogan is very proud of the union. “Terry takes full credit for Hellen and I meeting,” Norman laughs. “He says it’s one of the best things he’s ever done.”

www.togs.org

Will this be the year that Aaron Sorkin wins an Oscar?

This made me cry like a fat kid whose cake has just been stolen. Beautiful

The Indy has had some great articles over the last two days on the topic of the disgusting state visit to the UK of Pope Bendictator

Johann Hari today: ‘Catholics, it’s you this Pope has abused’

Geoffrey Robertson yesterday:’The Pope: Witness for the prosecution’

Very excited about this movie.

My interview with director Stephen Frears in the Irish Examiner

It’s almost lunchtime, and Stephen Frears is anxious to get out of the interview suite in London’s Soho Hotel and downstairs to the restaurant. In fact, he’s in the hallway and has to be reluctantly coaxed back inside for one more pre-prandial chat about his latest movie Tamara Drewe.

The 69-year-old director is known for being a tad tricky in interviews; never rude, but often disengaged and prone to the journalist’s worst nightmare of one-line answers. At first it seems the Irish Examiner has caught Frears on one of those days, but luckily he slowly warms up, revealing an opinionated and mischievous personality.

Tamara Drewe, which is adapted from a popular graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, is a darkly funny update of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. It stars one-time Bond girl Gemma Arterton as the eponymous Tamara, an ugly duckling-turned-sexbomb journalist who returns to her childhood home in the boring Dorset countryside, and proceeds to cause havoc amongst the locals, especially at a nearby writer’s retreat run by an odious, philandering crime writer (Roger Allam) and his put-upon wife (Green Wing’s Tamsin Greig).

The end product is a bit like Emmerdale on acid, a description that elicits a roar of laughter from Frears. “They should put that on the poster,” he says. “I think it’s the nearest I’m going to re-making The Quiet Man. When I was in Ireland I used to drive everyone mad by saying how I loved that movie.”

Frears was attracted to the “fresh, funny and sexy” nature of Tamara Drewe, but also its potential to rib the stuffy English middle classes. “I recognised that quality. I’m irredeemably middle class too, but I have no problem taking the piss out of myself. I think people will get it. It’s a joke that everyone understands.”

Another target for satire in the movie are writers and creative people. “Writers are the most ridiculous people of all,” he says, with a laugh. “It was all in the script, but I’m sure my own malice entered into it.

“I was in Jaipur this year with Hanif Kureishi and Roddy Doyle to give a lecture. There was a film showing next door to our hotel called 3 Idiots. We just all said, ‘That’s us’. But my writer friends are not offended by the portrayal in the movie. On the contrary, they’re very pleased to see a middle-aged writer in bed with Gemma Arterton.”

Having been in the movie business for over 40 years, Frears has worked consistently, refusing to stick to one particular genre or style, as evidenced by diverse credits like My Beautiful Laundrette (which launched Daniel Day Lewis), Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, High Fidelity, and the gritty immigrant thriller Dirty Pretty Things.

He has also made a significant contribution to Irish cinema, helming the screen adaptations of his friend Roddy Doyle’s The Van and the eternally popular The Snapper, which was finally granted a DVD issue last year some 16 years after its cinema release.

“I really shouldn’t say this, but I think The Snapper is the best film I’ve ever made,” he says. “I remember bringing it to Dublin and people just being gob-smacked by it. Colm Meaney and Tina Kellegher are just wonderful in it. Miramax and Harvey Weinstein wanted to put Colm up for the Oscar, but some rule made him ineligible.

“I’m not surprised that it’s still so popular. It’s really a story about the separation of church and state. I remember asking Roddy if there were ever any problems from the church because of the subject matter, but there wasn’t a dicky-bird. The writing was on the wall, and it arrived at just the right time.”

Of course, Frears is also closely associated with a duo of other linked movies – The Deal and The Queen – both scripted by Peter Morgan and starring Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. Frears reveals that he never got any reaction to the movies from the former prime minister, adding: “I wouldn’t expect him to like them, and I wouldn’t want to meet him. I think he’s not a very good man.”

So it’s safe to assume that Frears won’t be queuing outside a Piccadilly bookstore next week to get a copy of Blair’s new biography signed by the man himself (and agree to an insane list of security measures to do so).

“All of that just seems part of his pomposity and stupidity,” is Frears take on the matter. He turned down the chance to make a third Morgan-Sheen movie about Blair (The Special Relationship, which airs on TV this month).

“When I made the first two, he was still prime minister,” Frears explains. “Because both of them were about the early parts of his premiership, you couldn’t really say, ‘Well, this man is sort of shocking’. We had to somehow be kind to him. I’ve done enough. He was just an unfortunate prime minister to have.”

Frears adds that he never heard from Buckingham Palace either about Helen Mirren’s Oscar winning portrayal of the monarch. “I don’t know why, it seems very slack of her,” he says wryly.

He himself has twice been up for an Oscar as director (for The Grifters and The Queen), though he doesn’t seem too pushed about ever taking home the gold. “My suspicion is that it’s not good for you,” he says. “It’s always good to have something to aspire to, isn’t it? I just notice people who win Oscars then get into a mess. It might be bad for the inside of your head.”

It must be hard not to get swept up in all the award madness though? “No, on the contrary,” he replies. “When the nominations come in, you just think, ‘there’s only one question to ask myself: am I going to be a good sport?’ If you’re not going to be a good sport, don’t go. Don’t go and sulk. If you’re going to go, have a good time. I never thought I was going to win.”

Frears says he has an agent working for him Hollywood (“nice guy, he makes me laugh”), but that he doesn’t get offered a huge amount of material. “I’m like a child. People send me things,” he says. “I don’t give a damn. I just read something, and if it’s wonderful I’ll go with it. I’m having a fantastic time at the moment. It’s all down to luck.”

His career hasn’t been without its disappointments either. Accidental Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman, failed to find an audience. Then there was Mary Reilly, a notorious turkey starring John Malkovich and an Irish-brogue sprouting Julia Roberts. Frears doesn’t mention that 1996 movie explicitly by name, but it’s clear that it was a serious setback in his career.

“I was doing really well in the early 1990s, and then I made a film for Sony Pictures and it was a failure,” he says. “Everything that I’d spent the previous five years working for was just turned upside down. It was very disappointing and painful. But you pick yourself up because you don’t have a choice. You go down the snake to see if you can find a new ladder.”

*Tamara Drewe is released nationwide on September 10.

Great poster for Russell Crowe’s new flick