Pete McCarthy (born Peter Charles McCarthy Robinson) (9 November 1951 - 6 October 2004), was a British broadcaster and successful travel writer, noted for his books McCarthy's Bar and The Road to McCarthy.
Peter Charles McCarthy Robinson was born on 9 November 1951 in Warrington, Lancashire in the north-west of England.
His mother moved to England from her native Ireland during the Second World War to work as a nurse. It was during this time she met her future husband, at a dance. Peter was the eldest of four children, educated at West Park Grammar School (now De La Salle School), St Helens by the Christian Brothers. Peter later described this experience as “corporal punishment and awakening sexuality” which he compared with the experience of Stephen Dedalus in the book “a mixture of hellfire and brimstone”. He also described the Christian Brothers' education methods as "Carrot and Stick without the carrot".
As a child, he travelled by cattle boat from Liverpool to spend the first 15 school holidays of his life in Drimoleague in West Cork, Ireland. He stayed there with relatives on a farm called Butlersgift and used to bring two things back to England: A box of shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day and a turkey from the farm for Christmas. He later said that he had been led to believe that “God himself was Irish and I live in a wicked, pagan country”.
These childhood sojourns seem to be the reasons for Peter's intimate connection to Ireland, later on in his life. After reading James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist at the age of 14, Peter decided to become a writer. He attended Leicester University, where he studied literature before aspiring to a career in comedy. Striving for this goal, he co-founded “Cliffhanger Theatre” in Brighton.
After discovering another actor by the name of Peter Robinson he started to use his mother’s maiden name McCarthy to avoid confusion. In the 1980s he began writing television scripts and gags for the comedians Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. He was also a compere for the Comedy Store in London. Together with the Liverpool poet Roger McGough he performed in a two-man comedy show.
His first significant TV experience was in 1984 when Peter performed in the show They came from Somewhere Else. He then made travel films before he won the Critic's Award for best Comedy in 1990 with his piece The Hangover Show. The show was also nominated for a Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In the early to mid nineties Pete presented a Brighton based programme for Meridian Broadcasting called "The pier" which was a mix of what's on guides and local Brighton area listings in theatre and arts.
In late 1990, as a result of his success with The Hangover Show, Peter was offered an own television travel programme called Travelog on Channel 4. It was an alternative travel programme which had little in common with the traditional travel show format. It was a "marvellous experience" for Peter who said about this time: "We travelled to Zanzibar and China, Fiji and Corsica, Costa Rica and Laos; stood on the edge of volcanoes, had lunch with heroes of the Crete resistance, and got caught up in a military coup in Vanuatu". This statement emphasizes his passion to travel, get to know other cultures and people and undergo adventures.
For seven years he perambulated the world and in 1995 starred in the television programme Desperately Seeking Something followed by Country Tracks in 1998. In the same year he presented Breakaway and X Marks the Spot for Radio 4. During those years he also directed the broadcasts Country Tracks and Meridian Television for BBC 2 and was also appeared on radio programmes, including Loose Ends, Just a Minute and The News Quiz.
In March 1998, McCarthy and the publishing house Hodder and Stoughton joined together in a project in which Peter explored Ireland over a six-month period by travelling from the south to the north-west of the country and recorded his journey. The outcome of the exercise was McCarthy's Bar, his first book which sold over a million copies.
In 2002, The Road to McCarthy followed. Peter McCarthy wrote his books with pen and paper and upon answering a question that asked if he was a technophobe replied: "Yes big time. I've got a kettle and a fridge, but I don't own a computer, a word processor or even a typewriter." Peter, his wife Irene and their three daughters moved from Brighton to a village in the South Downs in East Sussex.
After the success of his previous books, Peter was planning on writing a third one, finding the comic as well as the historical in the six counties of Northern Ireland. However, the diagnosis of cancer in February 2004 changed this. Peter McCarthy died at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton on 6 October 2004.
The Brighton & Hove bus company named one of its fleet after him in September 2006 - 913 Scania Omnidekka.
