Joyce Fegan: Why does 'The Tommy Tiernan Show' get us talking?

The show cuts through the noise of Instagram stories, Healy-Raes shouting, Candy Crush, vaccine delays and ever-changing Met Éireann reports. It cuts through the noise because these are conversations worth having, writes Joyce Fegan

As Tommy Tiernan asks intense, intimate questions of his guests, he asks them of us too.

It takes a lot to get people talking nowadays.

An Irish newspaper used to have a section called 'People are Talking', which covered some of the national talking points from that week. 

You could have anything in there, from topics such as Angelina Jolie’s 2013 double mastectomy to Kate Middleton wearing Irish designer Orla Kiely for the first time.

It was a time before 3G and 4G allowed us to browse constantly on our phones, a time before our collective attention was split between a million different places. It was a time when there would be five or so national talking points, over the water cooler or the garden fence.

Nowadays it is hard to galvanise collective attention.

Unless you’re Tommy Tiernan that is.

Aside from the freezing temperatures and the ‘no show’ snow, the one thing I heard over and over again from people this week was: “Did you see that Irish actor on Tommy Tiernan, the guy with the long hair?” or “Did you see Brian O’Driscoll on The Tommy Tiernan Show?”

Word of mouth is the best form of publicity, especially in an attention economy, where everything from Candy Crush to that TikTok pasta recipe is competing against an RTÉ TV show or an Irish Examiner article for your eyes and ears.

And word of mouth is especially powerful when social media influencers claim to be hashtag-authentic or hashtag-real and let it all hang out for their voyeuristic audience.

So when real authenticity comes knocking, it makes a crack so wide in that dense fog of information saturation in which we currently reside that it gets people talking.

“Have you had any big crises in your life?” Tommy asks Brian O’Driscoll, left of centre, unscripted, unprepared. Bearing in mind BOD made his career out of marking opponents to within a millimetre of their own shadow, he didn’t see that question coming.

But that’s the thing about The Tommy Tiernan Show, you don’t see any of the questions coming.

There was this big long silence as the former Irish rugby captain searched his mind for a story, not just a ‘yes’.

In fairness to the rugby player, and he obviously knew it going on, a “yes” or “no” answer isn’t a socially accepted norm on the show.

Former Irish rugby captain Brian O'Driscoll discussed a friend's suicide with Tommy. File picture: Brendan Moran / SPORTSFILE

Brian went on to tell Tommy about how a very close friend took his own life, how he dreams of him often and how it made him feel.

To have two men talking about suicide on national TV, in Ireland — one a comedian, one an international sports star — in this unfiltered, unpolished way, resonated with many.

“Where do we go from here?” says Tommy, after Brian’s disclosure. It was something many of us might half think to ourselves if someone made a revelation of this kind in our company.

The awkwardness and intensity of the intimacy was palpable.

Tommy also wanted to know about Brian’s relationship with fatherhood, the impact he might have on his children.

These are the kinds of thoughts you might have only with yourself as a parent, maybe a partner, but not on national television. 

And parenting — how we do it, how we review it, how we repair it — is again not a conversation we’ve seen international sports stars have with comedians on the TV before.

As Tommy asks intense, intimate questions of his guests, he asks them of us too.

Then there was Stephen Rea.

He walks on stage, dips his head in a sort of bow to greet Tommy, takes his seat and appears ready for the intimacy. He did start out acting in theatre; he is used to eye contact and intensity.

The two men found themselves talking not about Hollywood or pay cheques, red carpets or glamorous movie sets, but about the actor’s late wife and the mother of his two sons — IRA woman and civil rights activist Dolours Price.

“I’ve never watched the documentary,” Stephen throws out straightaway, referring to a 2019 documentary about Dolours’ life.

Instead, Stephen spoke about their marriage and the impact of her alcoholism on it.

Actor Stephen Rea appeared to be ready for the intimacy when he took his seat on Tommy's show. File picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin.

“My father was an alcoholic and drank himself out of a job. We started moving around, you know, to survive.

“I had that kind of drama, which is deeply upsetting if you’re young. And then, strangely, I married someone who was so troubled,” the actor said.

“For a sensitive person like her, it was very tough.

“She masked it very well at the beginning because she came out of prison.

“I’ve never talked about this before by the way,” he added.

He then went on to depict their eventual separation and the difficulty many people experience when dealing with a loved one with alcoholism.

“I read a piece in a paper where a woman, a mother, had to get her son who was an addict to leave the house.

“She said in it: ‘Until the addict leaves the house, nobody is going to get any better’.

“I cut it out and I kept it and reminded myself of it all the time. That’s a mother putting her own son out of the house,” said Stephen.

I had to negotiate a separation. I mean, I got her a house and everything. It wasn’t just to save myself, it was to save everybody, it was to save the boys as well.

Stephen’s disclosure prompted Tommy to touch briefly on his own mother and her life, whom he said he hadn’t been “very close” with previously.

“God be good to them, you know?” says Tommy, to which Stephen agreed.

The show cuts through noise. It cuts through the noise of Instagram stories, Healy-Raes shouting, Candy Crush, vaccine delays and ever-changing Met Éireann reports.

It cuts through the noise because these are conversations worth having — and the people watching or talking about it know that.

We can be intimated by the intensity of the intimacy of the show as an audience and we can also be moved by it. We are Tommy’s guest when he asks “any big crises?” or “how do you find fatherhood?”

In asking questions like these, in that way, Tommy isn’t just getting Hollywood actors and international sports stars to reflect on the big things in life, he’s getting us all to do it.

While there’s no live audience, the audience at home has been brought to life.