Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

A group of interviews I did for movies.ie about John Madden’s new movie, The Debt.

First up, Dame Helen Mirren

Jessica Chastain

And Tom Wilkinson

Borders’ employees list their top complaints/grievances:

My interview with Colin Firth in today’s Irish Independent

Colin Firth has had a stellar year, winning an Oscar for Best Actor in February for his performance in the The King’s Speech, and following up that success with a juicy role in a new adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

So the Irish Independent took no pleasure in putting a damper on the 51-year-old’s lucky streak by having to inform him that Formula One driver Jensen Button had just displaced Firth as Britain’s best looking bloke in a new male celebrity-ranking poll.

Even worse, Firth dropped from first place in last year’s poll to third, with Spooks star Richard Armitage taking second position (that said, Firth still ranked higher than David Beckham, Jude Law and Daniel Craig).

Continue here.

My latest feature for movies.ie about working mums in movies.

I Don’t Know How She Does It, cries the title of – not to mention, annoyingly, several characters in – Sarah Jessica Parker’s new movie, released last Friday.

In it, SJP plays harried working mother Kate Reddy, who is trying to find the right balance between being Carrie Bradshaw and being Carrie Bradshaw trying to be a mother.

Though this movie seems to believe otherwise, Kate Reddy is not the first struggling working mother in cinema – nor anywhere near the best or most interesting neither. Consider the following…

Norma Rae (1979)/Mrs Doubtfire (1993):

Long-before she became supermum/peace activist/radio host/Calista Flockhart-force-feeder/worrier-in-chief on the TV series Brothers and Sisters, Sally Field was giving cinema audiences vital lessons in how to be a movie working mother in these wildly different films.

How Does She Do It? In Norma Rae, textile factory-working mammy Field leads a worker revolt to get union rights for her colleagues, in spite of the toll it takes on her family life. Her protest works and her factory becomes unionised.

Meanwhile, in Mrs Doubtfire, architect-mum-of-three (four, if you include her infantile soon-to-be-ex-husband) Miranda Hillard (our Sally) sets about getting her harried life in order by tossing out loveable* hubbie Daniel (Robin Williams), hiring a life-saving Scottish nanny (you know how that turns out) and starting a new love affair with Pierce Brosnan. In the mushy hands of director Chris Columbus, it all works out pretty rosy for everyone in the end. Just like in real life divorce cases.

*Actual description may not match product.

Continue here.

The Emmys might be a bit of a joke, but the odd time they get it very right. Case in point: rewarding Kyle Chandler last night for his consistently brilliant work on the recently-departed, consistently under-watched Friday Night Lights.

By Sophie Hannah

My feature on the Museum of Broken Relationships in today’s Irish Independent ‘Weekend’ magazine

What becomes of the broken-hearted? And, more to the point, what becomes of all the stuff they leave behind?

One option might be to offload that detritus of failed relationships – the random objects and keepsakes of little, if any, intrinsic worth but which are loaded with value or meaning – to a museum of heartbreak.

‘The Museum of Broken Relationships’ is a touring exhibit currently residing in London’s Covent Garden that invites the heartbroken to donate items associated with a failed relationship, marriage, romance or fling, rather than throwing them out, keeping them hidden away at the back of the closet, or burning them in a drunken ceremonial ritual with sympathetic friends.

These items are then incorporated into the permanent exhibition in Zagreb, Croatia, where a pair of artists and former lovers, Olinka Vištica and Drazen Grubišić, first curated the museum.

The tour came to Ireland two summers ago, setting up in Kilkenny for the city’s annual arts festival, and indeed one of the donations from a Marble City resident – a graffiti can used to spray a declaration of love on a wall – is on show in the travelling exhibit right now.

The idea behind the museum, according to its organisers, is offer “the chance to overcome an emotional collapse through creation, unlike ‘destructive’ self-help instructions for recovery from failed loves”.

