DURING MY all-too-brief flirtation with academia in University College Dublin, I was constantly a witness to the contempt in which members of the college s Literary & Historical Society were held by the student body in general. The L&H was the main college debating society, and its unctuous, be-tuxedoed, members masters of rhetoric to a man (and woman) were a sight to behold, marching pompously through the Arts Block on their way to the weekly Friday night debate, utterly immersed in their own self-importance. My God, they were despised.
Indeed, if memory serves me correctly, children s television presenter, stand-up comedian, Don t Feed The Gondolas resident team captain and newspaper columnist Dara S Briain was one such buffoon. Or was he?
No I wasn t, I was a lovely, nice guy who just happened to debate, he protests somewhat unconvincingly, before performing the kind of mental u-turn for which scholars of his ilk were renowned. Well, maybe I was. I was a debater, which I discovered when I left college were the most reviled breed of student. We were not popular.
Why not?
I think it s because we intimidated people. It s like stand-up comedy; that always intimidates folk as well. People are always coming up to me after gigs and saying Oh, I don t know how you do it. Stand-up s really difficult, I couldn t do it . I mean, that s a really bad way to start a conversation. It s like, (laughs) Yeah, I am better than you. I am lord of your pathetic little world, I am master of your universe. I do things you could never dream of doing .
It was probably the same with the debaters in UCD. There was always this thing that it was a clique and it kept people out. Personally, I think it was just a genuine fear of public speaking that kept people out. You don t go to people who build skyscrapers and say You re a clique, just because you can go up there and I can t .
Although he is without doubt the most topical comedian currently working in Ireland, Dara does not entirely attribute his eerily prolific output of material to his sordid student past.
One of the reasons I do so much new stuff about things that are in the news is because I m always writing, he claims. I do a column for the Sunday World every week, so I m kind of obliged to do reasonably newsy stuff. Also, I do a lot of MC work at various comedy gigs, so that s why it s topical, because it has to be. As well as that, I just tend to get bored if I do the same stuff over and over again.
Would Dara like to be a full-time, careerist comedian?
Well, the comedian s life is beautiful, but I don t have it at the moment because I double up as a children s television presenter, which involves getting into work at a particular hour of the day. I don t enjoy the lazy existence of my full-time comedy brethren
PATRONISING GIT
Surely a man as outgoing, animated and exuberant as the Bray-born 26-year-old would be bored by the life?
I don t know. I like keeping all my eggs in different baskets because it means that the work is nice and varied all the time, but it does suggest a lack of commitment to one particular career, he muses. I think I would get bored with a comedian s life, which is essentially just sitting around the house playing the PlayStation and watching Oprah for 12 hours, before going out and doing 20 minutes work and then drinking . . . (pause) . . . oh God, it sounds like bliss. How could you get bored with that? I d love to do it, but you can only just about get away with doing that here in Ireland.
When they re not tearing people s heads off and impaling them on spikes, Dara s comedy colleagues can see him twice weekly on the small screen presenting Echo Island, an eminently watchable Irish equivalent of BBC s Blue Peter. For a children s presenter, it must be a fine line between speaking to kids on their own level and coming across as a smug, patronising git, mustn t it?
Dara concurs: It is a very fine line, yeah, and as soon as you re not able to talk to them without sounding patronising then you should get out of it. I was okay, because I was brought in when I was relatively young. Young people s presenters are generally brought in at 22 or 23, when they re not that far away from caring about boy bands and video games and stuff like that. As long as you bear in mind that what s important to kids is important, and you treat them with the respect they deserve, then you ll be fine. Generally, they surprise me by how smart they are. I think the most important thing is not to go out to impress, because the you ll be like one of these horrible uncles that you see dancing at weddings.
Kids TV being what it is, there is, of course, a certain amount of naffness involved . . .
Oh God, yeah, from an adult point of view it can occasionally be appallingly naff (laughs). For example, there is no doubt in my mind that the second series of Don t Feed the Gondolas is going to include images of me with a big gormless grin, holding puppies and saying Remember kids, a dog is for life, not just for Christmas! .
DIRE WITTICISMS
Ah yes, Don t Feed The Gondolas: the Network 2 panel quiz show which, shortly after its inception, threatened to become a by-word for naffness. Nevertheless, the stern bollocking I received from Master S Briain shortly after writing a less than gushing review of the early episodes would suggest that Dara believes the programme is nothing short of excellent.
I think it s on its way to becoming a very good programme, he insists. My criticism of your piece suggested that it wasn t the worst show ever, which is what you wrote.
It most certainly was not what I wrote.
Well, I think I suggested that it wasn t floundering , which is what you said, Dara laughs. That has been backed up by the success of the show in the last few weeks, success, I might add, which you, Barry Glendenning, very unselfishly put at your own doorstep in the last issue of Hot Press, as if to say that we d improved because you had rubbished our initial endeavours (laughs).
The very notion.
Basically, I thought that a lot of your opinions, and the manner in which you voiced them, were injudicious. For starters, I don t believe that DFTG is just a rip-off of Have I Got News For You?. I ll spare you asking that question because it s an issue that people in the media always seem to bring up. That s no more valid than saying that Hot Press is a rip-off of the NME, or Phoenix is a rip-off of Private Eye, or that any Irish media outlet that uses a format or a physical look that has been used in England, somehow deserves to be abused.
I mean, you know yourself, that when you stand on stage with a microphone making people laugh that doesn t make you Eddie Izzard, but it also doesn t mean you re copying Eddie Izzard. You have to fill the space with ideas from your head. On DFTG, true, we have a guy in the middle and two on either side, but the rest is our own stuff: our ideas, our gags, our research, etc. I think we do a very good job.
So what did Dara make of Dylan Moran s observation that the participants on such shows are backslappers sitting around nursing their paunches, honing these fairly dire witticisms ?
That s grand, Dara shrugs. There are limitations within anything. Dylan is a very nice man but he has a paunch (laughs). By witticisms, I presume he means oneliners, and it s very tough to do anything except throw out oneliners when you re doing a show like this. You can t expand on something so it has to be oneliners. I think it s a bit trite to criticise it because of that, but that s his judgment call. Good for him. n