Never Mind The Bucolics

Having worked as a children’s author in the past, it was perhaps inevitable that David O’Doherty would turn his hand to writing a comedy book. Created in collaboration with fellow writer Claudia O’Doherty (no relation) and Photoshop wiz Mike Ahern (of acclaimed Dublin design outfit D.A.D.D.Y.), 100 Facts About Pandas gleefully list all manner of absurd details about the titular species, including that one was elected as head of state in Belize, and that pandas are drawn to fax machines.

Such a book sits well with O’Doherty’s style of comedy, the essence of which is a kind of good-humoured irony (if he was a musician, he’d be Beck). How did the idea come about?
“I certainly have always had a love of making up facts that are so slight they seem plausible,” replies David. “I always like making up rumours about my friends, that aren’t like, he’s a black belt in karate. I remember once starting a rumour that Daniel Kitson’s father owned the largest chain of garden centres in the north of England, which just fulfilled no purpose really other to see if the rumour would come back again, and people would start asking him horticultural questions. Claudia and I have always had a great love of David Attenborough, Blue Planet and Planet Earth and all of that.
“We definitely liked the idea of trying to write a nature book, but we don’t know anything about animals, so instead we decided to try and make up things about them that sounded like they might be true. One of the first facts ever was that if you shave a panda and weave the fur into a fabric, the fabric is bullet-proof, which is vaguely plausible. You see this new Gore-Tex bullet-proof bicycle tires and things like that, so it’s possible that if you knitted together panda fur you might get something similar.
“We must have written that down, and then Mike got involved quite early in the project. He really liked the idea of it, and we he started doing pictures for the facts, it gave them another 50%. I guess it’s the way your eye works – even reading an article like this, your eye will be drawn to a picture, and then it will try and make sense of the picture by reading the fact. That was the way we set about writing it.”
Did O’Doherty and his collaborators have any particular model for the book?
“No, although there was a degree of inspiration taken from a certain period in literature,” he replies. “Under-funded Irish schools always had a lot of reference books from the late ’70s and early ’80s, which are in this bizarre educational style where fact meets art. So you’d have these weird, badly Photoshop-ed pictures of a boy standing alone in the middle of the ocean, and the question would be ’Who are you?’ Then there’d be a thing about the core and the mantle of the earth. Just stuff that doesn’t quite make sense, so we definitely wanted to make a book that looked like it was from 1981 (laughs).
“Claudia and I just did it for kicks a few years ago. We wrote about 20 facts and Mike did about five or six pictures, and then set about seeing if anyone would be interested in publishing this. We were lucky enough to meet someone from this small imprint of Random House called Square Peg. The reason we went with them was because we said from the very outset that this is a curious project; it’s gonna be full colour, and it’s got to be hardback, and it’s got to look like it’s from 1981, which puts off a lot of publishers. They like large orange books that are very bright, and people’s eyes are drawn to them when they sit on tables on Waterstones.
“It was never going to be the most commercial project ever. It was going to be an unnecessarily expensive one from the start, but they were into it, and they never messed with too much all the way through.”
100 Facts About Pandas has enjoyed considerable support from O’Doherty’s high-profile comedy friends. Both Flight Of The Conchords’ Jemaine Clement and The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding wrote blurbs for the cover, whilst Jimmy Carr enthused about it on his Twitter page. O’Doherty was also encouraged in the early stages of the project by Father Ted and IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan, and Robert Popper, the comedy writer whose credits include the Matt Groening-endorsed science series spoof Look Around You.
Linehan’s sometime writing partner Arthur Mathews was an advocate for Andy Riley’s brilliant book of illustrations Bunny Suicides, with which 100 Facts About Pandas shares a certain comedic sensibility.
“I’ve always liked really stupid things,” says O’Doherty. “I grew up reading Flann O’Brien and then people like Stephen Leacock, and more recently George Saunders. These are all writers who have a satirical element to their work for sure, but then some of it is just really pointless, but funny for that reason. That’s what we set out to do - to be creative as possible with it. We ended around up writing about 150 facts, and trying to nail them down to the last 100 was just a matter of selecting the ones that Mike would like illustrating the most.”
In 2008, of course, O’Doherty entered the comedy big league when he won the if.comedy award at the Edinburgh Fringe. How has life been for him since?
“The award has been brilliant,” enthuses David. “It has meant that more people have come to shows, and more people have been willing to check out my comedy. That’s a double edged sword to an extent. Like, in Edinburgh this year, some people would come just because I’d won the big award the year before, and wouldn’t necessarily like the show very much. But some people come and really like it, and then they’ll tell their friends next year. I haven’t done a hit and run thing, and I’ve managed not to do any terrible television in the last year.
“You get a lot of offers to go on things, and I was offered the single worst television idea ever – The Apprentice for pets. And countless other panel shows for Dave and all of that. I’ve been able to stick to my guns, because I’ve been able to earn a living just doing stand-up for the last while.”
Having done a one-off special for BBC Radio 4 last year, O’Doherty is currently developing a few different television projects in the UK, including a possible adaptation of Panda Facts.
“It’s a slow old process,” he acknowledges, “but it’s nice to have in your peer group friends who have been through it. Noel and Julian from the Boosh did their first Edinburgh show in ’98, and the TV show came along in ’03 or ’04. So it’s a question of development as much anything – anything that causes you to think about it is going to make it better at the end of the day. And luckily in the UK, there is enough money in television to give you really good people to work with, who will hopefully ask questions that will improve the thing, if it ever appears.
“I would love to do something with Panda Facts. I think possibly the world needs a fake nature programme at the moment, and I could be the person to provide that.”

100 Facts About Pandas is out now, published by Square Peg. David O’Doherty plays Whelan’s from November 14-15