The Sweet Smell of Success

The Killers: brilliant. Bloc Party I’m not mad about, doesn’t really live up to the hype, does it? It’s not as good as The Killers, which I reckon turns into Bowie at the end. Dimitri From Paris I’m quite fond of too. Lemon Jelly…I don’t know if I’d bother my arse to see them live. Apparently they do a show for parents and kids on a Saturday afternoon in The Kentish Town forum with balloons and ice-cream and they wear the masks.”

Dara O’Briain may sound like a metrosexual with his finger very much on the pulse, but I suspect it’s all a cover-up. Rewind five days earlier to February 11th, when we meet up in Dublin’s Jury's Hotel in Ballsbridge, and we’re talking a completely different kettle of ball games. Naturally, a guy has a right to change his mind, but I suspect this about-face a week later in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel may be a result of my withering look when he mentions his deep fondness for Take That.
“I think that ‘Relight My Fire’ is the best single of the '90s,” he enthuses. “I hate doing (Never Mind The) Buzzcocks…it’s such a muso show it’s like dance never happened. They’re such fucking indie snobs on that show. Honestly. Girls Aloud are one of the best bands out there today. I’m just the biggest, gayest dancer, and I have to admit I love them. ‘Shoulda known/shoula cared/should hung around my kitchen/In my underwear’…that’s pure poetry!”
With that, he pulls out his iPod (third generation) in an attempt to turn me on to the finer points of bubblegum pop.
“Wow, what’s David Gray doing there?” he muses, turning the dial. “Jesus, look – I have a D:ream track on my Ipod!” Things, as they say, can only get better.

Lest you think that Dara O’Briain and I kick off our weekends meeting in hotels all over Dublin (“our weekly briefing sessions,” he chuckles dryly), I should explain the two-part interview. Initially we meet for the ‘official’ interview in Jury's; due to ‘technical difficulties’ I end up with bugger-all on tape with which to hang him. Rather generously, O’Briain agrees to a second interview a week later before he sets off into the night to take in I, Keano.
It’s an unexpected surprise, given O’Briain’s near-famous adversity to doing interviews.
“All comedians come across quite dull in print, because you’re not giving the timings or the pauses or movement or whatever. I hate reading interviews of mine as they don’t come across as I’d like,” he admits.
Needless to say, while I’m hesitant about fully owning up to my bungling in print, O’Briain is ever mindful of the story’s ‘angle’ (doubtless as a result of his student newspaper days, when he created UCD’s University Observer).
“Are you gonna put that in, that you paused the tape so I could take a phonecall and never took it off pause?” he goads. “Do it, do it, do it. It’ll humanise it; you can show the readers the feet of clay. Second, you’re showing them the process and bringing down ‘the wall’. Of course, it also looks like I’m very accessible – or desperate – to have my thoughts recovered. That or I’ve nothing to do before I hit Wagamama…” (laughs)
Rather tragically for all concerned, The Lost Interview saw O’Briain in flying, typically controversial form. He slated his Echo Island career with enviable bite, and chatted away about the possibility of there being a male sex columnist in Ireland (“surely we’re not still at that stage where it couldn’t happen, are we?”); Colin Farrell (“he made some remark onstage at the Meteors and I had to stand there like a lemming and laugh at it. I’ll get him back though”); Sinn Fein (“I’ve always said, if they didn’t do that bank job, I’ll eat my hat”); U2 (“I’m so not on the blag for the concert, haven’t really gotten into the last album anyway”); Bono (“We hadn’t time to grow close at the Meteors, though no doubt we would”); Ryan Tubridy (“He just got lucky. I know a thousand people who have infinitely more talent than he has”); Jewish comedians (“the funniest fuckers in the world”); the state of ‘New Ireland’ (“nostalgia is like heroin for the old…this place was shit twenty years ago and I can’t believe anyone would say otherwise”); oh, and his personal life (“it’s a totally closed book, moreso for the fact that I’m protecting the people in my life that don’t want the recognition. Though my poor granny gets wheeled out a lot, God love her!”).
As it happens, though, O’Briain has had a rather eventful week since we, y’know, last caught up.
“Well, I’ve bought tons of new albums, so I’ve topped up for my album question,” he deadpans. “I’ve bought a house (in the London suburb of Chiswick), the whole Graham Norton thing is happening, I trained Stephen Gately to compete on a reality show, and he won, and we did a killer episode of The Panel where Colm was just godlike. We’ve also added a date to the West End run and another date to Vicar St. It’s been a nice week. I’m sure I’ve slept too, I can check the diary for you…”
More notably, O’Briain had recorded his first appearance on BBC’s Parkinson, an event that he’s the first to admit is something of a benchmark in his career.
