Kenny Ireland's trick on screen was not to know he was in a comedy. Donald in Benidorm asks strangers what they are doing later as if enquiring after their health, and six series of louder scripts never once made him wink.
Fi1m perspective
Donald Stewart sits by the pool in Benidorm (2007), red from the neck up and under a straw hat, and asks every couple who passes what they are doing later. He is never once embarrassed, and that is the whole performance. Ireland does not play a swinger. He plays a hospitable man, and leaves us to work out what he is offering. The joke is in the gap, and he never closes it.
He came to television late and from the stage. He trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, helped set up the Lyceum Youth Theatre in Edinburgh, and spent the late seventies and early eighties with the RSC and the National Theatre. From the early 1980s the screen took him up in small parts: an orderly in Stephen Frears's Walter (1982), the skipper in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), Jonah Bognor in Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers (1988), Ben Landless in House of Cards (1990). The part people stopped him for was Derek, the handyman in the Acorn Antiques sketches in Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985). "To this day, nice camp waiters quote my dialogue at me and are slightly disappointed that I don't remember any of the lines," he said in 2007. That is the Donald method in a sentence: he did not find the lines funny, so he said them straight, and they were. Then he went back to the theatre, running the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh for about ten years from 1993 and directing Shakespeare, Brecht, musicals and new work, and the screen roles thinned to guest spots. Benidorm brought him back.
Walter is where we would send anyone who knows him only from the sunbeds. He and Jim Broadbent are the orderlies on the ward Walter is taken to, and neither plays a villain. They are tired men in charge of too many patients, moving through the noise as if it were weather. We were horrified in that ward, and nothing Ireland does there is horrifying; that is the point. He makes the place ordinary, which is worse. Chris Menges shoots it wide and flat and Ireland is often at the back of the frame, doing his job. It runs 70 minutes and we wanted it shorter, in the way one wants a true thing over with.
Benidorm asked less of him and asked it for longer. Six series opposite Janine Duvitski's Jacqueline, and the scripts grew broader each year while the cast kept working at them. Ireland's part of the bargain was to stay exactly the same. Donald in the sixth series is Donald in the first, hat and sunburn and the same mild enquiry, and the show around him got louder to compensate. We did not think much of the later years, and he is one of the reasons we did not think less.
Watch Walter first. It is short, it is hard, and it shows what he could do when nobody was asking him to be funny. Then one episode of Benidorm, not six.
Biography
Kenny Ireland (born George Ian Kenneth Ireland) was a Scottish actor and theatre director. Born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, he trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and began his career in Scottish theatre, later becoming director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh for ten years.
He appeared in films including Local Hero (1983) as the Skipper, Drowning by Numbers (1988) as Jonah Bognor, and Walter (1982) as Angus the orderly. On television he played Derek in Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985–1987), Ben Landless in House of Cards (1990), and Donald Stewart in Benidorm (2007–2014). He also directed numerous stage productions and was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre.
Ireland died in London on 31 July 2014.
