Nick Vincent Murphy

Moone Boy - Series 3

Warm, funny and full of charm. That's the best way I can describe Moone Boy, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy set in the small Irish town of Boyle in 1989.

Written by Chris O'Dowd (The IT Crowd) and Nick Vincent Murphy, Moone Boy launched on Sky 1 in September 2012, won an IFTA, an International Emmy and returns this week for a third series.

Chris O'Dowd: I don't know how prepared I'm to be a dad

Chris O'Dowd is in town with his long-time friend and co-writer, Nick Vincent Murphy, to promote their first Moone Boy book.

Radio Times review

The funniest visit yet to where eccentricity isn't just welcomed but actually celebrated. It's summer 1990 and, while Martin and his best (strangest) pal Padraic build a raft for some Huckleberry Finn-ish japes, Martin's sisters are both having size issues. Mother Moone is tiptoeing around Sinead's weight gain, and Fidelma is fired from Bible readings in church for being unmarried and pregnant.

From a priestly Mexican stand-off to a bargain-basement Enya video, Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy's crackpot sitcom fires on all of its numerous cylinders. Joy, bottled.

Martin Paul Kenny Dalglish Moone is the most life-affirming delight to have hit our screens in a long time. Played with gap-toothed genius by young David Rawle - actually he doesn't have a gap-tooth but the charm of the writing somehow makes you think he does - he's the amalgam of every well-intentioned, bright, troubled 12-year-old you might have been lucky enough to meet, and somehow manages to span every shade of the above category, from Thomas Turgoose's darker character in the Shane Meadows things, via every Roddy Doyle 12-year-old, ever, to Nicholas Hoult's Marcus in the more glucose-rich About a Boy.

Which is possibly to imbue Rawle's success with heavier pretensions than the writing would ever affect: Moone Boy is, essentially, a piece of fun. But what fun. Written by Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy, it's the tale of Martin Moone growing up in Boyle, County Roscommon, in the teeth of 1989 - we're told this by the scrolling title in the first scene, along with the nugget: "Chance of rain, weirdly low." So far, in Boyle, so Doyle, and this is not so much of a bad thing, as Martin copes with bullies, his mother's feminism, his sister's bras, broccoli boiled until it turns white, and the like, though it has (so far) stopped short of a horse in a lift. Where this is lifted superbly is in the appearance of Martin's thirtysomething be-beanied "imaginary friend", played by O'Dowd, who appears as a one-man Greek chorus, with banjo, to offer Martin the worst advice imaginable at every turn; and the occasional animations as we are taken inside Martin's head and reminded of the vaulting imagination you're stuck with by virtue of being 12 and clever.

It is surreal, within decent limits, and it is derivative, but I think the derivations are happily if tacitly acknowledged; musically, certainly so, as we get stings from Grange Hill, Mission: Impossible, Raindrops Keep Fallin', etc. There are grand twists, such as the disenfranchised, underemployed menfolk - including Martin's lovely dad Liam and the bullying twins' father - meeting up for ostensible poker schools or fishing trips (none of them own fishing rods, or even a pack of cards) but instead to drink and moan, with their damp-eyed remnants of manliness, about the impossibility of all their children. If the opening two episodes, also featuring a forgivably OTT cameo from Steve Coogan, are representative, there's a granite-solid winner here, sculpted with charm, knowingness and a canny ability to lift from tradition while delivering fresh unpredicatability at every turn. Sky has been waiting for a return on its huge investments in new comedy; and of course Ireland has been waiting too long for anything to even approach Father Ted: early days, but I think that if these are boxes which needed ticking, and the boxes could somehow be painted glass panels awaiting some pebbles from a cheeky 12-year-old, then what we're hearing here is the happy sound of breaking glass.

Moone Boy, the new comedy from Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy, is the former's skewed attempt to recapture the sort of grown-up family comedies of his own childhood, such as Roseanne and Cheers. It shares their canny grasp of the fresh and the old-fashioned: sweet without being saccharine, and favouring a gentle ribbing over the mean-spirited jibe. It depicts the late-'80s childhood of young Martin (charming newcomer David Rawle) in a small rural Irish town, negotiating a chaotic family life, the bad advice of his imaginary friend (O'Dowd), and a school peopled by annoying newbies, mysterious girls and bullies dishing out 'Cambodian burns'. It's an absolute charmer, and episode two follows at 10pm.

Following on from the success of the comedy short Chris O'Dowd wrote for Sky1's Little Crackers strand, the actor has now turned that re-imagining of his childhood into a charming, if limited, six-part series. Co-written with Nick Vincent Murphy and set in O'Dowd's home town of Boyle in the west of Ireland, the stories centre on fresh-faced Martin (David Rawle) as he tries to negotiate life with his three disinterested older sisters, distracted parents and two school bullies - but at least he has an imaginary friend, Sean (O'Dowd), a grown man with a beard, for company.