Everywhere the museum has travelled there has been a strong and enthusiastic local response, presumably in gratitude for the gift of ritualistic “closure” on past loves that the collection provides.

Walking around the exhibit in London last weekend, voyeuristically poking around at other people’s pain, the question that stayed in my mind was: is it really better to have loved and lost?

There’s certainly a healthy inflection of the bittersweet – and occasionally the downright bitter – in this exhibit. The clue is in the title after all: it’s about ‘broken’ relationships, not healthy ones or those that ended amicably. To be fair, would you even go to such an exhibit unless you were guaranteed an (un)healthy share of darkness as well as the light?

So, for example, a champagne cork donated from a woman in London is from the bottle of plonk she drank upon breaking up with a fiancée whom she discovered was cheating on her. In the note accompanying the display, this lady said she wanted to celebrate “a lucky escape”.

There’s also a Mercedes Benz sign with no explanatory note provided, or needed come to think of it; a teddy bear, donated by a Croatian woman, that she says was given to her by a man who told her he loved her just to get her into bed – and then dumped her; and a drug-testing kit from a relapsed addict lover.

Meanwhile, in the permanent exhibit in Croatia, you glimpse a half-smashed garden gnome  – known as ‘The Divorce Day Gnome’ – that was thrown in a rage at the car of a departing husband.

Then there’s the axe that was used by a jilted German man to hack up the possessions of the straying girlfriend, who had just moved in with him. He found out about her two-timing – with another woman, no less – while she was a two-week holiday.

“Every day I axed one piece of her furniture,” the man writes. “I kept the remains there, as an expression of my inner condition. The more her room filled with chopped furniture acquiring the look of my soul, the better I felt.

“Two weeks after she left, she came back for the furniture. It was neatly arranged into small heaps and fragments of wood. She took that trash and left my apartment for good. The axe was promoted to a therapy instrument.”

Raw, numb pain can be detected in other objects, such as a mobile phone that was sent to a woman from its owner just so she would stop calling him. There’s the sand from a beach of a too-brief holiday romance in Greece; the MP3 player of a former boyfriend, the music on which a woman continued to listen for a year after the break-up.

The contributions are not all negative and depressing, though given the nature of the museum, the cases involving cheating and duplicity are probably over-sampled. Rather, the objects in the exhibition are testament to the myriad of ways that people react to, and remember particular break-ups.

So for every furious remnant, there’s something funny, or nostalgic, or romantic. Consider the magnifying glass that was given to a guy in Manila by an ex as she was breaking up with him. In the note, he says he never understood what that meant (I could hazard one cruel guess).

I particularly liked the pair of orange underpants donated by another unidentified person. “For him too small – but I didn’t mind at all,” reads the note attached. Similarly, a pair of pink furry handcuffs is left to speak for itself.

Other objects are more heartfelt. An under-knee prosthesis is a symbol of a failed romance between a war invalid and the nurse who tended to him in hospital.

One German woman donated her wedding dress. “I wore this dress at our wedding ceremony in August 1994,” she explains. “We were both aged 20. Our goal was a happy home with many children, but Mother Nature didn’t deliver, plus I wanted to wait until I was finished university. It was very important to him to be a young father. Slowly we grew apart, and we separated. I returned to Berlin, and eventually started a new family.”

It’s not just lovers who are commemorated in the museum. After all, your family has arguably the greatest power to break your heart whether you realise it – and whether they mean to – or not. An Irish woman donated a spoon to the museum on behalf of herself and her late brother’s wife.

Another person donated the last clothes peg from her mother’s peg bag. “My mother was staying with us while waiting for her new house to become available. On the fourth night she had a massive heart attack, out of the blue, and died instantly. When everything was settled, I found her peg-bag in the kitchen.”

One of the most powerful exhibits in the permanent collection is a pair of figurines donated by one woman fleeing an abusive marriage. “My heart was broken in England in the 1980s when I could no longer accept my husbands vicious temper,” she explains. “The eldest child got most of the brunt of it, and I simply had to take responsibility for their safety.

