Dara O’Briain talks ordinary lives at Telford’s Big Top...

Having made a real name for himself as a TV presenter in recent years, Dara O’Briain is about to return to his first love of stand-up comedy, embarking on a mammoth national tour with brand new show Voice Of Reason.

“Doing stand-up is a euphoric experience,” says the 46-year-old Irishman. “The great thing is the anticipation. You’re thinking, ‘You’re going to love this next bit!’

“It’s wonderful to create local jokes that repay three or seven or even 12 years later. When I play Coventry, for instance, there are always packets of crisps on the stage. That comes from an audience interaction I had 12 years ago. 

“Back then, I was chatting with a guy in the audience who worked for a crisp company. I did a joke about it, and when I came back on stage after the interval, there were 12 packets of crisps waiting for me! Many people in Coventry remember that. So that’s the reason why the crisps are still there.”

In Voice Of Reason, Dara will be discussing such topics as the ordinariness of his daily life: “If there’s a theme to the show, it’s that, at the age of 46, I have an incredibly normal life!”

He will also be mulling over the rise of the nerd - “Thanks to the internet, nerds can find each other now. It’s very positive!” - and talking about his on-screen relationship with Professor Brian Cox on Stargazing Live. “When Brian and I work together, he’s the expert and I’m the broadcaster. When he’s talking, sometimes a producer says into my earpiece: ‘A plane is now hovering over Scandinavia with shots of the aurora borealis. We have to cut to that’. So at those moments, I have to interrupt Brian. But furious viewers then write in saying, ‘Why did you interrupt Brian Cox? I was enjoying watching him!’. They genuinely think I interrupt Brian because I’m jealous of him. They imagine I’m saying, ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Brian, but it’s not going to be all about you tonight. I also know things that I want to tell the audience’. Brian and I find that idea hilarious!” 

Dara will also be devoting a large section of the show to a routine about how he’s become the subject of a fake news website: “I go into the madness of this story about these things that are supposed to have happened to me. The producers of this fake-news website have filled in some details. For example, they mention James Street in Dublin. So some effort has been made in producing it. But it’s still so ludicrous. The site pops up next to features headlined, ‘She’s discovered the secret that dentists don’t want you to know’ and ‘Twenty stars whose lives have been ravaged by drugs’. In one of those, they put a picture of Chris O’Dowd beside a picture of Shane McGowan!”

The routine emphasises the extent to which the internet has turned into an uncontrollable ‘wild west’: “It’s become a torrent of disinformation. There was a tiny moment where we thought we could use the internet to amplify scientific truths and have a great weapon for fighting lies. But no, that was completely wrong. What the internet’s really useful for is more lies!”

Thanks to the millions of people in different countries watching his shows online, Dara has become an enormous draw all over the world. 

“The whole thing has opened out and gone global. I recently walked past a bus stop in Stavanger that had a picture of Russell Howard on it.
“In Tromsø, in the Arctic Circle, I walked on stage and said, ‘I don’t know how often you have these gigs’, and they called out, ‘We had Bill Bailey here last night!’ That punctured my balloon a bit. Bill went on to play Svalbard, which is even further north. I thought I was being a hero doing Tromsø, but he was doing a gig to polar bears in the Svalbard arts centre!”

So what does Dara hope his audiences will take away from Voice Of Reason? 
“I get really enthusiastic about sciencey stuff. You can see me getting giddy about space, and that’s why I recently wrote a kids’ book on the subject - but on tour, I’m there to do funny.

“This show is an evening of entertainment. It’s two hours of laughing. It’s not meant to be pedagogic. It’s not meant to say, ‘You’ll be laughing, but you’ll also be learning’. Of course, if that happens, that’s grand. But first and foremost, Voice Of Reason is just a load of funny stuff.”

Dara O'Briain performs Voice Of Reason at Telford's Big Top on Wed 8 August; Birmingham Hippodrome, Sun 16 & Mon 17 September & Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, Thurs 29 November to Sat 1 December

Feature by Graham Bostock