PADDY CONSIDINE

I couldn’t wait to leave school. I just could not wait to get out of there. I thought about it like a prison term

– I remember saying, “I’ve got three more years’ bird left!” I had been quite an unruly kid in the first few years of senior school, but in the fourth year I started to knuckle down. I was a bit of a class clown. I remember one teacher saying, “It’s alright now, Considine, but when you leave here you won’t have your audience any more.” I thought, fuck, he’s right. You can be class clown, you can be the funniest guy in the factory or on the building site – but where is that going to get you?

I was in danger of throwing my life down the drain. I won’t sit here and lie to you and say, “I would have ended up in prison”, because that’s not true. I was terrified when I was about 11 years old and thought, “fuck that”. So I knew I wasn’t going down that path.