Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

…I moved to London. Man, that has gone fast.

My TV feature on Chris Lilley and Angry Boys from last Saturday’s Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

Not everyone could get away with playing a mentally and hearing-impaired teenager who likes to urinate on his brother and watch his own mother in the shower, a politically incorrect female detention centre prison warden, a foul-mouthed black rapper, and an over-bearing Japanese mother who’s forcing her young skateboarding-champ son to be gay.

But, then again, not everyone is Chris Lilley, and not every show is Angry Boys, currently airing on Tuesday nights on BBC3.

For the uninitiated, Lilley is the Australian comedian behind the comedy series, We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High, two cult TV shows that transcended their Aussie origins to become hugely acclaimed international successes.

Born and raised in Sydney, the 36-year-old started his career in stand-up, before his breakthrough came on the comedy series Big Bite, in which he played an extreme sports enthusiast, and a passive-aggressive, musical theatre-obsessed high school drama teacher Greg Gregson, aka ‘Mr G’.

After that show was cancelled, Lilley conceived, wrote and starred in We Can Be Heroes, a six-part mockumentary series covering the search for the Australian of the Year. Lilley played a few different roles in the show, including teenager Daniel Sims, who was nominated for donating part of his eardrum to his half-deaf twin brother Nathan.

Most memorably, Lilley created the part of Ja’mie King, a wealthy 16-year-old private schoolgirl, who made the cut for Aussie of the Year for raising money for a charity organisation, and for doing 40 hour sponsored fasts twice a week, which not only raises money but also “keeps me looking hot”.

We Can Be Heroes was a great critical and ratings success when it aired in 2005, and for his part Lilley bagged two Logie Awards for Best Comedy and Best New Talent. This gave him the confidence and the clout to write another series the following year, Summer Heights High, in which the comic retained the character of Ja’mie, and resurrected the flamboyant Mr G from his earlier Big Bite sketches.

Summer Heights High is Lilley’s still-unrivalled masterpiece. Home and Away this ain’t. Lilley’s Mean Girl Ja’mie King, who spent the series as a guest student in a – retch – public school, became even more of a fan favourite due to her almost-limitless supply of bitchy putdowns, undaunted narcissism, class-based snobbery, and self-delusional confidence.

Meanwhile, with Mr G, Lilley played on another strand of humour as the camp, preening, catty Mr G attempted to stage his visionary, cautionary tale school musical Annabel Dickson: The Musical, based on the titular Summer Heights High student who had just died of a drug overdose.

Mr G believed in his own talent and artistic vision with absolute conviction; afterall, he did conceive of Tsunamarama, his musical about the 2004 Asian tsunami set to the tracks of Bananarama. Over the course of the series’ eight episodes, we watched as Mr G had to contend with what he saw as a philistine principal, as well as the enforced casting of a Downs Syndrome student in the lead role.

The third comedic element in Summer Heights High was Jonah Takalua, also played by Lilley, the penis-obsessed, delinquent son of Tonga immigrants, struggling in the special education class, and who was constantly on the verge of expulsion from the school.

The portrayal of these three characters left Lilley open to all manner of charges: that he was crude, ignorant, sexist, racist, and homophobic. However, the less reactionary, Mailbag-writing audience instead saw acute characterisation, insightful social commentary, and even poignancy and sensitivity.

The doomed storyline for Jonah, in particular, concluded on a deeply moving note, and that unpredictability is key to Chris Lilley’s genius as a writer and performer. He’s constantly pulling the rug out from underneath the viewer’s feet; just when you think you have one character sussed, he introduces a new element, organically, that makes you view them, and their point of view in a whole other light, while still making you bust a gut laughing.

With Angry Boys, Lilley has admitted that the only course left open to him after such a resounding success was to go darker, more challenging, and more surprising, while keeping the focus on his usual themes and concerns: namely role models and the crisis in modern masculinity.

Five episodes into the 12 part series, it’s clear that Angry Boys is not as laugh-out-loud funny as its predecessor, but it’s certainly more uncomfortable to watch, as well as being much, much sadder.

