The bloke with the box

Even for Jason Byrne, the man who sets standards for onstage energy that others can only dream of emulating (in an amphetamine-free scenario) 2005 has turned out to be a hyperactive year.
Jason’s breathless listing of his multiple endeavours across several media takes longer than some comics’ entire shows.
Perhaps it’s just his extraordinary natural exuberance or the fact that his four-year-old son Devon has spiked the coffee he just drank with Fairy Liquid.
Whatever the secret, the fact remains that the breakthrough that enables the Power of Byrne to be hooked up to the power grid is the one that will render all discussion of Kyoto irrelevant if it ever happens.
First off, there’s the touring. Jason has toured the UK extensively this year. For someone who is so much about being a live act it comes as a surprise that this has never really happened before. The unleashing of Byrne’s voracious appetite for stage time is largely a result of a management chance which occurred last year.
“My old manager always wanted to be in control. Now I just organise everything myself and do it”, explains Byrne.
Today, he’s handled by Lisa Richards Comedy here in Ireland and Karushi in the UK and they all seem happy to let him do what he wants – which is mostly getting into crowded rooms of punters and haranguing them genially for an hour or so, usually to roars of laughter.
Jason also went to Australia for the Melbourne Comedy Festival for the first time this year. “It was amazing. I did really brilliantly there”.
He was a huge hit at the televised ‘gala’ event for the festival, where selected acts had a meagre five minutes to persuade the wider public to seek them out at the box office to see more. Jason describes proceedings: “I just took my cardboard box on and said ‘I have five minutes, I don’t have any gags, but I have this cardboard box’. “Then I grabbed a fellah from the audience and got him to get into the box and started pulling him around the stage – like you’d give a child a ride in a box. The box fell apart so I ended up dragging him round by his ankles. When he didn’t do the car noises properly I hit over the head with the microphone. They loved it”.
This illustrates the Byrne enigma: there really is no point even in Jason himself describing what he does. You have to be there. It’s about Jason’s childlike naughtiness and effervescent and charming abuse. The way he turns a room into a big playground, where he is at the same time the bully and the biggest, boldest, coolest child.
You want to cool enough to get on the climbing frame and stand on one foot beside him, even though you know you’ll be a heap of broken limbs at the end of it while Jason moves on to see what damage he can do over at the swings.
There was a moment of panic in Melbourne when the boxee in question rang up to say that Jason had in fact cut his head open with the microphone. Concerns were dissipated quickly however: “Nah worries mate! Just wanted to say I had a great night!”.
Indeed, countless people confused the festival box office afterwards by calling up and asking for tickets for “that bloke with the box”. Jason played to packed ecstatic audiences for a sold out run. No doubt his profile had been further boosted by another TV appearance while he was there, this time as a guest on ABC’s The Glasshouse.
However Jason Byrne and television have not always hit it off. It can be frustrating for some who know the power of the Byrne live rollercoaster to see it struggle to make sense within the format and constraints of the TV studio.
But perhaps this too is about to change with the commissioning of a new RTE series following a pilot produced with Double Z (makers of Podge And Rodge and The Laughter Lounge among others). The show is called, succinctly, Arseholes.
Jason describes it as though it is a novel twist to the unstoppable progress of reality television, but as he explains it to me I point out that it is simply him taking one person as a representative of the front row of any of his audiences and giving him the usual stick but in a condensed and highly intense setting.
The hapless participants must spend time in an “apartment” (Jason: “Actually it’s more like a studio. With no windows. And they sleep in a bath full of balls. And the colours are disgusting yellows and lime-greens…”) in the company of the eponymous terminal posterior sphincters: none other Jason and his long-time sidekick, Naked Camera star P.J. Gallagher.
The two boys make it their business to make life hell for their guest, who must endure the torment to win a cash prize of !1000. That’s not really a lot of money – most local radio stations give that away several times as much before the first traffic report on the breakfast show. Where the success of the show, as Jason sees it, will lie is in appealing to the belief of the Irish male (and I’m guessing this would turn out to be predominantly a boys’ sport) that no matter how big an arsehole the hosts can be, he is a bigger tougher arsehole than the lot of them.
The first guinea pig for the pilot seemed to fit this profile. He was former Barman Of The Year from Tallaght, Terence who by his own admission and according to the testimony of friends and family is “bleedin’ very rough”. He wanted the !1000 for a new fridge and didn’t see any problem putting up with a few antics and comedy pranks to get it.
Jason reveals the story’s end with pride: “After 11 hours in the room with us he ended up wearing a woman’s leotard and staring into a pool of soup saying: ‘fuck the fridge. I’m going. Youse are arseholes’.” The next guy lasted only five hours.
He just about coped with Jason & PJ staring at him without speaking to him from chairs in which they were bound by chains for an hour, but by the time they had him sellotaped to a giant ball which they rolled around the floor between them he had had enough.
Perhaps, like me, you feel that this sort of thing is more suited to shocking revelations concerning detainees caught up in the War Against Terror on Newsnight, but ‘Byrner’ is sure it will be a huge hit.
“They can show the edited half hour on the telly and then do a big interactive job where people can text in to say what we should do to them next”.
I’m interested, but largely repelled. Hey, that’s what makes niche broadcasting.
On a different note, Byrne will star in Emily’s Song, a short film written and directed by Frank Kelly and Thomas A. Kennedy through their production company, Pale Stone Productions.
“It’s the first chance to do something serious like this so I jumped at it. They wanted all my stage energy, but with a lid on it,” says Byrne.
Byrne plays the father of two children, a mechanic whose wife dies, leaving the boys to pull the Da round from his pent-up denial and back to life with them and without their ma.
Look out for Byrne’s co-star, a genuine De Lorean car, watched over jealously by its devoted owner as Byrne worked under it in character.
“He kept running up between takes to wipe off the finger marks. He was inches away from riding it – but really it looked like a kettle”
More filming is ahead for Byrne in the coming weeks when he shoots a 10 minute pilot for a British production company Brown Eyed Pie. The piece, as yet unnamed, is from a script by Byrne with contributions from John Henderson. It references both Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean and the cult British film classic The Plank which starred Tommy Cooper, Marty Feldman and Eric Sykes. This will be darker and more rural and Irish than either of those, only the lack of words really tying them together.
An interesting array of talent is involved, including Paddy Courtney, who plays a gay estate agent selling churches to a parish priest.
And all the while Jason is gigging, gigging, gigging with the apex of his stage mountain his Edinburgh show, The Lovely Goat Show, which plays for the entirety of the Fringe in The Assembly Rooms and is alleged to involve big opening and closing musical events that take advantage of the large stage and 600-seater Music Hall auditorium.
He filled my ears, he filled the page for me and he filed his box with an Australian. Filling The Assembly Rooms is unlikely to pose a problem for the indefatigable Mr. Byrne