Comedian of the year: Dara Ó Briain interview

In the immortal words of Hank’s better half Peggy Hill, “Don’t be a cry baby, be a do baby!” Firmly falling into that latter category is Dara Ó Briain, a man whose glass is perennially half-full and for good reason.
2014 has seen him helm a 13th series of the still very chucklesome Mock The Week; gloat over others’ misfortunes in The Apprentice... You’re Fired!; drive from Arizona to Panama with Ed Byrne at BBC2’s expense; nerd up to Professor Brian Cox on Stargazing LIVE and play no fewer than 21 Vicar St. sell-outs, with another half-dozen lined up for next summer. The best, though, is yet to come.
“Next week I will have the double lifelong wish-fulfillment of taking Stephen Hawking Christmas shopping in the afternoon and then driving down to London to present Monty Python with an award,” he beams with delight. “The Christmas shopping is actually part of a series of interviews I’m doing for a Stephen Hawking TV special. It’s a word a minute he can communicate, so I had to send his people the questions in advance in order for them to prepare technically.”
While no one has anything but nice things to say about the good Professor, Monty Python’s recent London O2 comeback was the subject of extremely mixed reviews.
“I thought it was great,” Dara opines. “Part of that was John Cleese just fucking around. Terry Jones had a load of cue cards, which Cleese kept grabbing from his hands and reading out. I dare say there was a financial aspect to the reunion, but they genuinely seemed to be having fun on stage. And they’re Monty Python, the DNA, if you will, of modern comedy.”
What about all those Vicar St. shows? Isn’t he at this stage just showing-off?
“We did 31 on the previous tour, so actually we’ve been under-achieving,” he deadpans. “No, it’s been my attempt at Elvis in Vegas. I’ve found myself getting very possessive of the venue. One weekend I went down to do Limerick and Killarney and came back to discover that, in my absence, Vicar St. had had bands in. I walked out and went, ‘What have they fucking done to the carpet?’ With their amps and what not they’d scuffed the stage.”
He could have tripped and hurt himself...
“You know what, there’s a claim there!”

Being back home for a decent chunk of time, Dara’s obviously experienced what Labour Senator Lorraine Higgins, a mistress of understatement, describes as our “lawless utopia.”
“Jesus Christ, yeah. Of the people I’ve talked to in the front-row there’s been a surprising number of guards and a surprising number of revenue commissioners. I can tell you that the response to the latter has been decidedly warmer than to the former. I had a guard in two days after the bollard incident, who was at pains to stress he was on his local beat in Rathcoole at the time. And then we had another long rant with a guy about what conversation you’d make with Joan Burton as you were wedged up against the glass of her car. It was him going, ‘Joan, now that we have this time...’”
Just when you thought no one could out-daft Senator Higgins, along came Fine Gael TD Noel Coonan with his concerns that the water charge protests could develop into an "ISIS situation".
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Earlier on in the year, you had the Senate complaining that seagulls were losing the run of themselves and attacking people for their sandwiches. And you’re there thinking, ‘You don’t have dominion over the creatures of the sky'. For all that Seanad Éireann does, it can’t claim that level of power! But it’s always good for a few ‘LOLs’, I find, the Irish parliamentary system.”
Did Dara have Bolshevik bring-down-the-state tendencies when he was at UCD?
“No, I didn’t and neither was I young Fianna Fáil, who are the lunatic fringe you’ve really got to worry about. I was the individualist all-out-for-himself Debating Society-type, although I did bequeath UCD The University Observer newspaper, which I co-founded with a friend of mine, Pat Leahy, in 1994. That they’ve been getting up faculty noses for 20 years is
something I’m extremely proud of.”
Being old enough to remember Apollo 8’s historic landing in a Burbank movie studio, I was thrilled when Rosetta plonked itself on Comet 67P.
“If they faked the Moon landing, man, they were so ahead of themselves with the CGI,” Ó Briain proffers. “It was a highlight of the year for me too and provided a social media alternative to discussing Kim Kardashian’s arse.”
And spoiling Love/Hate for people like Dara, who were desperately playing DVD catch-up when Nidge was whacked.
“My self-imposed media blackout ended when I met Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in the airport and all these people kept coming up to him and offering their condolences,” he sighs. “I’m just at the start of Season 3 and know Robert Sheehan doesn’t make it, because he’s not on the cover of Season 4. I was in the same nightclub recently as Aidan Gillen who was standing there looking exactly like John Boy. I got quite an intense stare off him from the opposite side of the dancefloor: it was scary.”
The last time I met Aidan I discovered he’s a massive Norwegian death metal fan – albeit not into the church burnings and grave desecrations – prompting an animated chat about which is the finer Bathory album, Under The Sign Of The Black Mark or Blood Fire Death.
“The latter, surely?” Dara ventures. “I wouldn’t have presumed that he was a death metal fan, but equally I wouldn’t have said he’s into Taylor Swift – who was the inspiration for a very good Saturday Night Live sketch in which the virtues of a new drug called Swiftamine were extolled. Chris Rock was in it. I thought, ‘I’ve never heard a Taylor Swift song, I must listen to one'. I now fucking love ‘Shake It Off’. It’s a great track and the video’s funny. She’s happy to laugh at herself for being a bit dorky. She’s a delight.”