The cast of the new show – again all played by Lilley – includes Daniel and Nathan Sims, returning from We can Be Heroes, as the brothers prepare for Nathan to leave their middle-of-nowhere farm for a special deaf school.

Then there’s Blake Oakfield, a dunce ex-surfing champion who got shot in the testicles while fighting a rival beach gang. Lilley’s increased stature and budget – with funding from HBO – allowed him to film in LA, where he created the character of one-hit-wonder rapper, S.Mouse, who is under house arrest and facing the axe from his label after uploading a graphic, literal video for his new track ‘Poo On You’ onto YouTube.

However, Lilley’s two strongest characters on Angry Boys are women. Daniel and Nathan’s grandmother Ruth – aka Gran – runs a boy’s juvenile detention centre. She may be foul-mouthed and racist – calling one black teenager “Coco-Pops” – but she also knits them superhero pyjamas, hosts karaoke nights for them, and provides tissues for the boys locked up in isolation.

As ever though Lilley goes deeper and shows us something of Gran’s motivation, often to quietly devastating effect, as well as her genuine caring side for the angry boys under her wing.

Lastly, the most outrageous creation is Jen Okazaki, a Japanese mother who manages her young son Tim’s skateboarding career with Mommie Dearest-levels of manic devotion, depriving her son of food so he won’t get fat and cashing in on his homosexuality with a tacky though lucrative range of merchandise (including a phallic-shaped aftershave dispenser).

The thing is Tim isn’t gay, but that doesn’t stop Jen from cutting him off from girls and motivating him into the ways of the rainbow (“Don’t be shy, we know you like c*ck,” she instructs).

The response to Angry Boys so far has been mixed, running the full gamut from ‘disappointing’ to ‘genius’, though it has been a huge success in Lilley’s native Oz. The level of exposure he has received on this side of the world on the back of Angry Boys is a sign of Lilley’s ever-growing international profile, leaving his many devoted fans to wonder just where he can go next. How much darker and more disturbing can comedy get? No better man than Lilley to try to answer that question.

*Angry Boys, BBC3, Tuesday, 10.30pm

My feature on the history of gay pride in Ireland from last Saturday’s ‘Weekend’ magazine in the Irish Independent

As this year’s annual gay pride parade makes its way through Dublin city centre later today, the focus will very much be on celebrating and having a good time, so much so that it can be hard to reconcile gay pride in contemporary Ireland with its tough and often tragic origins back in the 1970s and 80s.

That was the era when the shocking killing of a gay man in a Dublin park became a major catalyst for social and legal change.

The 1969 Stonewall riots in New York – when hundreds of gay men and women clashed with police who’d raided the Stonewall Bar on the day of Judy Garland’s funeral – is credited with creating the modern international gay pride movement.

Stonewall didn’t inspire a similar direct call-to-arms in Ireland, mainly because gay visibility was extremely difficult here. At the time homosexuality was still illegal in this country: legislation passed during the Victorian era that had sent Oscar Wilde to prison was still on the Irish statute books, and would remain so until as late as 1993. To be gay in Ireland meant by and large to be ashamed and secretive and hidden.

That being said Ireland did absorb some of the ripple effects from the gay rights movements overseas. The emergence of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, and then the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970 were considered offshoots of Stonewall, while a more radical type of gay politics began developing on the campus of Queens College in Belfast, and a few months later in Trinity College.

In 1974, the Sexual Liberation Movement formed and began campaigning for reform on a wide range of issues including homosexuality, contraception, divorce and abortion. In February of that same year, the first Irish conference on homosexuality took place in the Common Room in Trinity, attended by 300 people, with speakers that included former Health Minister Dr Noel Browne.

On June 27^th, 1974, eight members of the various groups organised the first public gay rights demo at the Department of Justice and the British Embassy in Dublin. The small group, waving banners reading ‘The Homosexuals Are Revolting and ‘Lesbian Love’, included Jeff Dudgeon and Trinity lecturer David Norris, the two men who would go on in later years to successfully sue the UK and Irish governments respectively over restrictive gay legislation.

