Third degree, Byrne

Jason Byrne seems unusually relaxed as he lounges on a sofa in an RTE dressing-room and cadges a cigarette from my pack as he sips a coffee. Unusual because for those familiar with his adrenalin fueled live performances, where it often appears that he’s making it up as he goes along, his calm demeanor is a million miles away from his stage persona.

On stage, Byrne is a whirling dervish of improv and audience participation, ad-libbing with selected victims in the crowd and picking up and discarding comic ideas with abandon yet ultimately linking the various threads into a rich comic weave. He seems unconcerned that his latest TV venture, his first for RTE, looks set to transform him from cult-comedy celebrity to household name, for better or worse, as RTE’s track record with Irish comedy is hardly ground-breaking. Before I begin the interview proper I ask him if he’s nervous about how the show is being received?

“Not really, no,” he shrugs. “Basically RTE just let us do whatever the hell we liked and didn’t interfere at all. Obviously the kind of comedy we’re doing is based around improvisation and some people prefer a more straightforward approach, but that’s never what I’ve been about. I don’t tell jokes but I’ve been doing this long enough now to know what’s funny and what isn’t. And this is funny, trust me.”

How difficult was it to adapt his stage-show for RTE TV?

“If I’d never done TV before the RTE show then I’ve got to admit I wouldn’t have been ready for this, but I’d done a lot of British shows like Gas and The Stand-up Show so I knew it was a different scene entirely. People have said that I look terrified but that’s because I am! The adrenalin is pumping by the time I hit the stage and you’re just looking for something to latch onto to get in to it.

“The difference on TV is that the audience is really far away compared to most live comedy clubs so you’ve got to reach out that bit more. Plus, television audiences are a much more sober bunch than your average comedy crowd. And they’re nervous as well ‘cos they’re on telly! And that can make them a bit more self-conscious than they’d be in a live club, when you’re sitting in the dark and no-one can see you.

“In fact, for the RTE shows I have to have somebody go out and check the audience for people I might know personally and we move them to the back so I don’t get distracted. We had to move my uncle Michael, actually. Otherwise I could go ‘So what do you do then?’ and he’d say ‘You know what I do, you cheeky pup, I’m going to have words with your father.’”

Was a career in comedy always an ambition of Jason’s?

“I think like a lot of comedians I just drifted into it. Myself and PJ Gallagher, who’s also working on the TV show, were lighting engineers and the pay was so bad that no-one else wanted the jobs, consequently we knew that we could totally take the piss. I was Captain Cable and he was Boy Socket-plex. We just sat around this big warehouse and made each other laugh all day. It was sort of like taking revenge, since when we decided on a career in lighting we thought we’d be out on tour with the Corrs, instead we were stuck in a dusty warehouse all day surrounded by broken lights. Very Beckett. (Laughs.) So we just amused ourselves with theme days and hat hours and stuff.”

I beg your pardon?

“Well, we’d have a theme day once a month where, say, it’d be a Mexican theme. We’d dress up as Mexicans and speak in the accents and re-enact The Magnificent Seven. Hat hour was the last hour on Fridays when you had to go off and make a hat from anything you found lying around. Some of them were quite chic, in a Limerick College of Art and Design kind of way. But they wouldn’t keep you warm, mind you. We had a club in the basement where we’d have cans of lager.”

Did you do any actual work?

“People who owned their own lights would come in to our warehouse to fix them. Once Robbie Fossett from the circus family brought in a sick mirrorball that he said was ‘sucking the light in’. Of course it was just that it was really dusty ‘cos he’d never cleaned it. We gave it a wipe with a cloth and he thought we were geniuses.”

When did he decide to jack in the glamourous world of lighting?

“I’d seen Billy Connolly on video and thought ‘I’d love to do that’ but I first got up on stage at a charity gig in Ballinteer. It was a benefit gig for Romanian babies organised by two nurses and everybody on my road was there, the parish priest was there. They asked me to act as MC, so I got up and did what I’d seen other MCs do. I talked about wanking and sex and puking and female orgasms and it was that classic stage death complete with tumbleweed drifting across the silent room.

“The only funny thing was that my mother felt obliged to laugh, so she was going ‘Ha, Ha, Ha! (Oh Jesus, what’s he saying), Ha, Ha, Ha! (Please some-one get me out of here…)’ So I finished, to no applause, and went to the bar and got pissed, swearing I’d never do that again, but at the end of the night they asked me to do the raffle. I think they felt a bit sorry for me. But I’d no material so when I got up I just made stuff up and they fell about laughing, so I thought, ‘I’m onto something here.’”

Can Jason foresee a career in mainstream television after his RTE debut?

“I don’t really know if I’m going to be the next Pat Kenny if that’s what you mean. And I’ll never stop working live because that’s the real thrill for me. But I might try to get on Crimeline. I have the face for Crimeline. That computer generated face is very much the look I’m going after. This season.”