This Thursday on RTE One, the latest Graham Linehan sitcom, The Walshes, hits our screens. It’s a combined effort from the king of sitcoms and Dublin sketch comedy troupe, The Diet of Worms. JOE’s Eric Lalor caught up with one of the stars of the show, Shane Langan ahead of its debut tonight.
JOE: We are very excited to see The Walshes this Thursday night on RTE One Shane. Are you?
Shane: I’m very excited, but it’s a very strange feeling and we don’t know what to be doing with ourselves. We’ve (Diet of Worms) been trying for a few years to get a TV show together and now that it’s happening, we are not really sure how to feel. We are a little bit scared too.
JOE: In what way?
Shane: Putting it out there to be judged and the way a lot of people instantly write off anything under the RTE comedy umbrella before they even see it.
JOE: This has been a lengthy process for you. How and when did it all start and how did Graham Linehan (pic below) get involved?
Shane: We had done some stuff online like Dublin Stories and Puffincat and a few years ago we managed to get a well-known sausage company to pay some money for us to make a few comedy shorts which fitted into a campaign they were running at the time. They were happy with our efforts and funded our little web series called A Taste Of Home. They were five episodes, each five minutes long, about a Dublin family around the time of the 80s and 90s.
JOE: So that was the birth of the characters we can expect to see in The Walshes?
Shane: Essentially they are the same characters, but now The Walshes are set in the modern day. We had been in contact with Graham Linehan about a year before that and he had liked our stuff so he was great at giving us advice and was incredibly helpful. He saw A Taste of Home, liked it and suggested he get on board with the idea of making it into a TV show. That was almost five years ago. It’s been a long process coming from its original guise as a web series right up to now and it becoming a TV show.
JOE: How did you initially make contact with Graham Linehan?
Shane: We have always been big fans of his work and we were all at a Matt Berry gig in Dublin in Crawdaddy. We noticed that Graham and Arthur Matthews were standing at the back. Out of the five of us, Amy (Stephenson) and Gaffo (Niall Gaffney) were the only two who weren’t shy about approaching them. He then looked at our stuff and got in contact, so away we were.
JOE: So after watching the web series, he decided he wanted to make the TV show with you?
Shane: He was with a different production company back then so we worked with them for a while and it got chopped. We worked on the script which got chopped around a bit. Then he had his own production company and we started working with them to try and get a channel interested. We shot a pilot which didn’t quite work out and then it got picked up by the BBC. He always wanted to develop it, but for one reason or another it has taken this long.
JOE: He is the godfather of sitcoms with a great back catalogue of brilliant work. What was he like to work with on a daily basis?
Shane: He’s a fantastic person to work with. Very challenging too. The reason he is so successful is because he’s got such a keen eye for detail and he has a very clear idea in his head of what is funny and what isn’t. He really made us up our game. He is absolutely one of the loveliest men you could come across and a joy to work with, but it was hard work as he has such high standards.
JOE: Okay, so away from the Linehan catalogue of success, what sitcoms are you a fan of?
Shane: I love American comedy and 30 Rock is one of my all-time favourite shows. Tina Fey (pic below) is amazing in it.
JOE: Ok so Shane, we are looking forward to seeing The Walshes. Can you tell us what it’s about? Sum it up there chief!
Shane: Hahaha. Ok, well basically it’s about a Dublin family who are kind of stuck in a time warp mainly due to financial constraints. Even though the kids have grown up physically, they haven’t grown up intellectually or emotionally due to being stuck at home with their parents. The parents quite like having them around as they don’t want to be lonely.
JOE: Cool. So, we noticed that there are only three episodes. That seems a bit odd for a sitcom series. Why only three?
Shane: That came from BBC4 who have done that before with new shows like The Thick of It and 2012. They feel it’s the best way of getting off the ground with a new show and who are we to argue? For us, writing half hour shows of any quantity took a bit of getting used to as new writers. So, to do three rather than six was great as we were able to develop the characters in three episodes and hopefully move on to a second series of six.
JOE: Before we let you go, what’s happening with The Diet of Worms (pic below)? Any plans to perform live again in the near future?
Shane: We are having little chats about that at the moment alright. I’m sure we’ll get around to it again at some stage. We haven’t performed live in quite a while and I suppose there is a little bit of trepidation going back to it. We want to go back with new material. We don’t want to go back doing sketches we’ve done before so we will need a bit of time to write the new stuff. However, if all goes well with The Walshes, we will have even less time so I guess you could say that we are hoping we don’t have time!
JOE: Well we cannot wait to see it and we wish you nothing but success with it.
Shane: Thanks very much, hope you enjoy it
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