For the rest of the 1970s, Dublin Pride was generally marked by a press statement from the Irish Gay Rights Movement, usually drawing attention to the unjustness of existing legislation. The human and economic resources necessary to organise a Pride event only became available with the emergence of the Hirschfeld Centre in Temple Bar in 1979.

The National Lesbian & Gay Federation (then known as NGF) then organised a small Pride demo in Dublin’s city centre on Saturday June 28^th, 1980, four days after David Norris launched his constitutional action in the High Court. Some 19 marchers strode through the city centre handing out pink carnations and leaflets explaining the background to Stonewall.

The 1980s were simultaneously exciting and challenging in terms of Irish gay life. Indeed, the Irish Queer Archive, which became part of the National Library of Ireland in 2008, contains a wealth of evidence attesting to those difficult times.

For example, amongst the archive items is a letter dated from 1980 written by a 22-year-old gay man to the agony aunt of a Sunday newspaper. The young writer confessed that he was so lonely that he wanted to die, and finished by asking if he could be cured of homosexuality.

In her reply, the agony aunt advised the man to visit the Legion of Mary at the Star of the Sea hostel in Dublin as they ran “special meetings for people with that problem”. She added that medical experts were reluctant to “diagnose” homosexuality until someone was at least 27, due to hormone fluctuation. Regardless, she went on to recommend hormone therapy, and, as one last solution, she stated that the man should consider a life of celibacy, “like priests, spinsters and bachelors”.

There are numerous stories of gay men being refused entry to pubs and hotels around the country. A feature from the ‘Irish Times’ in June 1985 quotes the founder of an Irish singles club as saying his group has “no queers, homos, none of that carry on. Our members are entitled to no less.”

Elsewhere, a news report charted the response to the appearance of a lesbian named Joni Crone on The Late Late Show in January 1980. One caller to RTE – a doctor no less- is quoted as saying that he “does not pay the licence fee to see that filthy person”, while another complainant refers to the woman as “a pervert”.

But it’s the largely anecdotal instances of violence against gay people that haunts the era, crimes that more often than not went unreported by victims who feared they would be “outed” or even mocked by authorities if they came forward.

In January 1982, Charles Self, a gay 33-year-old RTE employee, was stabbed to death 14 times in his own home. The Garda response to the murder – dubbed a ‘witch-hunt’ by one gay rights commentator – led to a picket outside Pearse Street Garda station and a further souring of relations between the gay community and the police that would take a decade to improve. The Self murder was never solved; just last month a cold case team re-opened the file with two new leads.

Perhaps the most notorious “queer-bashing” of this kind was the brutal death of 31-year-old Aer Rianta worker Declan Flynn at the hands of five teenagers in Fairview Park in September 1982. The area was a popular ‘cruising’ spot for gay men to meet one another, and this gang – the youngest of whom was just 14 – considered themselves innocent vigilantes protecting the community.

This argument was enough to convince the judge, Mr Justice Gannon, to let all five men walk free on suspended manslaughter charges in March 1983 (one of the attackers was later jailed for raping a woman).

The ruling provoked outrage, and the first large scale public demonstration against anti-gay and anti-women violence. Between 800-1,000 people marched from Liberty Hall to Fairview Park on a bitter March day in 1983.

“That was a transformative moment,” says archivist and long-time gay campaigner Tonie Walsh. “It fed directly a few months later into Dublin’s first, proper Pride march in June 1983, where over 200 of us from Dublin, Cork and Belfast marching on a fabulously sunny Saturday afternoon.

“The reaction from the public was generally good. At the finish on O’Connell Street, Ireland’s first public lesbian, Joni Crone, addressed the audience, re-dedicating the GPO as the ‘Gay Person’s Organisation’.”

Subsequent gay pride events in Dublin in the ‘80s were more low-key, if not non-existent. “It was the decade of huge unemployment and mass emigration from this country, as well as the global Aids epidemic,” Walsh explains. “I think everyone was just exhausted.” Indeed, the 1985 parade is remembered for featuring just 25 people walking behind a small van with a winding-down tape-recorder slowly wheezing, ‘Sing if you’re glad to be gay’.

