IN 1992, upon realising that he was stuck in both a professional and personal rut, Eddie Bannon did what any level-headed besuited 26-year-old executive in his position would do he quit his job, dumped his girlfriend, jumped out of an aeroplane and decided to embrace a career as a stand-up comedian. Happily, five years on the former Coolock wide-boy regrets nothing.
I had one of those things that happen when you re approaching 30, he explains, sipping a pint in the bar of Blooms Hotel. I was working in freight forwarding and owned my own company, and I was in a long-term relationship with this woman, but one day I decided that I didn t want to end up being your stereotypical 40-year-old suit standing at a bar somewhere moaning that I could ve done that , so I decided to try loads of things that I was afraid of.
I got out of the relationship I was in because it was heading inevitably towards marriage and I wasn t into that, I did a parachute jump because I was afraid of heights, and then I entered a comedy competition in The Waterfront because I was a very introverted person, and it seemed to be the best way of curing my shyness.
The competition went well, so I got out of my job and went into comedy full-time, even though there was very little money to be made in it back then, and there was no security whatsoever. It s just that when I did my five minutes it was like a drug. As soon as I walked off stage I just wanted to grab back that high again. It s an amazing feeling when a room-full of people, in unison, think that you re fantastic.
Unsurprisingly, Daddy and Mammy Bannon were not quite as enamoured with their wayward son as The Waterfront punters.
My dad didn t approve at all, he recalls. He was saying Eddie seems like he s on a bike in life, going downhill without any hands or feet . And my sister said, Yeah, and he really seems to be enjoying himself . He was a bit annoyed because he expected her to agree with him. Having said that, my parents were okay about it. They hated what I was doing, but they never told me not to do it.
It was just that I was the eldest person in the house and, it being a working-class family, I had certain responsibilities. I could have made a good living at freight forwarding, but all through my life I was being forced to be a square peg in a round hole Do your work, keep your mouth shut and you ll get on . But when I hit 26, something snapped and I just thought Fuck it! .
So who were the bald eaglet s early influences?
I wasn t following anyone when I started, he muses. But once I did get started I spent about two years paying a lot of attention to what other people were doing because I didn t have the confidence to do what I wanted myself. Barry Murphy would be a perfect example. I fucking idolised the guy he was a God to me for two or three years, and I agreed with any advice he had to give me. I didn t have any confidence in my own opinions.
It took a while for me to get out of that mindset. I think it s a throwback to trying to stay with the conventional and not make waves. But that doesn t work in comedy you have to go I don t care if everyone thinks I m wrong , I m going to do it anyway .
Strict adherence to this Bannon canon has ensured that Eddie has become a household name (in his own house, at least), and that he is now firmly established in Irish comedy circles. A regular on the ever-expanding Dublin circuit, he is also the resident compere at Cork s unfeasibly popular City Limits comedy club. He s made the mandatory appearance on Father Ted; performed at all three Cat Laughs Festivals; been the subject of a television documentary, Sweet Dreams, which chronicled the build up to his first appearance at a London club ( I did a Sunday night at Up The Creek, which went really well ); and, in the true tradition of Irish comedy, he s been buggered senseless by the national broadcaster on more than one occasion.
Yeah, I ve suffered fairly badly at the hands of RTE in the past, he recalls. I did The Basement one night, performing a load of physical gags which nobody in television land could understand because the cameraman got his angles all fucked up and they couldn t see me properly. Then I did this thing on radio, The Monica Moody Show, with Ardal O Hanlon and Pauline McLynn. The show was pre-recorded, and when it was being broadcast and they played something that Ardal did twice. It was a two minute feature called Community Man. We had done three takes of it, and they ran two of them back-to-back on the radio. That kind of thing is just infuriating it s hard enough to do comedy on a medium you re not used to without them fucking it up. Whatever about us, at the very least you d expect them to do it properly.
Such cock-ups did little to dampen the Bannon enthusiasm, however, and Eddie was back on the goggler last year when he appeared regularly as a panellist on You Cannot Be Serious, RTE s mutant hybrid of the British successes Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Have I Got News For You.
Eight months before that was due to start, we were told that we d have carte blanche to do what we wanted. Unfortunately, the closer it got to showtime, the more restrictions they put on it, he claims.
I ve had an awful lot of people coming up to me going That was a really shit show , and I took that very personally. Once someone sees that you re involved in something that s really shit, they automatically assume that you re 100% responsible for everything to do with that show. That certainly wasn t the case with You Cannot Be Serious.
But surely the comedians must shoulder some of the responsibility for failure of the show.
We made the point that it was a rip-off of Have I Got News For You and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but RTE said Yeah, but no-one will know. Think about all the people in two channel land . We thought that as we had been promised carte blanche, we d be able to do something that was totally unrelated to what they wanted. Gradually, though, the restrictions came in and we were told what we could and couldn t do. It s a basic rule of thumb in RTE that live stand-up comedians are not to be trusted.
Now, it seems, there is a new show in the pipeline.
I dunno, maybe I m being gullible, Eddie avers, but I went along to a meeting for this latest show. I was very dubious, but we ve been guaranteed a free hand once again, and we ve agreed to go along with it. Personally I feel that maybe this time, they have learned. We ve done two pilots for a new show in the Temple Theatre, and basically it was three cameras filming a live stand-up comedy show. I m happy with that, even though I haven t seen a finished edited version. Nevertheless, it s a simple format and RTE should be able to handle that properly.
Details of Eddie Bannon s upcoming appearances can be found in this issue s Gag Guide.