Father Ted star Ardal O’Hanlon has revealed he had to give back a new kitchen he splashed out on with advance money he was given by a publisher on a book that flopped.
The actor – most well known for playing half-wit Father Dougal McGuire on the Channel 4 series – wrote his first novel The Talk of the Town in 1998.
He followed up with his next book, called Ragweed, which never got off the ground.
Speaking about the ill-fated Ragweed, he said: “I never got my main character right and the tone was all over the place.
“I delivered it, but we agreed to bin it.
“In fact, I burned it,” he told the Rte Guide.
“It was called Ragweed after the plant and it was about the ‘malaise’.
“But the thing is that it gave me the malaise and it gave the publisher the malaise.
“The worst thing is that we built a kitchen with the advance. So I had to give it all back.”
He admitted “things had come too easy” to him and he thought he was “invincible.”
“That was a very sobering experience. Up to then, things were coming easy to me so I thought I was invincible and could do anything,” he said.
Ardal has now written a new dark comic novel almost 25 years later – Brouhaha – which is set in the fictional town of Tullyanna, on the border.
It begins with the death of artist Dove Connolly, an apparent suicide. Philip Sharkey, his ex-best pal now living abroad, returns for the funeral.
When they were teenagers, in 1994, a local girl called Sandra Mohan went missing. Both lads loved her and neither fully moved on from her disappearance; all those horrible, unanswerable questions. Was she murdered? Did she just leave us? Who was responsible, if anyone?
Ardal also opened up about how he used to be a constant worrier but since the pandemic he has learned how to relax a bit.
“I’ve changed in a lot of ways. I was always worrying about how a show will go down, but that has improved a lot.
“I did Taskmaster on Channel 4 recently and I wouldn’t have done that in a million years.
“I was always a bit shy about being myself on TV. It took the pandemic for me to get over myself.
“I found Taskmaster utterly liberating, going out there with no safety net and finding out stuff about myself.
“But Jesus, if you don’t know anything by the age of 57, you’ve gotta ask what you’ve been doing with yourself,” he added.
But he admitted he’s come to terms with always been known as Father Dougfal McGuire – no matter what other roles he plays.
“Even now, people still think of me as Father Dougal. I know that, I’m not a fool.
“But I’ve come to terms with it.
“It was such a hugely popular show, I was lucky to be in it, and it has endured, so what can I do about that? And that’s something I’ve got good at; accepting the world as it is and not the way I’d like it to be,” he added.
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