However, the Dublin social gay scene was slowly coming out of the shadows. The Hirschfeld Centre, which burned down in 1987, had a café and dance club called Flikkers (the Dutch word for ‘faggots’), as well as a cinema club, youth group, counselling facilities and the headquarters for the Gay health Action group, who launched the country’s first information leaflet on HIV and Aids in 1985.

Furthermore, The George nightclub opened in 1985, while there were other gay venues or ‘gay nights’ held in bars on South Great George’s Street, Dame Street and South William Street. “The mere act of socialising in itself was seen as a public stance of defiance against the law, censorship and the taboos around any discussion of homosexuality,” says Tonie Walsh.

Bolstered by David Norris’ success at the European Court of Human Rights in 1988, a newly energised group brought the Gay Pride parade back into the public eye in 1992. This was a time of immense change: the new Fianna Fail/Labour government was obliged to implement gay law reform due to the Norris ruling, and in June 1993, the Justice Minister Maire Geoghegan-Quinn decriminalised homosexuality and established an equal age of consent.

Gay Pride took place the following day, where a huge crowd gathered in celebration chanting, ‘What did we want? Equality! When did we get it? Yesterday!’ The Central Bank became the centre for speeches and partying, where the Diceman (Tom McGinty) did a striptease. It was such a party that the council later put rails around the Central Bank to prevent any such future gatherings.

Ever since then Gay Pride has continued to have some sort of political hue, be it drawing attention to gay marriage or the rights of gay parents. But the nature of today’s parade itself illustrates how much has changed in gay life over the past 30 years.

“It shows how we have moved from a phase when Pride used to be defined by protest,” explains Walsh. “Now it’s a party, with a fantastic, colourful parade. The protest isn’t over, but so much of the equality and civil rights jigsaw has been put into place, and while there are a few remaining pieces, we know they are in sight. Pride is like a family day out now, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.”

…Countdown to Zero

Incendies

TV feature from today’s Irish Independent

DON’T MISS: Mildred Pierce

Tomorrow, Saturday, Sky Atlantic, 9pm

It’s telling that the first role Kate Winslet agreed to take on after winning her Oscar was in this TV mini-series, backed by the all-conquering HBO, which starts on Sky Atlantic tomorrow night.

There was a time, not that long ago, when the sight of a newly-minted Best Actress winner signing on for television work rather than pursuing $20m paychecks or locking-in a lucrative franchise would have been greeted with pitiful looks and Schadenfreude-laden sneers by the industry.

Not anymore, alas. For actors – even the A-listers – the lines between the big and small screens have become blurred to the point of indistinction. Not only is it now perfectly acceptable for a star like Winslet to commit to a project like Mildred Pierce, it’s also smart.

For quite a few years now, actors – especially those of the XX chromosome variety – have been bleating on about how all the good writing has migrated to television.

The likes of cable channels HBO, Showtime, FX, and AMC, as well as the main networks in the US have spent the past decade investing in and cultivating writers and directors who can create television shows to rival movies in their production values, writing, and performances.

Shows like The Sopranos, 24, Mad Men, Lost and The Wire have built up fanatical audiences and won praise from all quarters for their quality and the breadth and ambition of their visions.

For women, TV has been a godsend. Winslet is just the latest leading lady to find a meaty role in a TV production, and indeed Mildred Pierce also features Evan Rachel Wood and Melissa Leo, who won an Oscar earlier this year for the movie The Fighter.

Just look at some of the knock-out roles in drama and comedy currently on TV. On RTE2 tonight, you can watch Edie Falco – who already enjoyed one iconic role in The Sopranos – tearing into the part of the seriously flawed Nurse Jackie. You can then follow that up with three-time Oscar nominee Laura Linney navigating her way through the funny and poignant cancer-dramady The Big C.

Then there’s the case of Glenn Close in Damages, which has proven to be her strongest role since Dangerous Liaisons back in the late 1980s.