“There was no freaking out as such… just an awareness that it’s a really big deal,” he muses. “Parky is an utter pro – he’s textbook good. Plus, you’re always aware with Parky that you’re walking in the shadow of Billy Connolly. He went on twenty years ago and told a joke about a man whose wife had died, he buried her with her arse sticking up so he had somewhere to park his bike. That was the joke that launched Billy’s career.”
Aside from his witty repartee with Parky, O’Briain will remember the night for an entirely different reason.
“After my banter, Samuel L. Jackson turned to me, shook my hand and said, ‘That was awesome’. It wasn’t like a major moment or anything, but I do hope that anyone who I ever knew, any girlfriend who ever wronged me, anyone who decided not to go out with me or didn’t pass the ball to me in school, the man who scuffed my shoe on the bus once…are all tuned into it tomorrow night.”
And to think his Parkinson appearance could have been even more spectacular – Jennifer Lopez pulled out of her slot at the eleventh hour.
“J-Lo was to do it, but J-Lo has, quotation marks, ‘glandular fever’ but…(mimes bump). That’s certainly the Popbitch rumour. I’m sorry I didn’t see J-Lo, but I was reading that, when she went on TOTP to do ‘Jenny From The Block', she asked for ten dressing rooms. She’s hideously not down to earth.”
With events also unfolding with dramatic force on the Sinn Fein front in the last week, O’Briain won’t be drawn to expand further on his views in Round Two.
“I’ve been in the UK all week, so I’ve yet to be briefed on what actually went on this week,” he protests.
Currently dividing his time between Dublin, where he is recording The Panel for RTE 1, and London, which he calls home, O’Briain isn’t particularly fazed by the fact that few Irish people are aware that his stand-up stock is positively soaring in the UK.
“I would be bothered by the ‘big fish in small pond’ comments if I was just in this pond,” he counters. “The fact that people may not know about what happens in the UK, they’re under no obligation to know what’s going on in my life. People have space in their heads for one fact next to your name and with me, the fact is ‘TV presenter’, as opposed to ‘comedian’. It just so happens that I was doing the presenting thing when I was trying the stand-up comedy. I’m not out there saying, ‘Christ, if only Ireland knew what was really going on with me…’”

Of course, it could well be that there’s an unspoken sentiment that our national broadcaster doesn’t serve our comedians quite as well as its UK counterparts…
“The main reason we leave the country is not that we’re being kicked out, it’s the lure of London, you know, its shining lights and shimmering towers,” he counters. “The thing is, RTE is a regional broadcaster with a national mandate. The budgets are so small. Bear in mind that as comedians, we’ve all been on RTE. I’ve been on for ten years, when really I had no right to be there. I have a proper relationship with them and I’d like to keep it that way. If there’s any kicking to be done I’ll do it on the inside.”
O’Briain is especially keen to annihilate one particular myth on behalf of both RTE and, for that matter, two former hotpressers.
“Do you still believe that Father Ted was turned down by RTE?” he asks. “Someone put this in print on behalf of poor Arthur (Matthews) and Graham (Linehan). They lived and worked in London, they never even came to the Irish market with Father Ted. It’s like this: we don’t get exiled by RTE, we go willingly to London to work. It’s a huge misconception. I wish people would stop saying it about RTE. It drives Graham up the wall that it’s used as a stick to beat RTE with."
With The Panel currently in full flight, O’Briain is understandably wary of RTE ribbing. Naturally, he’s keen to do another series of the irreverent talk show, and already has a wish-list of guests mentally arranged.
“I’d love to have Blair and Bush and Bertie, but at the same time, what could they say? They’re not going to be that interesting,” he reasons. “When Bertie did the debates (that Dara chaired in UCD), he always had a pre-prepared speech. The only thing we learnt from Hanging With Hector is that Bertie is more in control of things than the shambolic nature of the show was supposed to let on. Hector didn’t get within spitting distance of him. Actually, scratch the lot of them…more time with Samuel L. Jackson please! Such a cool bastard it was unreal.”
When he was top dog in the UCD Debating Society, did he see any connection with stand-up comedy?
“I don’t remember being funny in college, I was quite studious," he recalls. “I like to think I was vaguely engaging as a teenager, but I was probably an idiot. I think I spoke to myself a lot. I was warned about it as a child as it looked plain weird. But I was a huge comedy fan – Steve Martin live is the funniest hour you’ll ever see on TV."
