TELEVISION / Doyle family values: Paddy Clarke Boo Hoo Hoo: Roddy Doyle is putting the darker side of family life on screen. Kevin Jackson met him on location

One Saturday afternoon late last autumn, the crowd at Dublin's Dalymount Park football stadium (Bohemians vs Shelbourne: a disappointing goalless draw) was slightly larger than usual, since it included a couple of actors, 50-odd extras, a camera crew, a director, a producer and a writer. Most of the crowd were understandably more interested in the match than in the visitors, but then some nearby lads noticed who the writer in question was, and, to the traditional supporter's melody of 'Guantanamera' started up a rowdy chant: 'One Roddy Doy-ull] There's only one Roddy Doy-ull] . . .'

Literary fame, indeed. Have Chelsea fans ever bellowed their mass approval for Kingsley Amis? Has the crowd at Yankee Stadium ever cheered for Susan Sontag? Doubtful. But then, Roddy Doyle is more than just another novelist in a town that, to outsiders at least, appears to seethe with literary activity. Over the last five or six years, he's also become a one-man film industry and even a kind of unorthodox sporting hero: pubs throughout the country had their televisions tuned to the Booker Prize ceremony to watch their local boy stuff the Brits.

When Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the trophy, the resulting scenes were perhaps not quite as ecstatic as those which greeted Ireland's World Cup draw against England in Doyle's third novel, The Van, but it was an extremely popular triumph none the less - even before the Booker shortlist, Paddy Clarke had already become the best-selling hardback novel in Irish publishing history. Doyle's coup also gave an additional fillip to the morale of everyone involved in the production of Family, his new four-part drama series for BBC 1, which was shot on location in Dublin from October last year to mid-January this year.

Family is set in much the same working-class milieu Doyle portrayed in his Barrytown Trilogy about the Rabbitte family, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, but its tone is much harsher. 'It's maybe a bit pat, but you could say it's the flip side of the Rabbittes,' Doyle remarks. 'Having done three contemporary celebratory books - although I think The Van is quite dark in places - I just wanted to show that I'm aware that life is not necessarily like this, that there are other families that aren't coping as well as the Rabbittes seem to have done, and that aren't as vivacious and witty as the Rabbittes are. What I've had to do for Family is first of all to come up with one overall storyline, but then, because each episode is self-contained, to come up with four smaller ones, each with a different point of view, different locations and different emphasis.

'The overall story is the breakup of a family, the parents separating. The first episode is about the father, who's brutal, the second episode is about the son coping with the family breakup or not coping with it, the third is about the daughter going out to work for the first time and coping with brutality of the father, and the fourth is about the wife coming to grips with the fact that she's alone now, and making the most of it.'

Doyle's explanations are made in the course of a long day's shuttling backwards and forwards on a specially commandeered train from Dublin's local transport service, the Dart. This constant toing and froing along the Dublin coastline can be something of a strain for those susceptible to motion sickness. At one point, a young extra dashes frantically into the train's spare carriage, sticks his head into a plastic dustbin and pukes. Some of the technicians suggest that he might try to settle his stomach with a nice greasy bacon sandwich . . .

The scenes being filmed today are from Episode 2, in which the son (John Paul, played by Barry Ward) runs away to Howth, and from Episode 4, in which the mother (Paula, played by Ger Ryan) is commuting to and from work. Filming on the Dart train poses Family's director, Michael Winterbottom (Cracker, Love Lies Bleeding) a number of logistical problems, not least because he has taken a cue from the self-contained nature of each of Doyle's four scripts and decided to give each episode its own shooting style and its own colour scheme. This means, for example, that all the extras on the train have to change from dark colours for John Paul's story into brighter tones for the final story, which is more optimistic.

Winterbottom is still a relatively young director and, according to Family's producer, Andrew Eaton, it was a fortunate coincidence that Love Lies Bleeding was being shown on television as production began, so that the Dublin crew could see and be reassured by the quality of his work. Eaton himself is a newcomer to drama production, having worked for several years as a director for the BBC's Music and Arts department, although, curiously enough, he can legitimately boast of being the first person to bring The Commitments to the (small) screen.

Eaton's involvement with Roddy Doyle began in 1988, when he read The Commitments, became enthused about the novel, and came to Dublin to film an item about it for the arts programme Review. The piece included dramatisations of a couple of scenes from the book, including a rendition of 'Night Train', with backing music provided by Eaton's own garage band, the Gits. Still fired up by Doyle's book, Eaton sent a postcard to his friend, the film producer Lynda Myles, suggesting that she should think about optioning it. The rest is, if not quite movie history, at any rate a cracking good success story.

Nowadays, after cinema versions of The Commitments and The Snapper, after the Booker, and after the novelist finally gave up his day job as a schoolteacher, film companies are queuing up to throw money at Doyle. Miramax flew to Dublin to ask if he would allow them to invest in the projected film of The Van; Disney made the same enquiry. (Doyle, peeved with Disney after a wrangle over a scene from Cocktail mimicked by characters in that same novel, just said no.)

In addition to enquiries about his own work, Doyle has also been invited to work on adaptations of other people's. 'There's a big trend in Hollywood of taking very good European films and turning them into very bad American films. I've been offered a few of those, but it's really a perverse activity, I'd rather go on the dole. A lot of screenplays are written by people who need the money to support them while they're writing novels, but, fortunately, with me it's been the other way round - until quite recently the novels have been more profitable than the screenplays. I'm in the position now that I don't have to do work I'm not interested in.'

To put it a different way, Doyle has unexpectedly found himself in a position where he has been free to spend more than a year working on a storyline for Family, and, as he says, 'to work on it with a producer I know I can trust. It's usually such a precarious thing for a writer to go into this kind of business.' Moreover, he has recently consolidated his standing by setting up his own production company with Lynda Myles, and giving it a name that the lads on the Dublin terraces will recognise: Deadly Films (as in the Rabbitte family's favourite term of approbation: 'Deadly]'). 'We were going to call it - you know Spike Lee's company, Forty Acres and a Mule? - we were going to call it Forty Acres and an EC Grant, but that was maybe a bit too much of an obscure joke.'

'Family' starts on 8 May, BBC 1

(Photographs omitted)