Consider also Mary Louise Parker in Weeds, Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, Patricia Arquette in Medium, Holly Hunter in Saving Grace, Toni Collette in United States of Tara, Rachel Griffiths in Six Feet Under, and Sally Field in Brothers and Sisters, while Claire Danes recently won a rack of awards for her role in the TV movie Temple Grandin.

The trend of movie stars and ‘serious actors’ (an oxymoron if there ever was one) crossing over into TV began in the late 1990s. Three people, in particular, were trailblazers in the field: Sarah Jessica Parker, who had to be convinced to sign on for Sex and the City, and Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe who pursued roles in The West Wing.

In an interview with this newspaper earlier this month, Lowe admitted that several stars – such as Kiefer Sutherland (24) and William Peterson (CSI) – later thanked him for showing that TV work was a palatable – and lucrative – option.

Imagine how different SJP’s career would be today if she’d passed on Sex and the City? Would she even have a career? That groundbreaking show also throw a bone – pun intended – to struggling screen star Kim Cattrall, who devoured the role of maneater Samantha Jones.

Today we’ve come to expect legends like Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman to switch back and forth between TV and movie roles. We’d never have had Angels in America or You Don’t Know Jack (about the late Dr Jack Kervorkian) otherwise.

Similarly, it’s now common for TV stars to cross over to movie roles too. Jon Hamm from Mad Men can be seen in cinemas from today in Bridesmaids, while his female co-stars January Jones, Elisabeth Moss and Christina Hendricks are all securing roles in big budget movies too. Tina Fey, the most popular American female comedian at work today, now agilely combines movie work with her TV baby 30 Rock.

As for Kate Winslet and Mildred Pierce, this five-parter is a slow-burning and visually stunning adaptation of the James M. Cain novel that was filmed as a melodrama starring Joan Crawford in 1945.

It’s a role that gifts Winslet the chance to go through a range of emotions playing the titular post-WWII housewife, who kicks out her errant husband and toils in low paid work before opening her own restaurant, and all while conducting a passionate love affair (with Guy Pearse) and trying to please her difficult, snobby daughter (played by Evan Rachel Wood in later editions).

Winslet is predictably superb though in a production that’s a little hindered by over-indulgence and problematic pacing on the part of director Todd Haynes. That said, the actress is sure to bag some awards for the role, setting her up nicely to return to cinema screens later this year in the action thriller Contagion with Matt Damon, and Roman Polanski’s Carnage, opposite Jodie Foster.

Latest feature for movies.ie

We love a good wedding here at movies.ie, and with the release of ‘bra-mance’ comedy Bridesmaids this week, we thought we’d assemble the maddest, most entertaining wedding ever from our favourite various movie nuptials.

How about we start with the bride? We could do a lot worse than Emily, the Corpse Bride from Tim Burton’s movie of the same title. C’mon, it’s Helena Bonham Carter! Plus she’s dead! And mad possessive! Furthermore she has that whole access to the wild underworld thing going for her, and the ability to turn into butterflies. That should make for a lively ceremony if nothing else.

As for the groom, it should be Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) from In & Out. Not only is he secretly gay and fa-ha-ha-bulous, we’d have the spectacle of Corpse Bride going batshit when she finds out about his thing for Tom Selleck. And that’s before his other fiancée, also named Emily (Joan Cusack) turns up to start a row. Oh those gays! Back-up groom is Andrew Paxton from The Proposal (Ryan Reynolds), because he might take his shirt off.

Continue here.

TV feature from today’s Independent

DON’T MISS: Family Guy

FX, 9pm/ BBC3, 11pm

Given its enduring popularity, seven-figure DVD sales, and ubiquity in the television schedules, it’s hilarious to think back on how Family Guy was axed from our screens back in 2001.

Owing to low ratings – caused by inconsistent scheduling – the Fox Network canned the cartoon adventures of the Griffin family after its third season. Talk about having the last laugh.

The show had had a difficult trajectory up to that point. Debuting after the Super Bowl in 1999, Family Guy – conceived by a-then 26-year-old animator and comedian named Seth McFarlane – pulled in a massive audience of 22m viewers, which quickly tapered off due in no small part to a cooler-than-expected reaction.

