Round Three of RTE’s storyland opened today with new episodes from the remaining competitors. In a previous post I outlined the reasons why I was backing the Tuam based comedy-drama “Lucky Run” and indeed I urge you to vote for the lads again as every vote counts. The show is getting stronger all the time and this one was once again put together with some real panache by my colleague Kevin Lavelle
If there wasn’t enough reasons to vote for the show, Producer Eamon de Staic went one further and cast walking swoon-boat and my first cousin Andrew Carney as a mysterious enigma type thing. Andrew is the son of my uncle Jim but its probably fairer to say he is closer anatomically to Greek God Adonis. A favourite of the love goddess Aphrodite, she fell in love with the beautiful youth (possibly because she had been wounded by Cupid’s arrow). Aphrodite sheltered him and entrusted him to Persephone. The latter was also taken by Adonis’ beauty and refused to give him back to Aphrodite. The dispute between the two goddesses was settled by Zeus 🙂 Adonis was to spend one-third of every year with each goddess and the last third wherever he chose. He chose to spend two-thirds of the year with Aphrodite much like Andrew chooses to spend two thirds of the year teaching buffers in Spiddal how to speak good. The rest of the year Andrew persues whatever artistic endeavours takes his fancy and when he’s not painting the landscapes of Offaly or working in his specially converted pottery shed he is working in the theatre.
This Friday he will be performing Charlie, Mary, Atari and Me’.. in Brian Hardiman`s Canavan`s pub, Tuam Sunday May 1 7.30pm. It’s a new half- hour one-man show written and performed by the man himself! Exploring the turbulent decade of the 80s, this experimental rehearsed reading is the first showing of new material, with a view to expansion later in the summer. Accompanied on the night by new writing, also evoking nostalgia, from Owen Ward. All support greatly appreciated! in the meantime you can see him in the latest episode of Lucky Run here.
Please Vote for the show, early and often on as many different computers as you can as it keeps lads here in the west working amongst other reasons.
This is what producer Eamon de Staic said to the mayo news:
“We’ve had a lot of craic,” says De Staic, whose production company Capaillín Bán is overseeing the project, a crime drama filmed on location in Tuam. “Lucky Run is about a young fella who wakes up after a night out. With the help of his friends, he pieces together the events of the night before, and he discovers that he’s up to his eyes in debt to a finger-chopping gangster.”
Out of approximately 80 applicants, ‘Lucky Run’ lived up to its name by being one of eight chosen to go before the public vote. They’re now down to the final four. Two episodes of Lucky Run are available to view on the RTÉ website, and the third episode goes online today. Voting takes place via the website over a seven-day period, and as the show’s competition includes a production by a Galway-based company, De Staic says: “We really need to get the Mayo vote to keep us in the running.” The show with the least number of votes will be eliminated, while the remaining three will get to make one last episode, and the public will then vote for the overall winner.
“We’d be hopeful of following in the footsteps of the Hardy Bucks and get something on TV,” said De Staic. “The whole point of the competition is to open doors. Obviously, we really want to win, and make the final episode, and hopefully go on and make something representative of life here in the west. We love it and we have great craic doing it, so we want to keep doing it.”
Larry McGowan, who plays one of the lead roles in Lucky Run, put the producer and director in touch with one another – though De Staic knew Cafferkey’s brothers Eamon and Colm. Their crew is a mixture of people “with a lot of experience” and others who are “pretty new” to television, the former crew including Ros na Rún veterans Trevor Laffey (the director of photography) and Fred McCloskey, who has “chewed up the scenery” as villain Danger Kennedy. “The great thing as well is that there’s no egos involved,” says De Staic. “We’ve a great team.”
It’s a change of scene for the producer, whose documentary Under Pressure (about Willie and Mary Corduff in Rossport) won the Jury award at the 2007 Kerry Film Festival. A former production co-ordinator for Pop4 (“Top of the Pops as Gaeilge”), he established Capaillín Bán in 2009 with Deirdre Gray, a fellow graduate of GMIT. ‘Lucky Run’ represents a return to the kind of thing De Staic undertook in his younger days.
“It’s been maybe five years since I worked on a drama, but we did a lot of drama production in college, and I loved it,” he explains. “Though obviously, this is a different kettle of fish to a college production. You have a proper budget, you can afford proper costumes, proper make-up. But essentially it’s the same thing. You hammer out a script and look at the elements you need for your production. It’s been full-time since January. and so long as we keep getting the votes, we get to make another episode.”
Episode three of ‘Lucky Run’ can be viewed at http://www.rte.ie/storyland from tomorrow (Wednesday). Voting will be open on the RTÉ website for seven days.
John Murphy 
Priceless:
“He chose to spend two-thirds of the year with Aphrodite much like Andrew chooses to spend two thirds of the year teaching buffers in Spiddal how to speak good.”