“We left unknown to him, and travelled to Ireland by boat on a winter night.  We came in only the clothes we were standing up in. A couple of years later when we had settled into our new life I purchased these two little figurines to remember these sweet little girls. Today they are in their thirties.”

Somewhat inevitably, given the strong emotions evoked during break-ups, some of the items also stray into the downright bizarre. What to make of a yellow plastic vial, which apparently contains the tears the male owner shed after a four-year relationship with a “wonderful but sneaky” woman broke down? “I was going to send them to her as a sign of my deep pain,” he writes. “But I sent them to the museum instead.” Probably a good call, dude.

There’s a bottle of shampoo for the intimate female areas that one man had kept in his shower after his girlfriend moved out. “My mother wouldn’t let me throw it out because it made for a good glass polisher,” he explains, with seeming sincerity, in the note beside it.

As you leave the exhibition, there’s a white-board outside in the hallway where people are invited to write their own messages conveying their responses to what they’d just seen, or simply to pass on their own wisdom.

Some messages are pithy, like, ‘When one door closes…another slams shut on your fingers’, and, ‘No sausage was ever as battered as my heart was by you’.

These nuggets even offered an unlikely ray of hope amidst the heartbreak. “Lucy thought this would be a good first date,” someone wrote. “She was right.” Nice to see that someone paid heed to another tip left on the message board: “Keep kissing the frogs…just in case.”

www.brokenships.com

My feature on the second series of An Idiot Abroad in today’s ‘Weekend’ magazine in the Irish Independent

Considering what he endured making the first series of the travel programme An Idiot Abroad, Karl Pilkington should have known better than to trust his old pals Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant when they came to pitch a follow-up series.

Last time round, Pilkington – a young grump and reluctant traveller – explored the Seven Wonders of the World at creator-producers Gervais and Merchant’s request. But they pushed him even further with unexpected twists, such as having to walk the entire length of the Great Wall of China, and riding a camel in Jordan for eight hours after a swim in the Dead Sea, only to be fed a meal of lambs’ eyes and testicles for dinner.

The results were a surprise hit. The first season drew almost 10m viewers across the entire series, while an accompanying book sold over 300,000 copies. It also aired on the Science Channel in the US, attracting an audience of 16m.

Now the trio – who know each other from their early days working on the late 1990s Channel 4 programme The 11 O’Clock Show and Gervais’ self-titled London radio show in the early Noughties – have reunited for a second series, which starts on Sky One next Friday (September 23^rd).

An Idiot Abroad 2 sees Pilkington set out to fulfil a list of ‘Things To Do Before You Die’. He is dispatched to far flung corners of the world to complete a carefully selected ‘Bucket List’ – such as swimming with dolphins, travelling Route 66, and staying on a desert island – in an attempt to prove whether they really are what they’re cracked up to be.

The thing is, Pilkington is not exactly eager to travel again, so he only agreed to do another series if the rules change: he wants to choose where he goes and what he does from the Bucket List.

At the start Gervais and Merchant are happy to go along with Pilkington’s wishes to get him through the departure gates at the airport. But once he’s back on the road, the two pranksters are back to their old tricks, throwing in unwelcome surprises for their clueless charge along the way to make sure he’s always pushed out of his comfort zone.

So, for instance, in the opening episode Pilkington agrees to spend a night on a desert island in the South Pacific. But en route he’s forced into a detour that involves a bungee jump in New Zealand, visiting a tribe that worships Britain’s Prince Philip, ‘arse-boarding’ down the side of an active volcano, and dressing in pants made from palm leaves to assimilate with the locals.

Speaking to ‘Weekend’ at the launch of the series in London, Pilkington (half-) jokingly states his reasons for signing up for more hijinks. “I needed the money,” he says. “What else am I going to do? When you’ve been in a programme called An Idiot Abroad, other job offers aren’t going to be flying in, are they? Because An Idiot Abroad has been on all over the world, I can’t escape being known as ‘the idiot’.”

