Dara Ó Briain: ‘I always felt like the dumbest, ugliest person in the class'

Irish Times

17-05-2025

Dara Ó Briain
arrives into the west
London
restaurant he's chosen for our meeting a few minutes late and full of apologies. He was on the language app Duolingo and was doing quite well so didn't want to stop because he was getting extra points. The comedian is learning Spanish. It's one of his latest 'little passions'. Another of these endeavours is the quest to improve his swimming kick. He's a regular at his local pool in Chiswick. He's also struggling with his spin turn.
'The water goes in my mouth,' he says. 'I can't do it, so I'm hoping I can get on a late night show with
Daniel Wiffen
and get a consultation, ask him for tips.'
We're here to talk about his latest stand-up show
Re: Creation
, which he's been touring in his beloved Vicar Street in Dublin and more recently across
UK
venues. He can't talk too much about a key aspect of the show – the search for his birth father – because it would spoil the story for audiences. His last show, So Where Were We?, was a sold-out post-pandemic chortlefest that also included a gripping final section about his search for his birth mother. Ó Briain first spoke about his adoption to
this publication
in 2021, during The Irish Times online Winter Nights Festival.
Growing up in a stable, supportive family in
Bray
,
Co Wicklow
, he had always been told he was adopted but had somehow 'forgotten' about it until he was in his late 30s, when he became curious. It wasn't until he watched
Philomena
, Steve Coogan's movie about one woman's search for her adopted baby, that he decided to try to trace his biological roots.
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So the last show was 'my version of Philomena, a young, scared woman makes a difficult decision in the 1970s and then there's a long arc to redemption, 50 years later, when the story resolves itself. The show had a lot of anger and some shocks about the way the Irish government treated women. There were revelations about the trafficking of babies. It brought the audience on a journey.'
His search for his mother was driven not by an identity crisis but by a sense that 'there was a woman out there who was wondering how I turned out'. He says now that apart from some frustrating bureaucracy involving a tortuous search for his birth cert, his experience of tracing and eventually meeting his birth mother and three stepsiblings was as positive an experience as he could have hoped for.
When he began the search for his genetic father, it took a while for his birth mother to provide the name of the man in question – understandably she was worried about dredging up a part of her past she had left behind.
'It was hard,' says Ó Briain. 'She had closed that chapter ... Her fear was that she was going to have to be involved. And when I told her, 'No, you don't have to deal with this at all', then it was easier.'
The story of what happened next is, as one reviewer put it, 'gripping and gasp inducing ... it must have taken a full half minute for my jaw dropping to end'. But no, Ó Briain won't provide any more details. All he'll say is that if the last show was his Philomena, this show is his Elf, by which he means 'a broadly comic story about a man of a certain age and of some professional standing who opens the door one day to find a giant in a clown outfit, going 'Hello, Daddy'. To be clear, at 6ft 4in, Ó Briain is the giant clown in this equation.
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Dara Ó Briain reveals his quest for his birth mother: 'She said there was no choice in this'
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'So it's just a great yarn, and it's quite different in tone to the last show. And part of it is the fact that he [his biological father] didn't know all of this had occurred and we're back to the way it was in Ireland at the time ... it's me basically contacting him and the story of what happened.'
As you'd expect, he has reflected a lot on the experience of being adopted. He still doesn't know where he got his 'insanely mathsy' brain from – he studied maths and theoretical science at UCD – but nobody in either his adoptive or genetic family is that way inclined. He's thought a lot about nature versus nurture through the process and he believes nurture wins, giving credit for most of who he is 'to the people who put in the hard yards, the ones who did the parenting, no disrespect to my genetic family'.
Dara Ó Briain: Since contacting his birth mother and father, he went from having one sibling to having seven. Photograph: Nicola Tree
We take a break to order some food. Ó Briain orders a cheeseburger. 'I knew you were going to order that,' says the waitress. The comedian is not offended by the waitress thinking he looked like a man in need of a cheeseburger. He's been intermittent fasting for a while now, more conscious of his health in his 50s.
'I got too chunky in the last while, I need to watch it,' he says. He has lost 2½ stones. 'The thing is people don't notice when I've lost two stone, they start to notice at around 2½, three stone and then if I get down by 3½ they start telling me I don't look well.' At one point he lost three stones and his agent took one look at him and said 'No, no, no, no, no'.
The swimming and fasting are both a way of life for him now. He tells me he doesn't talk to skinny people about this stuff, 'they can f**k off,' he laughs. As a nonskinny person, I'm honoured.
In fairness, he doesn't talk to 'people with hair' about having none either. For 17 years, as presenter of Mock the Week on BBC, the show that made his name in Britain, he was slagged mercilessly by panellists for being 'big and bald'. He's as comfortable talking about his weight – to nonskinny people anyway – as he is about discussing the fact that he only has one testicle, which formed a fascinating part of the last show.
