The scene: a hotel room in Cairns, a coastal town in the district of North Queensland. Outside, it s Australia. Dara O Briain is relaxing after having had his muscles tweaked by a deep-thinking masseur (or, if you prefer, an earnest homeopath ) who during the laying on of hands also took the opportunity of rubbing in the philosophical oils. They call it zen and the art of bodily maintenance .
He was twisting the shit out of my back, I ll tell you, says O Briain. It s a ridiculous time to have a philosophical conversation!
The Dublin comedian and TV presenter went Down Under two months ago with fellow mirthmakers, Eddie Bannon and Deirdre O Kane, to perform at the Australian equivalent of the Edinburgh Festival. O Briain s extended stay in the Southern Hemisphere has been good news for the comedy-lovers of Melbourne and Adelaide, where he has been woosily wooing punters with his well-wrought observations on life, love, happiness, and Fresher students.
O Briain has denied rumours that he spends his spare time there travelling around karaoke bars singing a slightly augmented version of Madonna s Holiday : If we took a holiday/Take some time to celebrate/Just two months out of time/It could be so nice . Of course, as your correspondent conducts the interview over a phone-line from Dublin, envy creeps over me like ivy, and I turn a greener shade of pale. But according to O Briain, it s not all sun, sand, and Sheilas in the land of Oz.
I went for a tropical holiday and it fucking pissed on me for the last three days, laments O Briain. And I haven t seen a single damn fish in all the time I ve been out to sea. It could well be the worst holiday ever. I already left one town because I was so miserable. I thought there might be a few more pubs up here. It s the only thing I can do. I can t go rafting because the rivers are too high. I can t go on the Great Barrier Reef because the visibility is so poor and I ll get seasick on the way out. And I can t go to the rain forest because there s too much rain. It s poxy!
Indeed, faced with such hardship, most people would happily settle for a rat-infested bedsit in a Bangladeshi flea-pit rather than have to face such a bad shipping forecast for the tropical Reef! O Briain is doing what can be euphemistically termed research for his new show, Dara O Briain Sells Out, by swimming with the fishes in the Antipodes. As soon as he gets back he s off on a three-week nationwide Irish tour.
I m off now for a five-day scuba diving course, he says. These are the five days during which I m supposed to be writing my new show! I went for a pint in an Irish pub here called Bridie O Reillys. I wrote all my new material down on two and a half beermats. That shows you just how hard I ve been working!
So we can expect loads of fish jokes then?
There ll be a lot of aqualung-related material, which I m sure the Irish public is just dying to hear. Do you know when you re scuba-diving? No . OK .
It ll be interesting to see what kind of audience O Briain gets for the Irish tour. After all, he s now moved from Don t Feed The Gondolas panellist to It s A Family Affair presenter, two quite different TV shows. It could be said that even your granny may now have heard and approves! of him. But the very title of the show sounds like a pre-emptive strike against his critics.
I take any kind of criticism that I ve sold out squarely on the chin, he says.
So long as the cheque arrives in the post?!
So long as my children are padded with heavy wads of cash! How am I regarded over there at the moment? he enquires.
You can expect people to scowl at you in the street; that is, if they haven t already crossed it to avoid you. Your name is muck, O Briain!
Brilliant! I ve no problem whatsoever with that. Mainstream, my friend. Feel the warm waters of mainstream as they rub over you. It s very pleasant over here. The grass is green.
What can we expect the new show to be like?
The show will be very explorative in the first third, he bluffs. It will be very dangerous and edgy. It will be improvisational. Er, basically, it s not written yet. I ve no idea what it will be about!
What of the audience reaction in Australia? Has it been difficult translating your comedy for an Australian audience?
It s not a difficult culture to tap into if you re Irish, he explains. Of course, there s so many Irish over here anyway, so that makes it easier. And the Australians sense of humour is very similar to that in Ireland.
The other thing going in our favour is that we re following on from Jimeoin, who is a huge star over here. He was on television here and had CDs released in Australia before he ever bothered to come to Ireland to do shows. It s a bit similar to Ed Byrne s career pattern, in a way coming up through the ranks in England. It s not that Ireland ever rejected him. It s just that he simply never worked there.
But it s amazing how popular Jimeoin is over here. I chatted someone up here recently on the basis that I was his brother!
Did you score?
I m not going to say anything!
What about the differences from town to town? Would an Adelaide audience be any different from a Melbourne one?
I didn t get to Sydney yet, but in terms of Adelaide and Melbourne, there s a huge difference. There s a big sense of rivalry between them so it s very easy to play them off one against the other, cos there s a strong sense of rivalry there even more so than, say, Cork and Galway, or Cork and Dublin. They re very easy buttons to press slagging off one city while you re in the other. I love This Town. Boy, I was in that Other Town, and what a crock of shit that was. I ve left it to come to This Town . You just substitute the names as appropriate. It s down to a lot of Civil War nonsense.
But I ve had a great time. There s a festival club in Melbourne where I developed quite a reputation for myself by dancing on the stage and such like. It was a little bit intense because I was there till seven in the morning every night. Just like Edinburgh! I knew everyone in the place by the time I left it. Then I headed up here to be on my own in the pissing rain.
Doesn t your heart just bleed for the poor fella?!
Dara O Briain Sells Out the Half Moon Club, Cork, 16th May; The Mousetrap, Kilkenny, 17th; The Laughter Lounge, Dublin, 18-21st; Galway, the Townhall Theatre, 24th; Castlebar, Mayo, 25th; Dolan's Warehouse, Limerick, 26th; the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival, Kilkenny, 1st-4th June. Special guest on the tour is David O Doherty.