For Gervais, Pilkington’s appeal as a travel presenter lies in his very set-in-his-ways, safety-zone-dwelling ordinariness. “Karl doesn’t realise he’s being funny, he doesn’t mean to be,” says Gervais. “He’s angry. He has no filter. He says exactly what he’s thinking at that moment in time. It’s without malice, and he hasn’t a pretentious bone in his body.”

Pilkington proves that point a few moments later when he wanders onto the topic of Russia, which he visits in the second series. “That place is full of miserable b*stards,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. Someone told me that when McDonald’s opened in Russia the workers had to stop smiling so much because customers didn’t understand what was happening.”

One charge levelled at the first series of the show was that the whole thing was scripted, another variation of the so-called ‘structured reality’ genre. “It’s all planned behind Karl’s back, but not one thing he says is scripted,” Gervais replies. “How could it be? Have you heard him speak?”

How much does Pilkington know before he sets off on an adventure? “I know where I’m going, and what I’m supposed to be seeing,” Pilkington replies. “I’m better when I don’t know, to be honest. I wouldn’t go if I knew half the stuff they end up asking me to do.”

Gervais jumps in: “The stakes are higher now, but in a weird way that pressure has made Karl more militant in this series. It’s like he’s doing it to prove us f*ckers wrong and not give us the satisfaction of taking the piss out of him if he bottles it.”

Throughout the second series, Pilkington will also travel to Alaska, Thailand, South Africa, Japan, and along the Trans-Siberian Express. In fact that last trip involves a stop off in the aforementioned Russia, where Pilkington gets to do something totally unprecedented – and out-of-this-world expensive – with a bag of Revels sweets.

Will there be a third series of the show? “I’d like to do ‘An Idiot At Home’ next,” Gervais says. “Or I’d like to do one with Karl called ‘Fool’s Gold’ where we give him £1m, and he has year to make another £1m out of it. If he succeeds he can keep the £2m. He won’t do it though, and you know why? He told us he’d just buy scratchcards and a do up a house in Bulgaria to sell on.”

Finally, if he wasn’t following someone else’s ‘Bucket List’ for a TV show, what would be on Pilkington’s list of things to do before he dies? “People don’t know what they want in life do they?” he replies.

“But I do know I’d like to kick a duck up the arse. Have you ever seen them in a park, wandering around with their arses up in the air? Don’t you ever just want to kick them? I’d also like to slap a kid on the back of the head as I’m walking past him.”

An Idiot Abroad 2 starts on September 23^rd at 9pm on Sky One.

Predictions for the Emmy awards on Sunday night:

DRAMA SERIES:
Should win: Friday Night Lights
Will win: Mad Men

ACTOR DRAMA:
Should win: Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights
Will win: Jon Hamm, Mad Men

ACTRESS DRAMA:
Should win: Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men
Will win: Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife

SUPPORTING ACTOR DRAMA:
Should win: Walton Goggons, Justified
Will win: Alan Cummings, The Good Wife

SUPPORTING ACTRESS DRAMA:
Should win: Margo Martindale, Justified
Will win: Kelly Macdonald, Boardwalk Empire

COMEDY SERIES:
Should win: The Big Bang Theory
Will win: Modern Family

ACTOR COMEDY:
Should win: Louis CK, Louis
Will win: Steve Carell, The Office

ACTRESS COMEDY:
Should win: Laura Linney, The Big C
Will win: Laura Linney, The Big C

SUPPORTING ACTOR COMEDY:
Should win: Ed O’Neill, Modern Family
Will win: Ty Burrell, Modern Family

SUPPORTING ACTRESS COMEDY:
Should win: Jane Krakowski, 30 Rock
Will win: Betty White, Hot in Cleveland

…gets a skewering online, and from comics like Conan O’Brien.