Comedian Dara O Briain talks about his love of both food and comedy in the latest edition of the podcast Dish with hosts Nick Grimshaw and the culinary maestro, Michelin star chef Angela Hartnett OBE.
O Briain is currently on tour with his latest show, details here.
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O Briain revealed that he is not a fan of poppadoms: “Never do the poppadoms. No. But like I do find myself going, ugh, what's these…What are these dry discs of nothing? That they’ve thrown in. With a small plastic bag of, of chopped [vegetable]. Yeah-that they do as well.” He is not too keen on mash either: "It feels slightly pre-chewed. Like, you know, if you're gonna give me mash, make an airplane noise with the fork as, as you, as you put it to my mouth-you know, like the, so…I feel like, mash is for the beginning and the end of your life. For, for, the middle bit…For the middle bit where your teeth are in good working order.” Or sponge cake: "Oh, sorry, on, on dessert, sorry, yeah, not really a sponge person. The only kind of- baklava. Don't like baklava, don’t-Yeah, oily, the stickiness of it all, don't do that, like whatever, there are more dessert like.”
Or beer and Guinness: “I'm not a big beer person. The um…I have too sweet a tooth for it, and I find beer just bitter, I've always found it to be bitter. The, so I would, my pint. Is, is like a cider, an Irish cider. Love a cider. I mean, but the only thing is I will, I, uh, I, there's a particular brand of a cider that I've, I have been very loyal to. For many years, yeah, which is Bulmers in Ireland and Magners over here. No [Guinness]. God no, no. Guiness is, I don’t know whether it was these guys are relatively small, but like there's a lot of brands on the market. Guinness are, it's not compulsory. And I think a lot- it’s weird, it seems to have swung back, young people are doing it now again. Look, I don't like coffee either, I don't like that kind of, bitterness.”
But he does enjoy touring: "Most the stuff I do now on TV will be documentaries. But I've prioritised, the live over...you've never seen me doing a regular radio show, for example. Because that would stop me doing the tours. You know, there's things I, I don't do because the tours are mad.”
You go out on the opening night and it's like a memory tester trying to get this all falling into, into shape, whatever. And then once you've seen that, once you go, oh, hang on now obviously, I gotta flip that around. ‘Cause the, it naturally, the show should start sort of big, and then, and then end particularly big, and all of that stuff has to happen-when you've seen it in its full shape. But it's really, it's like that whole thing of, you know, six people in blindfolds trying to name an elephant by touching a small part of it. That’s, you try to write the show in little bits and hope that they…Click in together.”
"The professional thing would be to have listened to myself…But… and I've managed to for thirty years not do that. At some point I'll go-At some point I’ll go, ‘I talk too quickly,’ and…And, ‘Wow, this really could have been bigger as a career if I just learned to slow down sometime in the nineties.’ So, and I have little verbal tics that just drive me insane, so I have to watch them back now 'cause we'll clip and grab bits to stick on Instagram-and it, it makes me twitch and I see myself bumbling and, and, and everything.”
“It's a second of two shows I've done about being adopted and finding my birth parents. The first show was about finding my birth mother, which was a very serious show. In some ways. You relieve that tension, it's a very nice tension to have in the room, like whatever. But it was kind of unexpected, the audience suddenly found themselves, you know, talking about the situation for adoption in Ireland in the 1970s and Catholic Ireland, and how Ireland stopped people finding their information, and it became this detective show trying to work through that. It was Philomena, essentially. The film Philomena, the Steve Coogan and Judy Dench film. This film is about me contacting my father for the first time, so this is Elf. This is literally…It's genuinely… there, there was a nice professional man of a certain age, who unsuspectingly has a really tall man in a clown outfit-arrive into his life, and go, ‘Hello daddy.’
And it's, it's that story. So it's-So it’s, I've been sort of gifted… you know, it's the thing I put off looking into for years. And then said, d’you know, I should, I should see if there's something in this. Just for the, not for the emotional, I kind of, I didn't have the thing that a lot of adopted people might have had, but I had a kind of sense of, this could be a story. Not just a story to tell, but a story to know about yourself. And it just became these t- like two- and what I, in both of the notes, normally you write out routine, routine, routine, and you write the names of them. But the, there's like, in the second half of both the last shows had just been, I'll start with that routine, start that with that routine, and then I just write the words, ‘Long story.’ 'Cause I know at that point, from there to the end, is this one story.”
He also talked about Mock The Week: “Yeah, seventeen years. Seventeen years of it. There were points where I thought it wouldn't, and points where it dipped and it went to various, because we kept having to introduce a new generation of comics. And so there'd be bit where they were new and they're shy and they weren't working well, and they're just getting used to it. And then they would get better and they would become the faces of it for a while. And then they would - what happened is basically like running a finishing school. We would pick, take people from the top of Edinburgh and we'd have them on the telly a few times, and they would learn how to do telly and jokes on telly, and then they would go, great, I've had enough of this now.”
“Mock the Week required a certain amount of work, more work than most of these shows do. Because that whole thing of like, the see, the bit at the end where I press the buzzer and they'd walk out and forward? People would go in with forty jokes for that. Whenever, yeah. I mean, it is, it was quite the technical thing. I mean, Frankie and Russell used to talk about having a memory palace. Because not only did you have to have forty jokes for that., you’d have to do the rest of the show. So it was very technically, very difficult to do. And so they would do that and the people just sort of went, I'm just gonna go on Would I Lie To You? and just talk s****, uh… because really that's all you have to do like.”
“We went through four or five generations. It was an interesting thing to work on because, I liked the young comics coming through. Which is not a given in people who work on long running panel shows."
“But there are, there, there are older acts who came from a generation who were not, ‘Great, new people! We love new people!’ They were like, ‘Hello.’ I came through a much frostier generation. Whereas this generation are much more collaborative. They all do each other’s podcasts - they all, they’re used to working together. And it made a much more enjoyable show to do. We had great fun with it. And it was weird when it ended. It's suddenly like, everyone went, ‘Oh yeah. We like that show.’ Maybe it could have, but like it was, it was, so it was nice to have an end to it that was upbeat. We also got, which people don't normally do, we got to do six episodes of ‘Goodbye.’"
