As his mystery guest chat show returns for a fourth season, Tommy Tiernan talks to Claire O'Mahony about his theory of life as seven-year episodes and why his multiple careers – actor, stand-up, TV host – are essentially just conversations.
Tommy Tiernan is a man who plies his trade in several areas. There’s the stand-up, which has made him one of the country’s most popular comedians. Then there’s his acting work, most recently the role of Gerry, the long-suffering father in the hit comedy Derry Girls. Now he’s returning for the fourth series of The Tommy Tiernan Show, a critically acclaimed journey in improvisation, where neither the host nor the viewers know who the guests will be until they walk out on stage. But whatever aspect of his long-standing career you consider, it can all be distilled down to Tiernan’s love of conversation.
"Every time you’re engaged in talking with somebody, it’s such a creative act because it can go anywhere," he says. "A lot of the time our conversations have the same habits and formulas and they’re kind of predictable but you do have the opportunity for creativity in conversation."
In real life, Tiernan is a far more serious person than the manic stage persona he presents, but humour still peppers his chat. We’re meeting in RTÉ to talk about the new series, but there’s not much he can reveal, given the show’s unscripted format. This time around, however, he feels more comfortable. "I thought to myself that, during last year’s show, there was a slight hint of 'Father Tiernan will see you now’. To my mind anyway, I was probably a bit intense last year. I feel a little bit more relaxed this year."
What he finds remarkable about the programme is that his guests, who have ranged from Vogue Williams to Adam Clayton, also have to commit to its unconventional template. "They have to be just as much up for the adventure of it as I am. I think it says a lot about them that they would agree to do it," he says.
He doesn’t really see himself as an interviewer, and again, going back to his great love of conversation, perceives the show as a dialogue. "I think the key to it is focus and listening and not being afraid to go after the thing that you find compelling about what the person has just said. Now that can happen anywhere: on a bus or in a shopping centre when you’re talking to somebody. I get people coming up to me and talking to me a lot because everybody knows me. I go out walking every day and I get people just strolling up and I’ve other, longer, conversations on the sidelines at kids’ football matches. But even in those kinds of conversations, it’s about listening and you’ve no choice but to trust your instincts and if those instincts are perverse, then you shall be revealed," he laughs, "but I don’t think you have any choice to trust them."
That fact that he is so often recognised and approached is, he thinks, a blessing although he stresses that he doesn’t have a radically different lifestyle to anyone else.
"I have great privileges in my life but they’re not extraordinary, they wouldn’t be something that would come between you and other people. They’re just treats and I enjoy those but I think being well-known in Ireland is nothing but a bonus in my life, because people engage with me, anywhere, and it’s all good-natured.
"People talk to me as if they know me, they shout out stuff from the street and I really enjoy it. Now when people are drunk, it’s very difficult because they lose their sense of grace and their timing goes out the window – they’ve no idea how long they’ve had you cornered for. But generally speaking, it’s lovely and it’s enabled me to have conversations with people that I wouldn’t have normally had."
Tiernan celebrated his 50th birthday earlier this year by spending 10 days at a silent Buddhist retreat in Co Clare. Religion has been a recurring theme in Tiernan’s stand-up comedy and it’s a subject matter that he displays great curiosity about. "I love the familiarity of Catholicism. I mean I love it," he says. "I love the familiarity of churches, Stations of the Cross, the Eucharist, I love all that but I cannot stand, I cannot breathe in Catholic orthodoxy; something inside me just dies and I go ‘You have to get out of here’. What I find great about Buddhism is that it’s very practical. It’s kind of like DIY on your mind so I’m attracted to it because of that and it’s a bit exotic as well."
Actually turning 50 was, he says, a non-event but he has been contemplating whether life events can be plotted out in spans of seven years, looking back on his own life as an exercise. His first seven years were spend travelling around with his family, living in Donegal, Africa, London, Athlone and Navan; and the period from age seven to 14 he remembers as a time for playing, whereas 14-21 revealed to him that "the mind has potholes" with accompanying teenage anxiety and depression. For the next stage, aged 21-28, he spent half the time on the dole in Galway and had his first child when he was 24, and began doing stand-up in the second half. The following phase, from 28-35, he characterises as a time of excess in every imaginable way.
"I started to become well known, I had this dream job. How would I describe this – it was a time of pleasure and excess and wildness." But then came a juncture. "If the tide was in from 28-35, it went out from 35 to 42. Do you know when you walk past a beach and the water is a mile out the strand and there’s just seaweed on the rocks and everything smells and there’s loads of flies? I found 35-42 hard-going because I had to deal with a lot of the consequences of the previous seven years and I grew up as well."
The subsequent years, from 42 to 49, he identifies as a time of work, a sometimes difficult period, although he stresses that throughout, wonderful things happened during the bad times and tough things happened during the good times too. "Now, from 49, I feel as if I’ve an air of mischief and good irresponsibility has come back into my life. I feel a bit more relaxed now. That’s the sense I have of it, I’m getting more fresh air now than I have done in the past seven years. I definitely feel a little lift."
Next year is typically busy for the comedian as he takes his show A Work In Progress on tour around Ireland in January and February and his Toomfoolery show to the UK and Europe in March and April. Derry Girls will then resume filming from mid-July.
"I really enjoy the stand-up when I have a show in my pocket and I can perform it. Putting a stand-up show together I find hellishly difficult," he says. "The acting, I enjoy hanging out with other people. I put myself under an awful lot of pressure when it comes to acting because I’m trying so hard to get it right and trying to decide which way is the way to do it properly."
Ask him what kind of parent he is and the father of six says that he is strict, in a way. "My kids would say about me that probably I’m quite relaxed most of the time but I can lose my temper very quickly. Bill Burr, the great American comedian, has a great line. His wife said to him, ‘Oh you’re so nought to a hundred in an instant’ and he said, ‘If only you can realise that I’m idling at 75. Now, I’m not like that, I think, but I lose my temper quite quickly. I’ll also apologise for it about 10 minutes later."
He becomes lyrical when recounting why he likes Galway, where he lives, from the pace of the River Corrib to the smell of the air. "I love the fact that Galway City is kind of unpredictable, that it shelters people. You don’t look odd in Galway if you’re on the dole and I like that. I like the fact that you only have to drive out the road to be in Connemara or the Aran Islands. I spend a lot of my imaginative time on Inis Oírr and I love that island and I feel very much at home out there."
Downtime for Tiernan involves a glass of whiskey at night (he says it’s no more than a double but his wife Yvonne tells him it’s more like a quadruple measure); a cigar in his shed at the back of the garden and, at the healthier end of the spectrum, he runs.
Recently, he’s been pondering what it is in his life that he really enjoys doing, and this is something he wants to become more conscious of at this point in his life.
"I think that’s an area I’d like to pay more attention to – to have fun, when am I having fun and to move more towards that than I have been. That’s important. Now I feel that it’s hard to know how to do that without doing it crassly or foolishly. I need to figure that out for myself."
