Dara Ó Briain, the 54-year-old standup who has hosted the topical panel show Mock the Week for more than two decades, is reflecting on its years as a macho bear pit, the dearth of jokes about Brexit, and why it's important to punch up. The show, which ran for 17 years on BBC Two until 2022, has been reborn on the free-to-air channel TLC, with a new season featuring a roster of comedians competing in a faux gameshow to answer questions about the week's news.
Accusations of bias and a macho culture
When Mock the Week was on the BBC, there were accusations that its mockery was directed to the right from the left. Ó Briain, who describes himself as "centre left," says that had a lot to do with what was going on in Westminster: "For the vast majority of that time, there was a Tory government – Conservative PM after Conservative PM – so obviously we were looking at them." He also admits there was probably something to those accusations: "I don't think anyone put an argument in favour of Brexit during the whole thing; nobody on Mock the Week was going: 'Well, maybe sovereignty or whatever …'"
The show featured right-leaning comedians Geoff Norcott and Simon Evans, but the right isn't as well represented in British comedy. Ó Briain isn't sure why – perhaps because "the direction in which you punch matters or people don't warm to it," he says. "I have seen comics do jokes about, say, nurses always asking for money, and the audience go: 'No, I don't think that, we're not coming with you on that one.'" Don't mock the weak. But equally, he suggests, audiences don't like it if you're too far the other way – "too happy-clappy".
The other accusation aimed at Mock the Week was that it was vicious, mean and male – a bear pit of a show on which macho comedians elbowed each other out of the way to get their jibe in. Jo Brand didn't like it when she went on. Again, Ó Briain says the criticism was fair: "It was generally seven men around the table: they were trying to find themselves; there were elbows." But he points out that the programme started more than two decades ago, when this was the culture of shows of this kind. Ó Briain says he wouldn't have liked to be a contestant: "I would have found it too staccato; I like to build up a head of steam on a piece of bullshit. But now it has become a lot more conversational."
Trump, Starmer, and what's a gift to mock
While there's plenty to converse about in the average week, some topics are riper for mockery than others. Trump, for example, isn't the gift you might assume he is: "Particularly Trump 2, darker Trump. There's not even the funny mistakes going on. Now, it's self-parody, so utterly ridiculous that maybe it's normalised the ridiculousness, to a certain extent. And you know, the joke's already there – what are we adding to it? It would be like doing jokes about the Simpsons."
What about Keir Starmer? "Awful. He did nothing and said very little." He means as a topic of discussion, rather than as a politician, although he wasn't impressed with the way he ran the country, either. He's not sure about Andy Burnham yet – they are still to mock one of his weeks – but he is amused by the process by which he came to power: "Makerfield gets to pick the prime minister now, is that how it happens?"
So what or who is a gift to Mock the Week? Peter Murrell and the SNP expenses scandal, he says: "Not quite a victimless crime, because I guess the people who made donations to the SNP were victims. But the details were so perfect: the number of video consoles, the £2,000 salt shaker [Murrell spent £2,618.16 on Lalique Feuilles pepper and salt grinders], the fact Nicola Sturgeon bent over backwards to act like she didn't know her in-laws suddenly had a 30ft camper van." They got some good mileage from that in the last season – more mileage than the camper van, which drove only from the showroom to the in-laws' drive.
Now, freed from the shackles of public service impartiality and scrutiny, and with more women involved, including Sara Pascoe, Maisie Adam, Laura Lexx and Angela Barnes, perhaps Mock the Week is a nicer place, even if it has many fewer viewers (a little more than 1 million when repeats are included) than the 3-million-plus it averaged in its BBC peak.
Finding his birth parents
Ó Briain wasn't meant to be a comedian. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at University College Dublin in the early 90s. He says he was a shy and self-conscious teenager, but pushed himself to join the debating society at UCD. During one debate, he told a joke: "It got a laugh, and a round of applause, and I remember this whoosh of adrenaline and me going: oh hello!"
Born in Bray, County Wicklow, Ó Briain was adopted into what he has described as "a stable home" and had a happy childhood. A few years ago, he decided to find out about his biological parents: "The plan wasn't that it should be a show, it was just this thing I should investigate, because of normal human emotions. I always knew there was this story waiting to be found out, and then the impetus was that none of us are getting younger. I know of people who have found parents and then met them in a nursing home and they've had Alzheimer's."