In the course of the (second) interview, a woman approaches the pair of us, shakes his hand and nervously plants a kiss on his cheek, before solemnly promising not to bother us again. O’Briain, for his part, is charm personified, graciously accepting her shower of feverish compliments.
“You don’t think that was orchestrated, do you?” he gasps afterwards. “Yeah, I set these things up all the time, to make me look good! Most people in the UK don’t even know me, and when I tell them what I do, they ask me, 'Do you perform under a stage name?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I perform under the stage name of Billy Connolly'."
I ask him does he feel any pressure to be constantly entertaining in everyday life?
“I must say I really don’t feel any pressure to live up to anyone’s expectations,” he states. “This whole ‘laughter is a serious business’ is a crock of shit. And you, the print boys (points finger), are the ones who perpetuate this notion. We’re less funny in real life ‘cos we’re not on stage and we haven’t condensed our conversation to a series of comedy high points. This notion that, y’know, he’s saying all this for the first time on stage, you’ve got to cop on and get over that. We’re no more depressed than anyone else. Generally, comedians have the same spread of personality you’d get in the population – maybe with more of a need for attention and love. Musicians do a lot less singing off stage, we do a lot less telling jokes.
“When you do five theatre shows a week, you’ve no desire to be the funniest guy at the dinner party or the pub. We get enough of an outlet for that. There’s this romantic notion that laughter comes from tears – Jesus. Let’s stop it. Most comedians aren’t even the funniest guy in the office.”
Having worked ‘the circuit’ for over 10 years (and clocking in a reputed 300 stand-up shows a year in the UK), O’Briain still admits to ‘dying on his arse’ from time to time.
“Well, there’s a time and a place for comedy. A gig with a load of soccer fans at midnight at Celtic Park is not the place to do it. They were looking for soccer stories and I was trying out my whimsical reminiscences and charming anecdotes of misadventure. Tommy Docherty left the job at Manchester United because he slept with the physio’s wife. He turned to me and said, ‘If you want to you can slag me off over the physio thing’.
“So five minutes in, I’m dying, so I go, ‘It’s good to see everyone here, apart from the physio, who was afraid to come in case Tommy wanted to fuck his wife’. It got a huge cheer, and I thought, ‘great, back on track’, so I went back to my stuff, and died on my arse. I said, ‘this is comedic gold and you’re not interested so I’ll stop’. After 5 years of stand-up you keep going when you’re dying, 10 years later you give out to them and they normally fall in line.”
Of course, the finest example of falling on one’s arse has to be Billy Connolly, who seriously damaged his own career with an off-the-cuff remark about Ken Bigley…
“Living in Ireland and the UK, we like to think we do irony, but that episode shows that no-one does,” he reckons. “It’s like I said, 75% of all communication is non-verbal. When you write that joke down and say, ‘this is what he said’, of course it’s going to look odd. But then, there are hundreds of ways he could have said the joke. Most people who wrote about it weren’t there and didn’t see how he delivered the line. I’d hate to see my set transcribed – the tone would be gone. Granted, what he said was a terrible thing to say, but it may have sounded different on stage. In saying that, my entire career, and the repayments of the home I’ve just bought, could be destroyed by one tsumani joke and I’m not that stupid!”
In the event of such a catastrophe occuring, O’Briain admits that a Reality TV career could well be waiting in the wings.
“As Jimmy Carr says, keep it for the way down,” he nods. “Apparently I’m about to be hassled by the makers of Strictly Come Dancing. (The producer) says, 'We’ll just keep raising the money until it’s impossible to say no'. I just think your man would find it quite funny. I guested on their discussion panel and was funnily snide.”
Will it ever come to a point where it might be impossible to say ‘no’?
“With a reality show, if you’re one of the people who breaks it, it’s a million pounds a year business,” he reflects. “It’s a huge media market. You might end up doing a David Brent and having to do the personal appearances in Scunthorpe, but it could work out. That’s the hideous allure, the nectar in the Venus Fly Trap that draws you in. At least (with Strictly Come Dancing) you learn a skill; it’s not a show where they put you in a room and watch you bicker and fuck. This involves having to do something, as opposed to eating maggots or being Stallone’s mum.
“I’m not doing the show, I’m just saying at least the people who do leave with a skill. Come to think if it, you could do Strictly Welding, or Strictly Small Firm Accountancy. Now that would be something.”