Shortt to bring Dixie Walsh to Glór

ONE of Ireland’s top comedians over the last 15 years, Pat Shortt is coming to Glór on February 1 and 2, for a show celebrating his character, Dixie Walsh.

The show entitled I am the Band, charts Dixie’s life and is a tribute night to the singer, where his peers and friends (the audience) come together to celebrate his career.

Speaking about Dixie, who sang the Breakfast Roll song and Cash Crisis Me Hole, Pat said the character is one of his favourites; “I suppose this is a show about his rise to mediocrity. I had him in the last two shows and he became huge with the Breakfast Roll. I suppose I came from music myself and I just love playing the character, as I did with D’Unbelievables, where the characters were also musicians. I kinda have a kindred spirit towards these guys and the madness and the craic that they get up to.

“I also wanted to do a show involving a bit more music and craic and madness. It’s still about the characters and the comedy but I wrote it about Dixie and I wanted to introduce characters like his mother, who comes and talks about him and his teacher talks about him as well. Dixie talks about his experiences growing up and then we see the characters and what kind of experiences he had to deal with and what influenced him.”

As the night is a party in Dixie’s honour, Shortt will be talking to the audience, something he has been known for since his time in D’Unbelievables. “The whole idea of this show is that Dixie Walsh has prepared a surprise party for himself and invited all these musicians along to it. Everyone in the audience is a musician as far as Dixie is concerned so he knows them all and he goes out talking about them and different stories and incidents with each of them so that’s a mechanism of how I work through the audience.”

He says he never has any real problems in getting his audiences involved with the show. “The key to it all I think is that I don’t make them feel embarrassed or silly, it’s all about myself. They may well be embarrassed at the attention drawn to them but the daftness is about Pat Shortt and it’s not about the audience.”

Over the years, he has portrayed a huge amount of characters and almost all of them have been recognisable from everyday rural life. “That’s the key to it, what I want everyone to do is see something of somebody they know in the characters. I think that makes it funnier, it makes it more real when you start delving into the madness of somebody, whether it be a builder or a teacher or somebody, because we’ve all been there and I try and represent that a little bit.”

He says that playing a certain Councillor Maurice Hickey was something he loved and that there are parallels between him and the current role. “I just loved playing that character (Maurice Hickey), he was a likeable rogue, absolutely as daft as a brush but as innocent as the day is long and everything about him he did with sincerity and passion. I think that goes with all the characters I do, you can see that honesty. It’s a bit like Dixie Walsh, Dixie used to get very disillusioned with the country and Irish scene in the local area that he was from and you could ask why anybody would even be bothered about it, but to him, it’s his world, it’s his absolute life.

“And there’s guys out there that live like that, their world is their parish, it’s a very, very, very small world but they’re very happy in that world. They’re not people who want to reach enormous heights on a world stage or anything like that, they want to be the best at what they do… in their own parish. And Dixie’s a bit like that, there’s not really much of a challenge out there but to him, it’s everything. That’s the charm and the daftness of it, reaching for heights that are just above your ankle.”

While Shortt is best known for his comedy, his performance as Josie in the 2007 film Garage was a complete change of direction and an excruciatingly dark film showed another side to rural life.

Again, Shortt’s character was one that can be quite easily recognised but laughs were at a premium. He is proud of the role, for which he won acclaim. “I had to go and try and find the world this guy is in. But when I did get it, it’s universal to everyone because I think every small village in Ireland has a character like Josie and who was treated like him. I think the great thing about that film is that it made us look at how we dealt with those people and those situations.

“It was a big move for me and a big chance. I felt it turned out to be a huge success but at the same time, I had wondered would a Pat Shortt audience tune into it. I felt they would, I felt the Pat Shortt audience is a lot more discerning than people possibly give them credit for. You get stereotyped as a caricature almost but there are so many other strands to what I do and something like Garage proves that.”

For many he will always be one of D’Unbelievables and he says what he’s doing now isn’t that dissimilar to the type of comedy he pioneered with Jon Kenny. “I suppose we almost created a niche for ourselves in that style of comedy, we were the only ones doing that. We very much did our own thing from the start, which is what I do to this day, the same daftness and comedy that’s outside the norm and with that you create your own identity,” he concluded.