He realised the story wasn't only about him after seeing the film Philomena: "I came out of the cinema with a sudden appreciation that this is actually not my story at all, I'm only a baby in it, but there's a woman who got pregnant and went on this journey," he says. "It's her story and I should probably at the very least make contact in order to close that circle for her and let her know it was great and I found a lovely family and all that stuff."
It was hard – bureaucratically, emotionally – but he found her and they met up. It was awkward and strange. He got a bunch of new siblings. He told the story in his show So … Where Were We?, which won best tour at the Chortle awards in 2023. His next show, Re:Creation, which he's been touring across Europe, tells the story of trying to track down his biological father. No spoilers (there are some dates left, plus it's on Amazon Prime), but it contains less sadness and anger than the previous set: "It's a bit of a romp, with a twist towards the end that is delightful to deliver. Not quite The Sixth Sense, but kind of a gasp moment."
The problem now is what to do next: "Both stories just kind of emerge in a very tellable form. There's no way of doing a third, no trilogy. Even as I'm doing it, enjoying telling the story, my head is going: 'Yeah, next time, you're going to actually have to do some work, write some jokes, because you're not going to be gifted another parent to find, there isn't another great family reveal,'" he says.
Well, there is one possibility, surely. Maybe not a parent … He laughs: "Yes, the perfect thing would be a knock on the door and there's a 25-year-old going: 'I think …' And I would go: 'Thank you so much!' Because this would be the only way you could extend the trilogy – if I was the father of a child given up for adoption." It's not going to happen, though: "I've done the audit, run it backwards in my head going: was there any situation that could have …?" He adds quickly: "I mean, I've had my checkered history. But I feel it's all accounted for."
Career and reflections
His TV career started as a children's presenter on the Irish state broadcaster RTÉ, while he was doing his first standup gigs on the Irish comedy circuit. He came to prominence hosting the topical panel show Don't Feed the Gondolas from 1997 to 2001. His big break on the other side of the Irish Sea came in 2003, when he hosted The Live Floor Show on BBC Two, which led to appearances on Have I Got News for You.
Since making his debut as Mock the Week's host in 2005, Ó Briain has presented just about everything on television. Alongside the panel shows and the comedy, his interest in maths and physics continued. He has presented Stargazing Live from Jodrell Bank observatory with Prof Brian Cox; his hobby is astrophotography, which he does from his garden in London ("you can filter out all the light"); and he's had many pops at bad science in his comedy.
Even when chatting, he'll borrow analogies from science. He says X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a black hole: "It's got sucked into this thing and created so much density that it's actually going to collapse under its own gravity." (He has abandoned the platform.) The popularity of panel shows? They have their moments: "It's like this graph of an extinction event: it goes back down again, but it never fully eliminates a small number of hard-shelled animals who survive each time – the cockroaches who are the comedians at the bottom, never fully eliminated because they're cheap and people like them, so they'll come back."
His own career, meanwhile, is more of a sine wave: "It goes up and down, but carries on." Or is it a damped oscillation? "If you don't pay attention, it gets smaller and smaller, asymptotically, until there's only a tiny little vibration right at the very end and I'm sitting in an olive grove in Spain going: 'Buenos dias.'"
You'll know, if you've seen him on stage or on TV, that Ó Briain's delivery is superfast. Well, it doesn't slow down over a quiet orange juice and lemonade. When he sets off on something, he's like a rocket in space. I fire little thrusters (chip in with the odd question) in an attempt to steer the ship, but when something has that much momentum sometimes you just have to run with it.
We go to many other places – solar eclipses, the World Cup, what to do if there's a medical emergency in the audience, Arsenal's transfer window, Blankety Blank, whether or not it's cool to be Irish in London, but there isn't space here … oh, go on then, just that last one. The answer is yes, but again it's sinusoidal: "We are currently cool, but I think people are getting a bit tired of it, so probably it's time for someone else to be cool for a while."
Whether he's cool or not, 90 minutes with Dara Ó Briain is eye-opening, exhausting and delightful. He's still talking when he gets into the car that has come to fetch him. It's something about Melania Trump, although I'm not sure if it's the documentary or the woman. And then it's too late when I realise: I forgot to ask if he ever feels as if he's trapped in a box. Mock the Week returns to TLC in the UK on 13 September at 9pm. Re:Creation is on Amazon Prime.
