Culture That Made Me: Dara Ó Briain on Prince, Alan Whicker, and college debates
Dara O'Briain on stage on a previous visit to Cork. Picture: Miki Barlok
Dara Ó Briain grew up in Bray, Co Wicklow. Since moving to London, he has become a mainstay on British television screens, as host on panel shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News for You as well as presenting popular maths and science programmes. He’s the author of several books, including the travel book Tickling the English.
He turned 50 last week, and upcoming dates on his stand-up tour include Cork Opera House, March 14-16; and he also plays Live At The Marquee in Cork on June 23.
Growing up, when everyone else was into U2 – when people were writing U2 in biros on their copybooks – I was into Prince. It was genuinely quite a challenge because he'd be half-naked on Top of the Pops singing Kiss in a high-pitched voice. People would go, “Really, that's what you like?”
Liking Prince was a bit like A Boy Named Sue. I don’t want to give the impression, however, that I was wandering around school like a New Romantic or in purple and in heels. I still looked as agricultural and as GAA as I do now.
Chaos by James Gleick is a book about chaos theory. In my teens, I was all about Mandelbrot sets; “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”; and how if you move the pendulum in a three-way system an infinitesimal amount, it ends up in a completely different position, which is such a surprise to us: how complex behaviour is. If you change something by a tiny amount, the outcomes can be huge – the butterfly effect, basically.
Gleick goes through the lives of different scientists who came up with the idea at the same time. I love that a life can be dedicated to an idea, the purity of that – “Look, I’m just gonna exist in my imagination. I've got this language of mathematics for doing it in.” While I was drifting towards this monastic, academic existence, I discovered that I had a craving for the love of complete strangers in a crowd.
I discovered debating in university. The first time I went along, it was amazing, like titans clashing. You could by all means give a heartfelt and well-informed discussion of the topic in question. Or you could just you do seven minutes of entertainment.
I saw the response people got to doing entertainment and went, “Oh, I love that. That would be nice.” The first debate I did I told an incredibly specific joke for a UCD audience in that particular week. It wasn’t a joke that travelled, but it got a round of applause. I remember this spike of adrenaline.
I probably read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 once a decade. He hits on something universal: the system doesn't care, and the great truth that actually people aren't that smart. If you give them a system, they'll just run the system. Who hasn’t met someone who says, “I’d love to help you but I can’t because I wouldn't know what form to fill out.”
A lot of what comedians do is butting up against the structures of life and going, “But, wait, what?” Finding the bits that break and the points they crack under, and how they clash with the softer, squishier sides of humanity versus the systems that we seem to construct around us.
Not The Nine O’Clock News was part of the first wave of “alternative comedy” on television. It was on BBC around 1981, with Griff Rhys Jones, Mel Smith, Pamela Stephenson and Rowan Atkinson. It was sharp and had a new kind of alternative sensibility, but with the slick professionalism of the old stuff.
It was a huge eye opener. Those guys arrived in kicking the door down. I remember thinking it was amazing. There was a sense of, “Oh, this is mine. My dad isn't getting this.”
I remember the first time I saw Eddie Izzard do "le singe est dans l'arbre" (the monkey is in the tree) at the Montreal Just for Laughs, a routine about how he learned that phrase. The whole thing is about: how can I contrive a situation where I could use that phrase?
Would I have to bring a monkey with me and place a monkey in the tree and then, say, go to the guy in the hotel reception: “Yeah, yeah, that's my name and by the way, ‘le singe est dans l'arbre’.” It was him bringing the ridiculousness of it out. I remember dying laughing at him doing that routine.
I only speak Irish to my father, although he is well able to speak English. Having a second language is such a pleasant thing. Bilingualism is good in giving you two sets of references to stuff. It allows you to learn other things faster because you've got other names for concepts. Your neurons are trained to take different paths. But it hasn’t influenced my behaviour.
I don’t speak solely in metaphor and allusion. In Ireland, we’re happy to take as much credit in our own lives for things that are just an interesting literary function and go, “Well, obviously because of the Irish language we only ever speak in florid, poetic tongues…”
So much of presenting on television is: don't walk into the furniture. Growing up, I liked Jonathan Ross, and his first show The Last Resort. He was a big deal, looking cool in a suit.
If I meet him, even though I’m a 49-year-old man, and I’ve known him for 15 years, I’m still going, “Oh my God, you’re the guy I used to watch as a teenager.” He had this new sensibility.
Clive James had a brilliant, sardonic sense of humour. He had this “I don’t belong doing these lovely things” look. His travel documentaries were properly authored. They were like essays rather than the travel shows I’ve been doing where a producer throws things in front of me and gets me to respond: “Let’s put a big clumsy man in a boat rowing with his legs and maybe he’ll fall into the water.”
Clive James’ shows were him actually reflecting on where he was, its landscape, its mythology and reality. It was a reflection of what was culturally different about a place and why it captured our imagination.
Alan Whicker doesn't get enough praise. I met him on a plane once. He was landing in Jersey and I said, “Hello, I also do some travel documentaries.” He said: “Of course you do.” He looked every bit as dapper as he did when he was doing his travel shows.