Viewers didn’t know what to make of it. The adult nature of its humour was a shock to many, while others persisted in comparing it to its acclaimed network stablemate, The Simpsons.

Indeed, on the constant comparisons to the Springfield clan, McFarlane says: “Stylistically, I think we’re on par with each other.” The rivalry hasn’t gone unreferenced on screen either: the two shows have continued to aim gentle potshots at one another in episodes over the past few years.

After its first season, Family Guy was shunted around the schedules for two years, competing against the likes of sitcom giants Frasier and Friends. It never had a chance to gain a foothold, or build audience loyalty, which led to its eventual cancellation.

Then something remarkable happened. A careless Fox sold off the rights for Family Guy for nothing to the Cartoon Network, who began re-running the show on its cable offshoot Adult Swim in 2003. It was a huge ratings success.

The first two seasons were simultaneously released on DVD, shifting 2.2m copies, becoming the best-selling DVD of the year (and the then second highest TV DVD seller ever). The third season subsequently sold another one million copies.

Fox quickly changed its tune when it copped that it had a huge cash-cow in its midst, and ordered 35 new episodes of Family Guy in May 2004, marking the first time a cancelled TV show was revived based purely on DVD sales.

The new series started airing in 2005 to ratings of between 10-12m, and since then it has retained strong viewing figures both on air and online. Seth McFarlane’s hand was strengthened too. In 2008, he signed a development deal with Fox rumoured to be worth around $100m.

From that deal emerged the equally adult-themed comedy American Dad, which certainly has its hilarious moments, but has never matched its predecessor in terms of popularity. The McFarlane machine then churned out a Family Guy spinoff, The Cleveland Show, though the less said about that painful television calamity the better.

Indeed, the shockingly bad Cleveland hinted that McFarlane had overstretched himself. Still, Family Guy kept growing stronger, becoming the first animated show to be nominated for the Best Comedy Emmy in 2009 (something that even The Simpsons never managed).

Criticism of the show hasn’t subsided though. The website Gawker took the occasion of the show’s Emmy nomination to lambast its “crude, sloppy, shamelessly Simpsons-derivative non sequitur humor”. Around the same time, the ‘New York Times Magazine’, no less, laid into McFarlane over the course of an interview, attacking Family Guy’s frequent rape jokes and its other politically incorrect jabs.

The show does indeed go out of its way to offend, as evidenced by the recent row over airing an episode about abortion. Earlier in its run an equally contentious episode about Jews was pulled, though both of these installments can be seen on the DVDs.

Other recent controversies were caused by an episode where Brian the dog and psychopathic baby Stewie travel back in time to Nazi Germany to find SS officers sporting ‘McCain-Palin’ campaign badges. Last year, the show’s writers went after Palin again by including an oblique reference to her in an episode featuring a Downs Syndrome character (kicking off a predictable firestorm in the American press).

However, far from causing shock these days, Family Guy’s outré humour has more in common with a hyperactive child that’s showing off for attention and who you just want to tell to sit down and behave because they’re embarrassing everyone.

Family Guy can still raise a chuckle with its black humour and out-there pop-cultural-savvy cutaways, but watching more than two episodes in one sitting can bring on a heady case of outrage-fatigue. Sometimes it just tries too hard, and overplays its hand, as was the case with their not-clever-enough-by-half feature length spoofs of the original Star Wars trilogy.

However, McFarlane is still one of the most powerful names in the world of animated entertainment, so what they hell do I know?

In fact he’s just been entrusted to revive one of the most beloved telly cartoons ever, The Flintstones, promising an ominous-sounding “21^st century spin” on the prehistoric comedy. Let’s hope he keeps the rude and risqué gags in check with Fred and Wilma. There are just some things we yabba-dabba-don’t want to see.

My feature in today’s Independent on Ireland’s first Wimbledon competitor, Vere St Leger Goold

After his valiant performance at Wimbledon this week, Conor Niland is a far cry from Ireland‘s notorious first contender in the competition, a convicted killer by the name of Vere St Leger Goold.

For the Waterford-born Goold, who competed in the tournament in 1879, ended up dying in prison after being convicted of a murder in Monte Carlo.

