The Stage

Irish eyes are smiling - Dara O’Briain

Published Wednesday 3 May 2006 at 11:35 by Jeremy Austin

Comedian Dara O’Briain has been tipped by TV execs as one of the major players coming up in the next few years. With a background in stand-up, festivals and presenting, he’s got the experience. Jeremy Austin finds out why he left Ireland for London, how he got into comedy and what he thinks of the ‘class clown’ stereotype.

He’s a big man, Dara O’Briain. Physically he’s big. But he also has that unquantifiable presence, that quality to fill any room that he is in. He’s doing it now. Although we are sitting alone, just the two of us at one end of a vast drawing room in London’s ultra-fashionable Soho Hotel, O’Briain is filling it. Does he know he is doing it? Is it deliberate?

He takes a sip of his orange and lemonade and begins a stream of consciousness. That’s how O’Briain talks - briskly navigating streams of consciousness in his gentle Irish brogue, much like his stage show. In this particular stream, this torrent of thoughts, he explains why he is glad we are talking face to face and not - as has been the case during the tour he is currently undertaking - on the phone. By the time he reaches the end of his rant, I’m pretty glad too.

“I hate phone interviews. I had five or six of them in a row a few weeks ago for the tour. The local newspaper in Hull, the local newspaper in Basingstoke, all these kind of places and one for a magazine in Ireland,” he begins.

“And I was kind of looking forward to the Irish one because I thought at least I won’t be doing an intro, which is the greatest chore when you are introduce yourself to people. But the five interviews with the UK press were fabulous and then the lazy prick from the Irish Press, his first question was, ‘So, are you busy at the moment?’, which means, ‘I haven’t Googled you, I haven’t read the press release, I’ve done nothing. Just tell me in your own words what you are up to’.”

I subtly finger the Googled notes in my pocket, thankfully. He continues: “When did you first realise you were funny is a terrible question because it means you start your question with, ‘I first realised I was funny when…’. The best answer I’ve heard was Ardal O’Hanlon’s - and this presumably is born out of being asked the question constantly - and he said, ‘The government sent me a letter when I was 11’.”

And then he laughs, a joyous, rip-roaring base of the belly laugh that would have had everyone in the room looking over at us and wishing they could join us. If the room wasn’t empty.

Everyone likes O’Briain. Journalists say how much they enjoy interviewing him. Comics never gossip vindictively about him. And television executives see him as one of the major, upcoming players in the next few years.

On a recent appearance on Jonathan Ross’ chat show, Wossy described O’Briain as “emerging”. It was a little surprising. Now in his thirties, he began as a stand-up in university but quickly established himself on television in Ireland presenting children’s programmes and panel shows.

He moved to London five years ago and returned to the stand-up circuit. He has performed at the prestigious gala at Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival, has had four successful Edinburgh shows and at the time of Wossy’s interview had presented the Live Floor Show for BBC2, made an indelible mark as guest presenter on Have I Got News For You and is chairman of BBC2’s satire quiz Mock the Week. He is currently selling out a two-month 1,000-seat venue tour.

“Emerging was the word that I heard and there’s a part of you going, ‘Surely I have emerged to a certain extent if I am selling out these places now?’ but I think there is still a newness about the face and the majority of people wouldn’t know me,” he says modestly.

“The majority of people in Ireland, they didn’t know me as a comic either. I was a comic. But I was a presenter and that

was the biggest mistake I ever made - double or treble-jobbing in Ireland because you can do it for a while and it is great to learn how to do a bit of writing, a bit of presentation and all that but when it comes to your name and your face, they have one space in their heads for what you do. They can’t go, he’s a comedian/presenter man.”

O’Briain is a little scornful of the country in which he was born. At one point he recalls a tour he did there four or five years ago on the back of his TV success. Harking back to the idea that Irish audiences could not see this presenter as a comedian, he said they saw it as An Evening With… that bloke off the telly.

“The support act was earning more than I was - and I was paying him. I did three weeks around Ireland and the sum total was about 400 people. Driving back, I was just happy to be home in London rather than Ireland and I don’t think I have quite forgiven Ireland for that - it’s a little childish. But it was horrific.”

O’Briain first wanted to be a stand-up after seeing his father present the annual choir festival in his local church in front of 6,000 people. Watching from the junior choir, the unmusical O’Briain fell in love with oratory, commanding an audience.

“You are looking at your dad and it’s all very impressive but he would speak to the audience and I loved that command. I loved the way he worked the room. Everyone else came away with the music, I came away with the talking in front of people,” he explains.

