He’s unusual, Dara O Briain. Physically, to start with. Six feet four, with that doorman’s torso, shoulders broad as a wardrobe, shoes the size of canoes – yet despite the looming bulk, he seems harmless, gentle, like some great grazing brontosaur. Bald but for a few wisps the light catches, he looks older than 38. At one early stand-up gig, he asked the audience to guess his age; they almost all said late thirties. He was 29.
His demeanour is unusual, too, at least for a comedian: he’s at ease with people. He exhibits none of that tightly coiled intensity, that jittering neediness you see in most stand-ups – you can imagine having a relaxed chin-wag with him over a beer, which you suspect you couldn’t with Lee Evans or Ricky Gervais. He’s courteous without a globule of oiliness: we meet at lunch, and when the waitress arrives with his main course it’s: “You’re a legend. Thank you very, very much.”
But what really marks him out is his style of comedy. Good though he is at panel show bantering – he presents Mock the Week and occasionally Have I Got News for You – he’s most at home doing stand-up. On stage, he’s a logician, a rationalist, a geek: he’ll take a topic (the fairy tale about the three bears, say, or a risible Hollywood disaster movie) and dissect it with surgical relish, scrutinising its absurdities and inconsistencies, like a comedy scientist. Perhaps it’s because he actually is a scientist.
But more of that in a minute. On Wednesday, O Briain begins a new presenting job: The Apprentice is back, and he’s replacing Adrian Chiles as host of You’re Fired!, its sister show, in which each week he’ll ask the latest discarded candidate about their business bunglings.
“It’s the closest I’ve come to standard, non-comedy TV presentation,” he says, “but it is a relatively light-hearted show – it’s not like I’m presenting Newsnight.”
He’s long been a fan of The Apprentice, Lord Sugar’s entrepreneurial talent contest, in part because of how amusingly conceited he finds so many of its candidates. “The whole 'I’ll do anything, anything’ stuff – that pleading is just a grown-up version of The X Factor kids going: 'This has been my dream.’ There’s nothing worse than those kids – you’re 14, last year your dream was a pony, next year you’ll have another dream. At least The Apprentice people have worked a while.”
At the time of our interview, O Briain has yet to meet Lord Sugar and is pondering what to talk about when he does – probably not football, because O Briain’s team (Arsenal) have just thrashed Sugar’s (Tottenham). Anyway, he doesn’t see You’re Fired! as a route into mainstream television, the way his fellow stand-up Jason Manford has moved into The One Show.
“You have to let people know the one thing you do and I’m a comedian – you can’t muddy that, or people will go: 'You’re that guy who does Homes Under the Hammer.’ I’m first and foremost a touring comic.”
As a boy, he’d never have guessed that one day he’d be saying that. Raised in County Wicklow, Ireland, the son of a trades union negotiator, he was a “gauche, shy, insecure” teenager and a swot – “I wanted to be a physicist, doing quantum mechanics with a chalk and blackboard in a lab.”
He didn’t think of himself as funny. But when he arrived at University College, Dublin, to study maths and theoretical physics, he joined the debating society, and was eaten up with envy for its members’ social confidence – “and envy is a great motivator”. He gave debating a go and loved it, feeling “the release of no longer thinking, 'Oh God, everyone’s looking at me and I’ve got a spot and I’m the ugliest boy in class’.”
After university he had a spell as a “mediocre” children’s television presenter in Ireland (it’s hard to picture him as a frothy Fearne Cotton type, but at least he had hair then) and did open mic spots at comedy clubs. Anxiety devoured him. “I remember the first time I did what I might loosely term a professional gig, I walked around a small suburb of Dublin beforehand for four hours. Just nerves. I was on stage for five minutes. The nerves to time-on-stage ratio was insanely skewed.”
Yet still, somehow, he enjoyed it, and gradually found both his voice and success: his first Have I Got News for You slot was in 2003 and he started Mock the Week in 2005. As well as filming You’re Fired!, he’s on a 110-date tour, but says it doesn’t stop him seeing his wife and their two-year-old daughter – he drives home to London from almost every gig, even if it’s as far as Manchester, just to be around in the morning “to do normal daddy stuff”.
O Briain agrees his stand-up is “forensic” in style – “and more and more nerdy as I get older”. “The routine [in his current set] about NCT antenatal classes, the routine about video games – I could be back in the student union bar talking to physicists. I don’t know whether it’s because of the blogosphere or Twitter, but nerds have become more vocal. There’s Ben Goldacre’s book [Bad Science], that whole kind of atheist, secular, rationalist strain,” he says.
He’s an atheist himself, like most scientists but not like most sons of God-fearing Irish Catholics. “For some people, religion is the answer to a question, but I don’t even have the question, don’t have any need for an explanation. My mother’s term is 'pagan’: 'Oh, you’re a bloody pagan.’ I think [my parents] both think at some level that my eternal soul is in damnation but that I seem to be happy enough, so fine…”
If they think atheism deserves damnation, I wonder what they make of Mock the Week, the coarsest comedy on television.
Its most controversial star, Frankie Boyle (he of the rude gags about Rebecca Adlington and the Queen), quit last year, and O Briain admits the show “could have done with being a little less vicious – Frankie’s brilliant at what he does but there’s no need for the rest of us to follow him into that”.
In comedy generally, he adds: “I do think there are too many rape jokes around. It’s become an unfortunate badge of honour among young comics to assert their 'darkness’. And there is nothing less interesting than a 21 year-old, straight out of college, with a joke whose emotional heft he has no idea about. There are topics I wouldn’t personally go into.”
He does do quite a lot of swearing, mind you. What does his mother say after she sees him on stage? “She has a very charming line she did a number of years ago when somebody said: 'Did you understand it all?’ And she said: 'I couldn’t hear most of it.’ Sidestepped very nicely.”
The Apprentice returns on Wednesday on BBC One at 9pm; The Apprentice: You’re Fired! follows on BBC Two at 10pm. The DVD Dara O Briain Live 2010 is out on November 22
