Pauline McLynn

Watch Mrs Doyle bring in the tray. She does not ask whether you want a cup of tea; she assumes it, and the conversation only starts when you say no. Pauline McLynn plays her with a bright, fixed smile and eyes that never leave the guest, so that the hospitality is total and so is the refusal to hear a refusal. She was in her early thirties when Father Ted began in 1995, playing a woman who could have been sixty, under make-up and a cardigan she never lets slip. We found her the most frightening thing on Craggy Island, more than Frank Kelly's Father Jack in his armchair, because Jack only wants a drink and Mrs Doyle wants something from you.

The part came after years of Irish theatre with the Abbey and the Gate, RTÉ comedy-dramas and radio satire alongside Dermot Morgan, and it ran for three series to 1998. Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan wrote her tightly, and McLynn has been generous about that: "You'd have to be the worst actor in the world not to succeed with what Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews wrote. They understood she was the archetypal granny or mammy. Wherever you go, you'll always meet a Mrs Doyle." She undersells herself. The lines are theirs; the unblinking stare that holds a beat past comfort, and the sense that saying no has only made things worse, are hers, and the writing would be half as funny without them.

What followed shows what casting directors saw and what she wanted instead. There was Aunt Aggie in Angela's Ashes (1999), Libby Croker, the narcoleptic librarian, in Shameless (2004), regular runs in Jam & Jerusalem and EastEnders, and a good deal of theatre. The eccentric supporting part kept finding her, usually a woman older than she was, and she has said she is drawn to baddies and darker figures. Gypo (2005), a Dogme-style British drama in which she has the lead as Helen, is the film critics point to when they want to show there was more in her than the tea, and we have not reviewed it, so we will only say the reputation exists and is worth checking. From 2025 she is Maggie Driscoll, the new landlady of the Rovers Return, in Coronation Street.

The cost of a great comic creation is that people quote it at you in the street decades later, and McLynn has had that longer than most. What she can do is not the question; the question is whether anyone with a serious part has looked past the cardigan. A pub landlady is a promising place to start. The Rovers is somewhere people come in and say yes to a drink, and after thirty years of forcing tea on the unwilling, it will make a change.