Ó Briain is a busy man and not just with touring and TV appearances. Since contacting his birth mother and father, he went from having one sibling to having seven. 'I'm a man, I can't manage family at the best of times,' he says. 'Now I have willingly taken on a 600 per cent increase in family members and an almost uncountable number of cousins.'
He says as with many adoption stories there's a 'mad flurry' at the start and then it settles into something else where he's found himself explaining to random cousins: 'Just so you know, even the woman I actually call Mammy doesn't hear from me as much as she'd like to'.
'I have had such a positive experience ... I wasn't invested emotionally the way that other people are. My own family basically carries that weight. So I stress a lot more about how often I talk to my daughter than I do about how often I talk to any of these people ... so that's more my focus. But this is just a nice extra thing.'
Ó Briain has three teenagers with his wife, Susan, a surgeon. They feature in the latest show when he describes how his children are used to his nostalgic walking tours of Dublin. These tours are mostly him saying 'well, that's gone' about some landmark of his youth that's now disappeared. 'This is based on me driving past the old Jurys Hotel in Ballsbridge with a 13-year-old boy in the car going to see the family in Bray. We drove past Jurys and I was like, 'Oh my god, it's gone'. And he's looking at this space, this void wondering, 'How am I supposed to feel about this? I don't have memories of the Coffee Dock, of the aftermath of your debs, when you were sitting there in a tuxedo at half five in the morning trying to look sophisticated.' '
Dara Ó Briain: 'I'm a man, I can't manage family at the best of times.' Photograph: Nicola Tree
It's not off the ground he licked these 'oh, that's gone' tours. His mother, when she first moved to Bray, lived in a house on the Boghall Road. The house was flattened and turned into a small parade of shops. A butcher's and a chemist and a chip shop.
'We'd occasionally drive up to the spot and she'd go, 'This is where I lived when I moved out of home and now it's all gone'. Then there'd be a long respectful pause until enough time had elapsed and we could ask, 'Can we have chips now?''
Ó Briain still insists on doing two-hour shows, sometimes longer, when he could actually get away with only doing an hour. 'I'm old school,' he says. 'I see younger comics do an hour, but I don't want to, I am not quite Springsteen with the 3½ hours but venues have an interval, people spend money in the interval, it's good for everyone.'
I hated being 15, I didn't know how to talk to people, I'm still not brilliant at small talk
—
Dara Ó Briain
After a string of 19 shows in Vicar Street, lately he's been transitioning the show from Ireland to the UK. 'I left Vicar thinking what a beautiful thing, how glorious, this show is a work of art. 'Were you not there? You missed something special' – then I bring it to somewhere like Cheltenham, which is a Presbyterian hall with a massive pipe organ, it's a different thing.
'It's an awkward one anyway, because in England you have to strip away certain familiar details you really enjoy telling, and then it becomes a slightly more polished product. But the process of the polishing removes maybe some of the sweet, little shared moments that you'd have with a gig in Ireland. Then they get a chance to drop back in again when you go back.' It's different in Dublin. 'It's more familiar ... it feels most like I'm just telling you the story and you're all on board.'
This 'polishing' process is necessary though. He might lose anecdotes about Micheál Martin meeting Trump, but the show is tighter and becomes more universal. It becomes something that can play 'in Auckland or in Oslo … so ...t's a good process'.
He goes deeper into this, describing his career as going from – he adopts an insecure voice – 'I was funny in UCD to, oh no, now I'm talking to people who weren't in UCD but they're from Dublin. Oh no! Now I'm talking to people from Cork. They're not from Dublin
or
from UCD, oh no, this is really difficult now. The whole point of your career is you trying to get to a universal place.'
The photographer arrives and Ó Briain is extremely obliging when she asks him to peek around a curtain and lean his head on the table. He chats all the while, talking so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up. He's generous with his time, an endlessly obliging interviewee full of decency and good humour.
At one point he mentions that he had his 40th birthday in this restaurant. He loves parties but they also bring up deep-rooted insecurities. One friend, journalist and broadcaster Tony Parsons, was aware of this and texted him five minutes before the event started to say, 'Nobody is going to show up to your party'.
Top table: Dara Ó Briain. Photograph: Nicola Tree
Parsons knew the old wound he was poking. Part of Ó Briain has never got past being a 'dorky' 15-year-old, full of insecurities and fear of being unpopular. 'I hated being 15, I didn't know how to talk to people, I'm still not brilliant at small talk ... I always felt like the dumbest, ugliest person in the class. All of that stuff. A test case.'
