Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

My latest piece for movies.ie tying in with the release of The Hangover Part II

There’s an old acting adage that goes, ‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard’. That could, and should, be modified to, ‘Dying is easy, playing drunk is hard’.

With the release of the unstoppable ‘The Hangover Part II’ this month, we’re reminded once more of just how tricky it can be to realistically and convincingly render the condition of being properly locked on the big screen.

So, with full acknowledgement of how tasteless it might seem to some, Movies.ie raises a glass to toast these superior lush performances of yore. Hic!

Continue here.

One year after the contentious finale of Lost, EW and IGN have articles that re-assess those last episodes from a cooler perspective.

Part 2 of Doc Jensen’s EW article.

Courtesy of ShortList…

The Obamas arrive in Ireland…

Crayola Star Wars

Courtesy of Mikethepod.com

My feature on the four previous presidential visits to Ireland in advance of the state visit of President and Mrs Obama next week

On Monday next, Barack Obama will become the fifth sitting US president to visit Ireland during his first term in office. Almost 50 years after John F. Kennedy made his triumphant visit to these shores, President Obama and his wife Michelle will follow the tried-and-tested, feel-good, photo-op-friendly route of tracing his ancestral roots, in this case in Offaly and Kilkenny city, simultaneously courting the Irish diasporic vote in the US as all White House occupants and contenders so assiduously do.

JFK, the first Irish-American US president, began his iconic Irish visit on June 26, 1963. Thousands gathered at Dublin airport from early that day to welcome Kennedy, while tens of thousands more lined the city centre route as the President travelled in an open-top Lincoln to Aras an Uachtarain. Some 300 gardai kept watch as confetti and tickertape rained down on an awestruck JFK from the open windows above him.

The next day Kennedy was helicoptered to Wexford to meet his distant relatives, the Ryans and the Kennedys, at Dunganstown, and then onto New Ross, the site from where his great-grandfather had sailed for Boston a century before.

Back in Dublin later that evening, some 2,000 people gathered in the summer rain for a garden party in JFK’s honour at the Aras, but pandemonium quickly ensued as people started leaping over chairs, “trampling toes and crumpling hats” (as one dramatic newspaper headline reported), and pushing through the linked arms of the Secret Service in order to grasp the hand of the startled Kennedy. Even a bishop was knocked to the ground in the rush.

At every turn – be it making an address to the Oireachtas or whistlestop tours of Limerick and Galway – Kennedy worked the huge crowds like a pro. Indeed there’s only one report of the affable, charming mask slipping: when a man ruffled Kennedy’s hair in Galway, the president glowered and waved the fan away. Kennedy boarded Air Force One in Shannon making numerous promises to return. He was dead by the end of the year.

The next US president to come here was Richard Nixon in October 1970, but the reception for the 37^th US president couldn’t have differed more from the one given to his nemesis Kennedy.

Nixon came to Ireland for three days, at the suggestion of Irish multi-millionaire John Mulcahy from Waterville, Co Kerry. Ireland was considered a good base for Nixon to meet his team who were currently in Paris trying to hash out a peace deal to end the Vietnam War.

These controversial meetings were given a fig leaf of state visit officialdom by Nixon’s plans to visit the site of his distant Irish Quaker ancestor’s grave at Timahoe, Co Kildare (shoring up his credentials with Irish voters on the US east coast), and agreeing to spend some five hours in total meeting with President De Valera, Taoiseach Jack Lynch, and Minister for External Affairs, Dr Patrick Hillery.

Not surprisingly, protests were held against Nixon’s visit. On Sunday, October 4^th, as Nixon was – in the words of Labour’s then External Affairs spokesman, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien – “working the harp-and-leprechaun circuit” in Timahoe, over 1,000 people marched from Parnell Square to Ballsbridge in protest against the president’s contentious foreign policy.

A mock ‘trial’ held by the crowd found Nixon guilty of war crimes, and an effigy of Nixon was burned outside the US embassy, as placards depicting the president with swastikas were waved. Later that evening, en route to Dublin Castle for a banquet, Nixon, standing and waving through the sunroof, just about ducked back into the presidential limo to dodge an egg that was hurled at him from the otherwise unenthusiastic 400-strong crowd.