Now Goold’s incredible story will be told in a new play Love All, which is being staged as part of the Clonmel Junction Festival in Tipperary next weekend.

Continue here.

(Picture courtesy of Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum)

My TV feature from today’s Irish Independent

DON’T MISS: Chelsea Lately

E! Entertainment, 12am

For a sex that has long held a reputation as good talkers and listeners, there are precious few women talk show hosts working in popular entertainment today. Pick a country – any country – and see how many female chat show hosts you can come up with in that territory. It’s a struggle, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not under any illusion that women are staying away from the genre out of choice. Watch out now boys as I’m about to use a scary [whispers] feminist term, but the patriarchal showbiz system has just never supported the concept of female light entertainment hosts (or female directors, female studio executives…you get the point).

Which makes the recent success of US late-night talk show host Chelsea Handler all the more significant. Since its debut four years ago, her programme, Chelsea Lately, has slowly built a core of fervent supporters (including this newspaper’s Ian O’Doherty, who was a proud early adopter).

Handler’s brash, disarming, often outrageous interviewing techniques have attracted enough attention to propel her into the mainstream, which, as we’ll see, has been something of a mixed blessing.

Handler – aged 36 and a statuesque blonde – started her career as a stand-up, having moved to Los Angeles as a teenager in search of acting work. She appeared on shows like The Bernie Mac Show, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, before bagging her own self-titled programme in 2006 (it lasted only two seasons).

While her TV career was still trying to get off the ground, Handler found success elsewhere: as the humorous memoirist of three books. The first, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands – charting the, ahem, ups and downs of her chaotic love life – appeared in 2005, and went to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list.

She followed it up with what has to be one of the best-titled essay collections ever published, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, which, again, topped the bestseller list in 2008. She’s penned two more tomes since.

The format of Chelsea Lately, which started on E! in 2007, includes a cold-opening with Handler making gags about the day’s topical – mostly entertainment – stories, before going into them in more detail with a panel of three comics (not forgetting the contributions of her diminutive assistant Chuy).

To her credit, Handler recruits the services of a lot of not-yet-established stand-ups, and has been praised for her wide use of female comics on her panels.

Handler then conducts an interview with a celebrity guest. However, stars know that when they agree to do Chelsea Lately, they’re more likely to be asked about bodily functions, or behind-the-scenes gossip, or other off-topic matters that would typically cause their PR people to go into meltdown.

But the slebs seem to love it, and often come back for more. Tellingly, the stars appearing on the show have become more A-list with every passing year. Whereas Handler would have been lucky to get Jennifer Love Hewitt on the show in 2007, today Jennifer Aniston – whom Handler genuinely counts as a friend – is a regular guest.

And ergo lies Handler’s current problems. There’s only so long someone can stay outside the showbiz circle, taking the mick and becoming a star in the process, before that person is co-opted, and inevitably neutered by the very circle they once mocked.

Handler herself is a big celebrity in America right now, making great strides into the entertainment community –to the point where it’s genuinely been mooted that she may soon get her own primetime network talk show – which is making it increasingly difficult for her to carry out the job that made her famous.

That, coupled with potential burnout and rapid over-exposure, is taking its toll. Take her gig as host as the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, for example. This was a big deal; Handler was the first woman asked to host the VMAs since Roseanne Barr back in 1994.

Her performance was woeful – and I say that as a fan. Critics dismissed her emceeing duties as “workmanlike” and “cringe-inducing”. The content and the delivery of her gags just fell flat nearly every time. Since then there’s been a noticeable dip in the quality of her talk show; the jokes seem more laboured. The outrage level has been lowered. One or two recent installments have even been – dare I say it – boring.

Even worse, she has allowed her book Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, to be turned into a laughter-tracked network comedy. Watch the trailer on YouTube. It’s not pretty. Moving up always entails selling out in some way.

Here’s hoping Handler can regroup and rediscover her comic mojo. She’s a big talent, but needs to decide what kind of host she ultimately wants to be: nasty outsider or neutered insider. Alas, I suspect that survival and mainstream success lies down only one path.