He remembers going to Coláiste Eoin on the 84 bus from Bray and being in conversations that would just dry up. 'I'd sit there thinking, You are so bad at this, you are useless.' That fell away in UCD when he discovered with 'glee' that he could not just talk to people but in front of people, that he was a whizz on the debating team and, even better, could make people laugh.
'I remember the relief of not having that any more ... that sense of not being beholden to your own insecurities.'
His fear of returning to those dark, dorky days has clearly been a driving force, but it may be losing its potency as a motivator. 'At some point I'll just go, 'I mean Jesus, Dara, how long have you spent wanting to be liked? How long have you spent wanting these people's approval?' To be clear, he doesn't mean the Vicar Street residencies, the people who come to see him because they love what he does, a long-standing relationship he deeply values. He's talking more about 'the fight, the hustle to get on panel shows where you are in front of an audience who aren't necessarily your crowd and you're saying 'hey! Here's my stuff' and there is a point where you're saying to yourself, why are you doing this? You're 53. You don't need to be impressing the audience on Blankety Blank, which is actually something I did three weeks ago.'
He's laughing now but there's a seriousness to his point. 'I've been blessedly lucky ... I was given this platform for 17 years by the BBC [Mock the Week] that gave me my crowd and my crowd continued to come ... but then every so often you think, you should do these things, you should go on Blankety Blank, you should go and be funny in front of a mainstream audience who are really just there for the host not for you.'
When he went on that show recently one of the participants was showbiz veteran Maureen Lipman. 'I said 'Maureen, you've done this before and she goes 'I've done it with them all, I've done it with Terry [Wogan], I've done it with Les [Dawson], I've done it with Lily [Savage] and now with Bradley [Walsh]'.' Lipman was 'an absolute delight' by the way, despite persistent diva stories.
I have an asteroid named after me. That's the coolest thing that's ever happened. It's called 4910 Ó Briain
—
Dara Ó Briain
He is not tempted by shows with 'celebrity' in the title. You won't, for example, find him in the jungle with Ant and Dec eating kangaroo scrotum. 'I don't watch that. I never have, I don't find that sort of thing entertaining,' he says.
So no Strictly Come Dancing? 'God no, even if it was offered,' he says referencing a long-standing joint issue. 'I've a shitty knee. I like a dance but no, I have a hole in my knee and it's hilarious because people go, 'There are people who have lost their legs who do that show', and yes, that's true, but I can't do any impact stuff, I'm not allowed to run ... I'm staving off having my entire knee joint replaced with a robotic joint, so Strictly would be an awful thing to do.'
Stargazing Live: Prof Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain. Photograph: Andrew Hayes-Watkins/BBC
Anyway, he always has his science gigs, another enjoyable side hustle for the comedian. He appears regularly on Curious Cases on BBC Radio 4, and has presented a series of BBC-produced documentaries shows on the moon, the sun and more recently volcanoes for Channel 5. So while some people in his position have stories about partying with famous types his biggest claim to fame 'is I have an asteroid named after me. That's the coolest thing that's ever happened. It's called 4910 Ó Briain'. It happened when he was doing the show Stargazing with Prof Brian Cox. 'He has one too. Mine is a double asteroid, excitingly, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.'
Our time in nearly up, so I ask how long more does he think he'll carry on with these huge tours? He's definitely conscious that 'at one point it will all end', that he might even be the one to pull the plug, perhaps deciding to pack it in one day to stay at home listening to opera – he's a recent convert, loves a bit of Carmen – and spend more time with his family, 'who I quite like'. 'That's a genuine puzzle for me at the moment,' he says. 'If I had to start again, like, if you dropped me in the middle of say America, and said, right, work your way up to the clubs ... I don't think I'd have the energy to do that hustle again.'
On the other hand 'it's just talking and it's a very fun job. So whether or not I'll do that many more big tours, I don't know. I mean at some point there'll be the ending tour, a greatest hits of all the shows and I just say to audiences 'look you don't remember these anyway,' so I'm just going to go through them all. And these are lovely routines to do. I'll just enjoy myself doing killer routines to finish it off and say goodbye at the end.'
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'We've all done it': Dara Ó Briain offers support to actor after only one person attends her show
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The adoption stories have taken up the last two shows and he's clearly relishing bringing them, with all their gobsmacking twists and turns, to audiences. 'There's been a heart to them; it's very enjoyable.' Before he leaves, he jokes about the possibility of a third show, one that would turn his adoption saga into a trilogy. He describes a sequence of events in an imagined future where one day a man or woman will track Ó Briain down, knocks on his door in leafy Chiswick and greets him with 'hello Daddy!'
'Now, that would make a great show,' he declares.
Re: Creation with Dara Ó Briain is in Vicar Street on July 3rd, 4th, 5th and 10th, 11th and 12th, and Live at the Marquee in Cork on June 29th