Dara’s “liberal bias” got him into trouble with that nice Nigel Farage, who was disembowelled on live radio this year by LBC’s James O’Brien. If you’ve yet to sample its wonderfulness, YouTube is the place to go.
“I know James, he’s a mate of mine. It was done with a stiletto; Farage didn’t know what had hit him. You can’t claim that yours is the massive coming movement of its time and then accuse people of being rude when you’re subjected to the same scrutiny as other parties. The downside of democracy I’m afraid, Nigel, is that you will be questioned about your policies and subsequently mocked if they don’t stack up and – I’m in danger of being rude here – Ukip’s don’t. I also enjoyed the EDL managing to mistake Brighton Pavilion for a mosque and the BNP tweeting, ‘I hope everyone observes a minute’s silence’ 24 hours after Remembrance Day. Give them enough rope etc. etc.”
With the British National Party and their ex-leader Nick Griffin feuding in public, Tommy Robinson quitting the EDL and the family of murdered drummer Lee Rigby telling Britain First to stop exploiting his death, it was an annus most horribilis for the UK far-right. Here in Ireland, we had a coalition of self-parodying fundamentalists and past their sell-by date journos saying that they’re not homophobic, but don’t want them gays having equal rights.
“I took part in the register to vote drive, but didn’t campaign per se because I didn’t want to make it a ‘thing’. Like, ’How does the happiness of two guys in another part of the country in any way impact on your heterosexual marriage?’ I think it will pass relatively easily. Irish people are a lot more understanding and liberal than they’re given credit for. The vast majority, who tend to be silent, will do the right thing.”
Love/Hate aside, did Dara spot anything else which would suggest to the outside world that there’s more to Irish culture than stage Oirishry?
“I loved Ballyturk in the Olympia, Our Few And Evil Days in The Abbey and then Calvary – Pat Shortt’s performance in that was fantastic,” he ventures. “All the natural warmth he has was shed, in order to play this deeply unpleasant dick. I was like, ‘I’m not so sure I want to go out drinking with you anymore'.
“At one point during the year I said, ‘This is after getting fucking Nordic! Everything is dark, everything is grim'. A routine I have in the show is me getting exasperated by the amount of that stuff; parents weeping at a press conference in every ITV drama. You just think, ‘Fuck it, lads, let it go for five minutes. We get it, you’re painting in these colours'. After watching Ballyturk I asked Enda Walsh, ‘What did we do to you?’ and he said, ‘It was like Albania with priests'. Just to pile on the misery, Lenny Abrahamson is making a film version of Room, which is a tough read. It’s about an abducted mother raising her child in – go on, guess – this room. Holy fuck, you’re wondering what happened in the country to these people?”
While Joan Rivers’ death rather sadly split the vote, Gene Simmons and Henry Rollins aside, everyone seemed gutted by the loss of Robin Williams.
“It’s unfortunate that Joan’s comments about Gaza sullied a lifetime of work,” he rues. “You had a lot of people saying, ‘She deserves to rot’ and you think, ‘OK, it was clumsy and badly done, but it doesn’t change the fact that she was a hell of a comic'. I tweeted an RIP and said she was a huge influence of mine, which she was. I worked with her once and it was genuinely a masterclass. You think to yourself, ‘That’s how to do it'.
“I never met Robin Williams, but was due to do a Sky Atlantic Set List show with him, which is where you walk out on stage and the topics you’re going to cover flash up on the screen. ‘Yeah, now I’m going to do my bit about... one-legged funeral pall-bearers!’ It’s a complete rush of a format and I was supposed to go over and record one in San Francisco with Robin Williams, but my performance visa was denied. So, I’m afraid it’s a non-anecdote.”
Before we let him go and gorge himself on pulled pork in Pitt Bros. – we must salute the D2 nosherie’s, “It tastes better with tofu... said no one!” slogan – what does Dara make of Sky Sports’ GAA coverage?
“During extra-time in the Mayo and Kerry replay I tweeted, ‘People of the UK who’ve never seen a Gaelic football match, you must watch this...’ at the precise moment this big fat lad from Mayo lumbered across the field. I’m thinking, ‘No, this is not what I want you to see!’ I spent a lot of the year evangelising about hurling to the complete mystification of my English friends, who just couldn’t get the stick part or what actually constitutes a foul.
“Sky’s coverage was decent, but I prefer the pay-per-match GAA Go, which apparently has accounts in 150 countries including the Shackleton base in Antarctica. All they need for the set is North Korea!”