Brendan O'Carroll has revealed he cried the first time he stepped out on the set as Mrs Brown and saw his vision come to life for the first time.
The comic first launched the character of Agnes Brown on Irish radio, before graduating to the stage and then hitting screens in the long running BBC show, Mrs Brown's Boys.
Three decades later, the mastermind behind Ireland’s most famous mammy has reflected on the feeling of seeing his writing come to life.
Read more: Brendan O'Carroll told Mrs Brown's Boys co-star he'd 'stop wedding' at altar
The 67-year-old said: “I cried, we all cried. Everybody in the cast, we all cried.
“Because we had been rehearsing all week and we were exhausted because we didn’t know how much rehearsal went into TV, and we were rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing, and they said ‘ok today, we will rehearse on the set in front of cameras’ and we went up to the set and Mrs Brown’s stuff was there.
“And you know what it is, I love what I do,” he added, speaking to Holly Willoughby And Phillip Schofield on ITV’s This Morning.
“Because I typed it down there, and it pops up there. It's like magic.”
The Dubliner noted seeing familiar surroundings from Ireland at the UK set, including his favourite teabags from home.
“And when we walked in the sitting room was exactly as it was in the book and in the play, the kitchen was exactly how we wanted it,” he recalled.
“There were Lyon’s tea bags, Barry’s tea, all Irish.
The Finglas funnyman, who has a tattoo of a dragonfly on his hand for sentimental reasons, added: “And not only that, the cushions were all dragon flies.
“And he didn’t know about me and the dragon flies, the designer, he knew nothing about the dragon flies, and I said ‘who told you about this?’ and he said what? So I showed him the tattoo on my wrist and said ‘you know dragonflies have been very lucky for me.
“And he said no..”
Speaking to promote the release of his autobiography Call Me Mrs Brown, Brendan also opened up about tough times on his road to success, including the crippling debts after his pub venture went bust, and how the death of his father inspired his comical nature.
And it was only when writing his new book, that Brendan remembered this memory, he said.
Citing how his two most asked questions in life are if Mrs Brown’s Boys is his mother, and when did he realise he was funny, the funny man from Finglas said:
“And I used to make things up. Because it wasn’t that I was bullied in school, I wasn’t, if anything I was probably the bully in school. So it wasn’t anything like that.
“It was only when I was writing my book, I remembered that just about two weeks after my dad died, I was ten, it was two weeks after my tenth birthday, and I came downstairs to the toilet in the middle of the night to go for a pee, and went back up, and I saw the light still on in my mom’s bedroom.
“It didn’t surprise me because she liked to read in bed anyway, but I could hear her sobbing. And I sat on the stairs and was crying myself, and I just thought ‘you know what, my job I think now is to make her laugh every day.
“And I think that’s when I started. And I did, I made her laugh virtually every day.”
Meanwhile, asked why he decided to write a book after all of these years, he joked: “Well the cheque was good. Artistically, the cheque was really good.
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