1 9 6 9 – 1 9 7 1 (UK)
20 x 30 minute episodes
Forty-year-old Bunjy Kennefick (Milo O’Shea) was a gently perspiring, desperately randy middle-aged middle-class Irishman living and working in London. An executive with a large West End company, he drove a flashy car and lived in an expensive modern Regents Park flat.
His secretary, Miss Argyll (Yootha Joyce), was also his willing but perpetually frustrated girlfriend.
Unfortunately, his pious and ferocious widowed mother (Anna Manahan) had also crossed the Irish Sea (along with her collection of plaster statues of various saints which she kept in the cupboard) and, being a devout flint-hearted Catholic, was reluctant to give up her innocent son to the heady delights of the English capital – and to Miss Argyll in particular.
The mother’s brother was their priest (Ray McAnally) and his congregation was largely made up of Mrs Kennefick’s contemporaries, largely blessed with middle-aged sons of their own, all panting for the fleshpots.
A later addition to the cast was Bunjy’s scrawny suppressed camp cousin Enda (David Kelly), another exile from the Emerald Isle, who had a light hand for pastry.
The series began life as a Comedy Playhouse pilot in 1968.
Bunjy Kennefick
Milo O’Shea
Mrs Kennefick
Anna Manahan
Miss Argyll
Yootha Joyce
Cousin Enda
David Kelly
Father Patrick
Ray McAnally
Episodes
The Day We Blessed the Bench | The Day Verilia Went to Pieces |
The Night Me Mammy Snuffed It | The Day the Saints Went Marching Out | The First Time I Saw Paris | The Day Concepta Got England
The Night Miss Argyll Got Canonised | Me Mammy’s Tomb | The Night We Saw Old Nick | The Last of the Red-Hot Mammies | The Night Enda Entered a Convent | The Night I Left the Church | The Morning After Finnegan’s Wake
The Day We Went Dutch | The Night the Banshee Brought Me Home | The Day I Got Engaged | The Day I Went Commercial | The Sacred Chemise of Miss Argyll | The Mammy Murder Case | How to be a Mammy in Law