That said, Nixon did draw respectable crowds of 1,000 in Timahoe and 4,000 in Limerick, but perhaps the president’s strongest Irish card was his wife, Pat. Born Patricia Ryan, and so named because her birthday fell on the eve of St Patrick’s Day, the First Lady was by all accounts a popular visitor in Mayo where she flew in for a day of meeting Ryan cousins, and visiting her grandfather’s former homes in Ballinrobe and Robeen.

Even more divisive and unpopular was the 1984 visit by President Ronald Reagan, another Republican whose foreign policies in and towards the Soviet Union, and Central and Latin America were igniting waves of intense anti-nuclear and anti-war protests around the globe.

Reagan – then aged 72 – and his wife Nancy touched down in Shannon on the evening of Friday, June 1^st. Amongst the greeting party of governmental and diplomatic figures was Ireland’s current Finance Minister Michael Noonan, then Minister for Justice. ““Ah, I’ve heard of you,” Reagan said to Noonan. “Aren’t you the guy that’s supposed to look after me here?”

Again, the welcome accorded to the Reagans couldn’t hope to match that which greeted Kennedy. There were 900 gardai and defence force members at the airport – double the number of the public who bothered to turn out.

In fact, Reagan’s visit brought with it the most immense security precautions ever seen in the Irish state, not surprising considering that the president had been shot at close range just three years beforehand. In all, 7,500 Gardai (which included the then reigning Rose of Tralee) were moved around country during the Reagans’ three day visit.

When the First Couple were choppered to Ashford Castle in Cong, Co Mayo, they were driven the 100 yards from the landing pad to the hotel as six Secret Service agents walked alongside car. Coming up the rear at all times during the visit was an armoured limo known as the ‘War Wagon’, which was believed to contain five agents armed with sub-machine gun assault rifles, automatic handguns, and a variety of hand grenades and stun grenades.

After visiting Galway on Saturday, the Reagans made their way to Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary on Sunday, where 4,000 people gathered to see the president visit the spot from where his great-grandfather Michael O’Regan had emigrated for Illinois during the Famine. All protestors were kept out of the village, and security measures included the installation of five digital phones so that Reagan would be able to issue orders at a moment’s notice (this being at the height of Cold War tensions).

The famous photo-ops from that day are of the Reagans in the Ronald Reagan Lounge, a pub owned by John and Mary O’Farrell. Reagan had a pint of Smithwicks while Nancy sipped on a glass of Carolan cream liqueur, before posing with the obligatory babies. Meanwhile, outside, Derek Davis was compering for the locals, raising laughs by saying that he’d been chosen as MC by the Secret Service because his girth would provide the best cover for the president from a bullet.

From there, it was onto Dublin to meet President Patrick Hillery at the Aras, and onto a state banquet at Dublin Castle. Security was equally intense in the capital; it’s believed that there were Secret Service men underneath every manhole along the presidential motorcade’s route from Phoenix Park to Lord Edward Street.

Later, some 10,000 people marched through Dublin in the ‘Ring Around Reagan’ demo, carrying mock Pershing and cruise missiles, and chanting ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Ronald Reagan, he’s no good, send him back to Hollywood’. One American woman in the crowd was quoted in the press as saying, ‘Jeez, they must be all Democrats in Dublin’

The next day, Reagan’s last in Ireland, as he became the second US president after JFK to address the joint houses of the Oireachtas, 4,000 protestors (including Michael D. Higgins and then USI president Joe Duffy) congregated outside Leinster House booing and whistling. Meanwhile, inside, some 20 deputies abstained in protest, while Tony Gregory and Workers Party TDs Tomas MacGiolla and Proinsias De Ross walked out of the chamber mid-speech.

However, just over a decade later, De Rossa would be playing host to another US president as one of the three party leaders in the Fine Gael-Labour-Democratic Left ‘Rainbow’ government. The Clintons – the Bill n’ Hill show – rolled into Dublin on December 1^st, 1995, following a triumphant stopover in Belfast the day before, marking a return to the kind of ecstatic public reception that greeted JFK 30 years previous (and which is sure to greet the Obamas in May).

As 80,000 people crowded into College Green that evening, with sharpshooters positioned on roofs all around, Clinton worked his famed rhetorical magic, praising Dublin’s “handy” Gaelic football team, and giving a shout-out to all those in the audience named Cassidy – his mother’s maiden name.