“I told him that recently and he looked at me in a kind of relatively nonplussed way. I thought it was a really touching moment and he was like, ‘Oh really, did you’, and was still disappointed I didn’t take the music from it. So it wasn’t the touching, cinematic moment I thought it would be.”

He continues: “Comedy is a cheap way of getting validation from strangers. I suppose emotionally I don’t need that but I do still like the buzz off of it.

“When I was a comic I started in college and I loved the fact that an audience became one entity. And I would walk past 600-seater lecture theatres and I’d see the students in there and I would see them as an audience.

“The potential for getting a whoof of laughter off that crowd was huge. Obviously the lecturer would walk in and talk about Australopithecus and I would think, ‘You’re wasting it’. The potential energy in a giant room of people to explode is enormous.”

Certainly O’Briain is not the bumbling social wreck that some comedians are. He is not the sad clown, nor did he find refuge from school bullies in his ability to make people laugh. In fact, he thinks all of that gubbins is rubbish.

“The depressive one is a myth or statistically insignificant but the cliche absolutely dogs you. And then you sound like you doth protest too much,” he says, frowning.

“So there’s that one and the notion that comics are the class clowns. I am not sure how many people were class clowns. I doubt Jimmy Carr was the class clown. I can’t imagine that.”

It is interesting that O’Briain mentions Carr. In many ways they’re not dissimilar. Both are Irish, both are highly regarded for their stand-up and both have enjoyed a meteoric rise in their television careers. But possibly more telling is that both have an absolutely unswerving dedication to their craft and careers and a truly focused professional approach.

No one is an overnight success. Not even the Arctic Monkeys. And certainly that is true in comedy. There has been many years of hard grafting on O’Briain’s part. He reckons it took him seven years before he finally began getting it right.

In 2002 he was invited to the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal - the comedy equivalent of Cannes. He got boosted up to the Gala event at the showcase - a privilege - and returned to do an Edinburgh Festival Fringe show that saw him long-listed for the Perrier. From that he got the the Live Floor Show.

“I think I just found the rhythm that best suited what I did. And I don’t think I could analyse that, it’s just what I use,” he explains. “I just found my voice and started wearing my suits on stage, went from a 175-seater room down to a 105-seater room to make sure I sold out from the start and all these little things that happened at the same time.”

“The benchmark is three years. Can I give up my job yet? And then a couple of years later - am I finding my voice?”

It is stagework that keeps a comic fresh, O’Briain believes. Despite a burgeoning television career in Ireland, he emigrated to the UK in part because of the relatively small stand-up circuit in the Republic.

It is a mark of the man that he had the humility to go back to the gruelling rigours involved in trying to establish yourself as a live act.

“I was doing television work over there and I was fairly well known and frankly could have faffed around in my late twenties, hanging around the nightclubs and getting laid in Ireland. But I got menopausal and decided to come over here and do the circuit,” he admits.

“I did two years of Halifax on a Tuesday night followed by Nottingham on a Wednesday night. But then I had come at it fairly old. It had been in my bones before but it was very good to do it properly here.

“Those two years I had already done four Edinburghs. So there was a weekend when I did my Jongleurs open spot and my Comedy Store open spot and in both places older heads would come in and say, ‘What are you doing here?’, and look at the board [that listed his open spot] and say, ‘You are kidding me’, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I got ten minutes’.”

He admits to there being a thrill surprising open-spot audience who are expecting another stumbling five-minute routine from a newcomer.

“It is a fun and childish thing to go out in front of people who think you could be rubbish and then hit them with 11 years of material. The challenge is is doing it in front of an audience who are already expecting stuff off you,” he says.

“The worst thing in the world is coming off to a smaller cheer than you went on to. It happened to me the first time I decided to tour Ireland on the back of a television show and I just didn’t have it. I didn’t have the game. It was about five years ago. I walked on to a big ‘Waaay’ and walked off to an ‘Okay’.”

But it paid off. “Everything I have got has come as a result of my stand-up. And anything I have done, residual skills, are because of the years doing kids TV and hosting game shows and the other stuff I did in Ireland.”

Now he says he continues his stand-up to keep his material fresh and to keep him at the top of his game. It also gives a performer something to fall back on should their television career collapse around them. Comedy is not easy, kids.

“Commissioning editors come and go and can say they never liked my stuff. The one thing about live is, do a good show and people will come back to your next show. That’s the one small part of your career you can have control over. The one guarantee in any showbiz career is that at some stage somebody will go, ‘Wow, whatever happened to…’,” he says.