Tommy’s tales
Popular Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan talks to CATHERINE JACKSON about his latest show Tell Me A Story as she finds out why the funny man will always be more comfortable doing stand-up comedy than acting or writing.
Tommy Tiernan blames his mother for his current choice of career. “My mother tells the longest, most boring set of stories that seem to interconnect all the time. Once she starts it just goes on and on and on.
“And you know when you’re listening to a story and you want someone to stop and you think ‘I imagine this will be over in a minute... well my mother isn’t like that.
“I think it would be fair to say I would have mused on the art of editing while listening to my mother,” he laughs, eyes twinkling under his woolly hat.
However, Mrs Tiernan didn’t get it all wrong. In fact her eldest offspring is now one of the most popular Irish comedians of all time. With the coveted Perrier Award under his arm, he also scooped the British Comedy Awards Best Stand-Up accolade for his debut solo show.
Now the Navan-born comedian is just back from a successful run at this year’s Edinburgh Festival and is set to take London’s West End by storm with his new show.
Tell Me A Story, the title of his month long residency at the New Ambassadors Theatre, is he says in typical Tiernan form, about “following the comedy monster”.
“I came up with the title to the show before I had the material,” Tommy says. “It was originally supposed to be about going on a tour of your imagination with my 3-year-old son as a guide, but you have to go wherever the comedy monster brings you and he might bring you to places where you never thought you would go...” he smiles.
“I didn’t know that with this show I was going to be doing material about Israel or being in an all boys school. If it was up to me I’d be doing stuff about Jungian psychoanalysis and dreams, but when you get on stage and start those sentences, you know there is nothing there.”
And that’s the last thing the Galway-based comedian wants. He is a master storyteller with a healthy respect for his audience. “The show is like a conversation,” he says. “You’d never sit at home and plan what you are going to say to your friend. It’s a bit like that but the audience’s only response is laughter.
“If I have an idea I try it out on stage. Then when you are trying out that idea another one comes to you on stage and you just try and lengthen them so that over the course of a run the show grows and develops and the stuff that develops is very organic.”
It is clear from his show that Tiernan certainly has a natural flair but it is hard to believe that the show is improvised. His comic timing is impeccable, the delivery flawless and the laughs come right on cue.
The only time he founders slightly is with an audience heckle. Nonetheless he battles on regardless assaulting the audience with his surreal stories.
Although in the past, he was often compared to incendiary American comic Bill Hicks for poking fun at the Church his style has changed. His reputation started with his now infamous ‘Lamb of God incident’ on the Late Late Show, in which Tommy joked, in typically surreal style, that the Lamb of God was an actual lamb bounding around a field full of his own self-importance because he was chosen by God.
Tommy remembers it vividly. “The front page of the Evening Herald in Dublin had a headline that the show was going to be sued for blasphemy — it was great,” he says.
“I remember the show was live and I did my material at about 10.15pm and the show finished at 11.30pm. I went to leave RTÉ at 12.15am and I was stopped by one of the researchers saying: ‘We cant let you out of the building because people have driven in to the studios to complain.’ I couldn’t believe it!
“It was scary at the time and my Dad was saying (adopts thick Meath accent): ‘Ah Tom has gone and shot himself in the foot now’.
“But my Uncle Brian in London had other ideas. It was all around the time when Salman Rushdie and the fatwa was still a topic of conversation, so my uncle said that instead of putting a ‘fatwa’ on me the Legion of Mary were going to put a ‘fat one’ on me,” he giggles. “It was unbelievable and it ran for about six months!”
There is a lot less Church bashing in his new show, and there is still plenty of passion. Tommy Tiernan in 2003 is more Billy Connolly and less Bill Hicks — and with the requisite Connolly jokes that as one reviewer put it “would make a squaddie blush”.
However, Tommy says his three children are now his real muse. But they also inspired his recent children’s show in Edinburgh, which he describes as “a disaster”.
In fact, Tommy is incredibly frank about the work he has done that hasn’t been successful and when I mention that his universally panned Channel 4 sitcom Small Potatoes has been removed from his press biography he looks surprised.
“That omission was nothing to do with me,” he pleads. “I’ve done acting before but I’ve no faith in my abilities as an actor. I never know what instincts to trust when I’m acting. I never feel I’ve got it right. I always feel that was too much, too little. I don’t know.
“The thing with stand-up is I can act whenever I want. I know there are good performances in me but I would only be involved where I’m in charge of it, as the writer or director.
“Even stuff where people say: ‘Oh you were very good in that’ — I get no joy out of it.”
He says he didn’t even derive any pleasure from his memorable performance as Fr Kevin, the crying priest in Father Ted.
“The piece that most people quote to me was the piece on the bus,” he says, “But to get that we ended up having the director sitting in front of me going ‘happy, happy, happy’ to change my expression, and ‘sadder, sadder, sadder’ to change it back and I bloody hated it.
“I know that the piece that ended up in the show people found very funny but I just didn’t enjoy it and I would have no interest in doing it again.”
The same goes for his novel writing. His first novel The Gospel According to William did quite well but a reprise is unlikely.
Tommy says: “Sometimes when you’re good at stand-up comedy you think you may be good at other things as well and I nearly went mad doing that novel.
“I spent five or six hours a day in an office trying to write.
“What I say about it now is ‘I can’t work on something unless people are watching me’. When you’re writing a novel you end up being slightly perverted.
“I do have a novel at home that is unpublished though. “And I’m sure some children’s books will come out of the storytelling, but the children’s book will be a good,” he adds hopefully.
But for Tiernan fans it’s hard to doubt
him.
n Tommy Tiernan’s Tell Me A Story is at the New Ambassadors Theatre, London until November 2. Box office: 0870 0606627 or www.ticketweb.co.uk.
|