Soon after that, Bill and Hillary visited Cassidy’s pub on Camden Street where the president drank a pint of stout (sparking a PR war between Guinness and Murphys over which brand he actually consumed), though the First Lady left after 15 minutes because she couldn’t handle the smoke in the bar.

Clinton too addressed the Oireachtas in his self-styled role as peacemaker, an event that brought John Hume and Gerry Adams into the Dail for the first time. Such was the rapturous tone of the visit that one White House staffer on the trip commented, ‘This is day two of the 1996 presidential campaign’.

Indeed, that’s a point that won’t be lost on Obama as he heads into the 2012 race. After their respective Irish visits, Nixon and Reagan went onto win second terms in record landslides, while Clinton also comfortably sailed to re-election. Most put those victories down to good campaigns and weak opponents, but none of them, Obama included, wanted to miss the chance to bank some of the ‘luck of the Irish’ along the way.

My interview with Kay Burley about her new book, First Ladies.

In First Ladies, the steamy new book from Sky News presenter Kay Burley, a perpetually randy British prime minister named Julian Jenson doesn’t miss any opportunity to have his wicked way with one of his many lovers, and that includes during a stay at the British ambassador’s residence in Dublin.

Indeed, that Irish-set romp – with Waterford Crystal flying off desks as legs are thrown akimbo- is the book’s raunchiest sex scene, and Burley has Bertie Ahern to thank for it…kind of.

“I wanted to include a Dublin plotline but I’d never been to Government Buildings, so I needed help with those details,” Burley explains to ‘Weekend’ over an early evening glass of wine in a bistro in Notting Hill, north London.

“I knew so little that I even spelled ‘Iveagh House’ incorrectly as ‘Ivy’. That was my fault, and I’m terribly embarrassed about it. I rang Bertie’s office, and about a week later he called me back. We spoke for an hour, and he was very lovely and chatty. With his daughter being such a successful author, I thought he’d look favourably on me.” (Bertie gets a special mention in her list of acknowledgments).

First Ladies, a Jackie Collins-esque bonkbuster set in the world of British politics and media, doesn’t claim to be anything other than diverting fun; as its 50-year-old author herself proclaims, “You won’t need a dictionary, and it’s not prose. I just wanted it to be page-turner about strong women.”

For weeks now, gleeful newspapers and websites have gone to town on Burley’s descriptions of her fictional lothario’s “gifted tongue” and of “glistening bodies writhing seductively”. Burley laughs at the suggestion that she must have had sex on the brain – “that’s more men than women, or so I’m told”, she says – before explaining how she approached writing the erotic passages.

“I knew I couldn’t write sex, so I rang my friend, author Kathy Lette, to ask for tips,” she says. “Kathy said, ‘Well darling, you can’t sit at your computer in your jeans. What you need to do is pop on your best lingerie and lie on your bed with your laptop, and start from there.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to do that’, to which Kathy replied, ‘Well, you’ll always write bad sex scenes then’. I decided to stay at my computer, in my combats, and I wrote what I could.”

None of the trysts are inspired by real life? “I’m 50 and I’ve got a child, what can I tell you?” the twice-divorced ‘Afternoon Live’ presenter replies, with a sly smile. Her son, Alexander (from her marriage to sports agent Steve Kutner), is now 18, and in college. “Oh he’s mortified,” Burley laughs. “All his friends have read the sexy bits, which is even worse for him. He’s so embarrassed by his mother, full stop.”

Burley has certainly provided plenty of ammunition for that embarrassment over her 20 years presenting on Sky News: she is (in)famous on internet forums and social networking sites for a series of bizarre on-screen comments and gaffes.

To recount some of the most cherished examples: on Ash Wednesday of last year, she mistook the ashes on US vice president Joe Biden’s forehead for a large bruise. Whilst interviewing the ex-girlfriend of Steve Wright, who’d murdered five prostitutes in Suffolk, England, Burley inquired, “Do you think he’d have done this if you’d had a better sex life?”

Another Burley classic– though this is possibly urban legend – saw the broadcaster introduce live coverage of 9/11 by saying “the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack”. Let’s not forget the moment last summer when she angrily interrupted a young political protestor live on air, saying, “Why don’t you just go home and watch it on Sky News?”, which led to calls for her to be sacked.

