The Irish Are Coming. Ryan Tubridy
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Father Ted is probably the purest fusion of Irish and British comedy. Commissioned by Channel 4, it had an all-Irish cast, spent much time filming in the beautiful County Clare and had Irish writers. We would have complained loudly if the British had written a sitcom about three corrupt, scheming, totally unreligious priests. In the same way as only gay people can call themselves queer and only black people are allowed to use the ‘n’ word, we are the only ones allowed to mock ourselves in general but priests in particular. And the comedy in Father Ted is as Irish as it gets: very funny, very clever and spiritually satirical, with its post-ironic political incorrectness.
DARA O BRIAIN: the most Irish of them all
Born 4 February 1972
This is the first time in my lifetime that Irish people are able to go: ‘What? You’re going to England? Sure, it’s full of terrorists. Come to Ireland. We’ve no terrorists at all. They’re all playwrights now.’
As eras go, the early 90s weren’t that bad. Bill Clinton brought rock and roll and blowjobs to the White House. Ireland elected a woman as president and qualified for its first-ever World Cup finals. Nirvana, Blur and The Cranberries burst on to the scene as U2 continued to reinvent and give them all a master class in stamina. As a nerdy student at University College Dublin I found myself moving in varied circles that took in politics, history and the bar. As I did so, I found myself brushing shoulders (mine narrow, his broad) with a most articulate and very amusing science type who emerged as a star of the debating circuit. Holding court in whatever lecture theatre he performed in, Dara O Briain was always going to end up in a job where his voice would be heard.
Brought up in Bray, County Wicklow, the O’Briains spoke Irish at home and Dara attended an Irish-speaking school in a Dublin suburb. At University College Dublin, he studied theoretical physics but, between lectures, his head was turned by the banter and repartee that dominated college debating societies. It wasn’t long before the motion for discussion became irrelevant as the lecture theatres filled to hear the mile-a-minute science student divert the discussion to suit his observations. Story-telling and quick-witted comebacks were the order of the day rather than stand-alone gags and it was in these student lecture halls that Dara honed his skills and saw the potential of a career in comedy.
The next step was to gain some exposure and earn a few quid on the national broadcaster. A stint on children’s television and as a panellist on a satirical panel show was complemented by constant gigging around the world with much time spent in Australia and at festivals like Edinburgh, where his shows were attracting some very important interest.
Most of the subjects in this book simply outgrew Ireland. For a country that prides itself on the ability to talk and talk and talk, sometimes it feels like going around in circles and, for some people, the circles become too small and so a toe is dipped into the Irish Sea. Dara’s career went as far as it could in Ireland and he couldn’t resist the temptation to look over the hedge at a bigger field: ‘You’re sitting next door to a country of 60 million people which has Christ knows how many hundreds of comedy clubs and God knows how many hundreds of theatres. This country [UK] is uniquely set up because of the Victorian infrastructure of theatres to be really good for stand-up comedy and they’re receptive to it and they have a great tradition of it so it’s essentially like playing in the Premier League.’
The road to Britain was smooth with no concerns over potential obstructions like accents. The path had been well trod by Dave Allen, Dylan Moran was on the circuit, and Graham Norton already had his own irreverent chat show (see Chapter 3), so Irish comedians were welcome and not lost in translation. One of the most striking things about Dara O Briain is that, unlike Dave Allen, he didn’t invent a new name for himself. Causing difficulty even for a home audience, it’s a name few would have predicted would be rolling off the tongues of the British audiences who flock to his shows. And, in fact, back in 2006 Dara explained: ‘Darby Brown, Dazzy B, Dusky Benderson … Don’t think that I don’t spend all day running through the incredible showbiz career I might have if I just ditched my own name.’ He told me: ‘It’s easier to become well known with a name like Jack Dee or Alan Carr or Jimmy Carr or Jo Brand. They’re all short, punchy names as opposed to some big convoluted thing!’ But to his credit, Dara has always done things a little differently.
Things really kicked off in the UK in 2003 when Dara took the helm of Live Floor Show on BBC Two. This was followed swiftly by a guest appearance as host of Have I Got News for You. After that, everything started to happen and in between countless gigs at venues all over Ireland and the UK, Dara was fronting shows like Mock the Week and partaking in popular series such as Three Men in a Boat, which saw him reconstruct the famous novel with Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath.
The material he chose for his stage show was quite different from Dave Allen’s day. There are very few Church-related gags in Dara’s repertoire, although he’ll still have a poke at authority figures such as politicians or bankers. The shadow of the Troubles was receding when he got to Britain in the late 1990s: ‘We arrived at the point where the worst effect it had on me is the time I couldn’t find a bin on the Tube and a bloke said “Oh, that’ll be because of your lot.”’ He learned to do his terrorism joke first, so it was out of the way and the audience relaxed – and also because it was very easy laughs. ‘There is a weird notion that terrorism is a difficult thing to write about. It’s the f**king easiest thing because the tension is already there so if you address it anyway, you release that tension and you get a laugh. We got credit for a darkness and a depth that we did not deserve.’ But now, post-peace process, it’s history; there’s no comedy in it any more.
The only major consideration for the twenty-first-century Irish comedian is how Irish or how British his material can or shall be. Most comedy can be universal but in Ireland we’ll munch a packet of Tayto rather than Walkers crisps, and if you’re talking politics most British people don’t know how to pronounce Taoiseach, never mind have a clue who the latest one is. Dara gigs in both countries and he’ll riff about the same type of subjects but just change the Irishness of the references as appropriate. He’s one of life’s comedy riffers. You can throw anything at him and he’ll riff away, like the perfect jazz guitarist in a band.
Broadly speaking, he’s an observational comic, looking at life today. He’s not looking at Ireland as a country or playing up being an Irish lad in the UK – even though he’s possibly the proudest Irishman of all the émigrés in this book. He was brought up to speak fluent Irish, in a very Irish household, and you can sense the Irishness in his bones. As a prolific tweeter, he allows his fans (and naysayers) close to him in a technological sense and, on occasion, this has allowed detractors to criticize him if he says anything that they deem un-Irish. Dara reckons ‘It is generally a bedroom Republican, it’s teenage nationalists going “Ahh, I thought you were Irish.” I did find if you transferred the language to Irish, it ends quite quickly.’
It’s a good ploy when challenging a critic of one’s Irishness to simply ‘out-Irish’ them with a passing phrase in the mother tongue. But this type of criticism does rankle with Dara, who says, ‘I think it’s exceptionally rude, particularly in a time of more emigration, to turn around to anyone’s that emigrated and say “You’re not Irish now.” I think it’s an immature trait.’
When we met in London for the purposes of this book, we talked at length about the Irish in Britain and Dara said the move wasn’t so dramatic for him as it was for generations before him. As he settled into his new home he found that the Irish had assimilated into British society and weren’t