Tommy Tiernan ‘fell all the way down the stairs’ at his home last weekend

Tommy Tiernan: 'It’s hard to listen when you’re in pain'

Comedian and talk show host Tommy Tiernan has described how he fell down the stairs at his home and injured his leg and his ribs last weekend.

Tiernan said he broke no bones but sustained muscle damage in the fall. He told The Tommy, Hector & Laurita Podcast that it happened at 11.30pm on Friday night.

“I fell all the way down the stairs. Head over heels,” he said.

“I had a glass of whiskey and a book in my hand so when I slipped I couldn't grab onto the banister. And I just was gone. I've busted my leg and my chest and my neck, my voice.

I've hurt myself into sensitivity,” he said, referencing his quieter voice.

I wasn't drunk, I’d had one [glass of whiskey] but I had a full one in my hand.

While his voice was affected, he said he is also concerned about listening to the guests on his RTÉ talk show, which airs on Saturday night.

“It’s hard to listen when you’re in pain,” he said.

Tiernan said he had become distracted by an Easter decoration his wife, Yvonne, had hung on the wall over the stairs and lost his footing while looking at it.

“I’d never seen it before so I was coming down the steps and wondering ‘what the fuck is that?’ I couldn't make head nor tail out of it. I was wearing socks and carrying whiskey, and I had a book in me hand, a book about God. And I was gone, I went all the way down from the second step. I was delivered then out onto the floor, helpless like a baba, roaring.” 

He said he hurt his leg “all the way from the kneecap up to the top of my thigh. I broke nothing but muscle has come off bone or tendons are stretched, something like that. The ribs are done in as well. The ribs weren’t from being hit, the ribs were from some weird stretch that I did in the fall.

He joked: “As I was falling I was just focused entirely on the whiskey.” 

He said it is a setback for the ultramarathon he agreed to do with Dr Sinead Kane, a promise he made on The Tommy Tiernan Show at the weekend. 

The ultra athlete invited Tiernan to join her in a race as a guide runner, which he said during the interview he would love to do — as long as they were running away from Youghal, not towards the East Cork town where Dr Kane grew up.