Burley also drew ire for reducing singer Peter Andre to tears by suggesting he could lose custody of his children (prompting 880 complaints to media watchdog Ofcom. Burley was eventually cleared).

“Nobody likes to make mistakes, and when I do, it broadcasts to the world,” she says. “If I make a mistake, everyone knows, and I trend on Twitter, which is the 21^st century version of the poison pen letter. Of course, I’d rather not make mistakes, but I think I’ve done more live TV than anyone else in the world. I’m going to make mistakes, but what can you do? You get back on the horse, because if you start examining your entrails in the midst of battle, you’ll just keep falling off the horse.”

She gives the impression of someone who has had to learn to laugh at herself. “I was in Louis Walsh’s dressing room backstage at The X Factor last year, when these beautiful boys walked in,” she recalls. “We introduced ourselves, and I assumed they were staff on the show, so I asked one of them if they could fetch me a cup of tea. They replied, ‘Erm, we can ask someone to get that for you’. Turns out they were the boys from [the band] The Wanted. I felt like a numpty.”

But what about the nastier moments, such as when British Labour MP Chris Bryant called her “a bit dim” in the course of a particularly heated discussion about phone hacking? “I’m sure he regrets that,” she replies. “I think he was showboating, and that was a golden opportunity for him. But he is a man who has posed for pictures on the internet in his underpants. So who’s dim?”

Clearly, Burley isn’t afraid to fight back, as evidenced by the pictures apparently showing her pinning a photographer to a wall – by the throat – during a chaotic altercation outside a courthouse where Naomi Campbell was making an appearance in 2008.

Criticism seems to bounce off her. “When I’m on air, I’m a different person,” she says. “I’m not me. That’s just my persona, and people are entitled to judge that persona. I’ve got fantastic family and friends that keep me grounded. I’m quite a private person, and certainly not a ‘celebrity’. I have 14 chickens and three dogs. I’m much more comfortable in my wellies and up to my arms in chicken poo.”

Born and raised on a council estate in Wigan, in Lancashire, Burley – whose maiden name McGurran denotes an unexcavated Irish heritage – worked her way up through local papers and radio, before graduating to TV, and then joining Sky in 1988.

She recently signed a new five-year contract with the station (worth about e570,000 a year), and is reportedly close to her boss, the ‘boogeyman’ of world media, Rupert Murdoch. “I’ve spent time with him; we’ve had lunch here and in New York,” she says of her relationship to the controversial Australian. “But, I mean, he doesn’t ring me in the morning to ask how I’m doing.”

Unlike one of the characters in her book, Burley says she didn’t have to play dirty or engage in “back-scratching” to get to the top. “Nobody has any dirt on me,” she states. “I broadcast my mistakes, and I don’t have any skeletons in the cupboard.”

She has been a single mother for most of her son’s life. “I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always had very good help at home,” she says. “I’ve always gone with ‘mannies’ (male nannies). Having a boy, I felt Alexander needed that bit of testosterone. Our previous ‘mannie’ was a Gurkha in the Indian army, so he was a great influence to have around.”

Despite being on television nearly every day for two decades, Burley maintains she has very little sense of vanity. Today, she is wearing a black and ivory Escada dress and black heels, with an ivory MaxMara bag, her distinctive auburn hair neatly coiffed. “I only wear make-up when I have to,” she states. “It’s important that I dress the part for my persona as a broadcaster. In all walks of life, people will listen to what you’re saying if you dress the part.”

She does take her health seriously though, running 5km every morning either with her dogs or on her jogging machine. “I’ve always tried to keep fit because both my parents died relatively young,” she says with a noticeable flinch of her eyes. “I want to be able to see my grandchildren grow up.”

When asked if she’s single or attached, she replies, “None of your business”. Well, could she envisage getting married again? “I’ve had two successful marriages so far, so who knows?” she quips.

Burley’s second book – a thriller – is already finished, but if neither book manages to sell, it certainly won’t be because the author is too shy to brazenly self-promote. “I was interviewing Hillary Clinton last week, and I gave her a copy of the book,” she says. “She was very gracious and asked me to sign it.” Burley pauses, and gives a wink. “Never miss an opportunity, darling.”

*First Ladies is published by Harper Collins

Tomorrow is the Rapture, apparently