"As The Bishop Said"

It’s shortly after 11am and Des Bishop is a tad bleary-eyed as we settle into a booth in the Fitzwilliam Hotel. Not a result of a night on the tiles. Rather the comedian easing back into normality after the Edinburgh Fringe. The festival has been good to Bishop. It yielded particularly poignant scenes in 2010 when he brought his terminally-ill father Michael onstage at the climax of My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, a show described by the Guardian as “a gift from a son to his father”, one that spawned last year’s RTÉ documentary and book of the same name.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bishop’s return to the live circuit finds him significantly dialling down the more personal aspects of his life in favour of something lighter; Des Bishop Likes To Bang. A concept show built around drumming, Bang’s origins were somewhat happenstance. Having plucked up the courage to ‘have a go’ on Dead Cat Bounce’s drums last year, he was subsequently gifted an electronic kit from a friend. Bishop, naturally enough, constructed a show that allowed him to reconnect with musical comedy, and the various frustrations contained within.
“Comedy songs, when you perform them, they’re a very easy laugh,” he begins. “Surprisingly easy. Getting to the point where you have a song to perform, especially for me because I’m not a musician, took a lot longer and it was much more work than the previous way that I was writing stuff. Trial and error. Do it again, over and over. I was getting a lot of drumming lessons before Christmas, trying to get better.
“If I had gotten a lot better, which I knew wasn’t going to happen in that short space of time, I was thinking that I could maybe revisit this in a couple of years and have a whole new set because I’ll actually be able to respond to people, be a better drummer. Still, it was never about becoming a better drummer; it was about trying to find what’s funny, trying to find the jokes. Also, writing songs is different, writing these funny raps. It’s a really different style of writing. You’ve gotta write the fuckin’ lyrics, gotta find the song and it doesn’t even matter if you’re reading off a page – which I often do – it takes four or five goes to even find out how the song works.”
Fully aware that his intentions for a fun show have resulted in arguably his most technical outing to date, Bishop offers a playful shake of the head. That “four or five goes” logic proved applicable to the show as a whole. Technical glitches were ironed out and friends such as David O’Doherty and Michael Mee provided helpful assistance, tightening things up. Perhaps though, his most interesting collaboration to date has yet to be fully realised.
“There’s an Australian comedian called Felicity Ward. In her last show she talked a lot about her struggles with booze and giving it up, so myself and her are in cahoots together about an idea for a play that is funny but not that funny about a relationship between a man and a woman in Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s not an AA thing, but it uses AA as a device because the entire play is them sharing about their relationship. You never see them interact with each other.”
Having spent time in AA, what does Des think of how it is depicted in entertainment?
“There’s not that much depiction of it, really. It’s always just quick through the whole thing. People end up writing about AA at a time when either they have experienced it and don’t like it and are a bit critical of it or they’re sober maybe two or three years, they’re in the midst of finally being happy for the first time in years and it tends to be a little bit of rose-tinted glasses because they think AA is just the best thing ever. I mean, I love AA, I’m not critical of it. At the same time, it’s 17 years since I fuckin’ drank. I’m an adult now and I finished my adolescence in AA. I became a man living in AA and now I’m a nearly 37-year-old man with the wisdom of life’s experience so obviously I don’t see things entirely through the thing of, ‘AA is life’. And actually, this play is nothing to do with booze. It’s to do with the dysfunction of addiction. It’s really about relationships and obsession which is a problem for a lot of people, not just people in AA.”
It may be some time, however, before that project comes to fruition as Bishop once again prepares to fully immerse himself into a community as he ups sticks to China for a year with an RTÉ series to follow. A far cry from Connemara but Bishop knows the lay of the land, believes that there is tremendous potential for exploration and is confident that come 2014 we’ll be watching him do his thing in fluent Chinese. As ever, it’s a personal project, one that took four years of shopping around. Given his track record with RTÉ, you might be surprised to discover that getting commissioned doesn’t come easy.
“It never worked that way with me,” he says. “After Joy In The Hood, they offered me a chat show and I guess I could have become one of the faces of RTÉ, but it was never… I mean, that’s not a criticism of them trying to get me to be that, but it was never what I wanted to be. And funny enough, a lot of people think that I’m just some RTÉ guy, but I made a documentary about minimum wage, about marginalised communities, about the Irish language and about my dying father. None of those are mainstream! People try to criticise me as being some fuckin’ mainstream performer and all those things, but there’s not a fuckin’ mainstream channel in America that would even look at those ideas.”
In that regard, Bishop’s CV should speak for itself. There will always be a section of the audience that remain sceptical to comedians tackling serious issues.
“It’s not a play,” he muses. “Part of people’s creative ambitions is that there is something in it for them at the end, but that is nothing to do with ego. It’s everything to do with how human beings work. That’s why we have orgasms. We probably wouldn’t make as many kids if there wasn’t as much in it for us in the making, you know? ‘What a selfish bastard. He had a kid so he could blow his load? What a cunt!’ It’s just part of being human. People can question your motivations. You just drive on and you make interesting shit. I haven’t seen that documentary Russell Brand made about addiction and I want to see it. Funnily enough, I have something similar in with RTE but I want to see Russell Brand’s one. People will say he just loves the sound of his own voice but the guy gives a shit about this thing. If people get something out of it, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason to do it.”

Des Bishop kicks off an Irish tour with dates in Hawk’s Well, Sligo on September 29 and Market Place, Armagh on October 4.