HI DAVID, what are you up to today?
I'm trying to write a book at the moment, so I'm happy to take a break from that.
It's going well, then?
Not really, no. It's a novel for kids: I've written a bunch of stuff for kids [the popular Danger is Everywhere series] but they've all tended to be about 20,000 words – this is more like 50 to 70,000 and I keep forgetting what happened at the start when I get to the end, which I think might be in contravention of the number one rule of novel writing.
It was also due last June, but I'm going to try and get a draft off for March 1. That's my goal – which is nice, because I'll have something else to do by day as well as doing these gigs. I think if I just did comedy, I'd go mad.
What's the book about?
My granny lived on Achill Island off Mayo and my brother and I would have gone down there a lot. There isn't a bank on the island, so a travelling bank – a bank in a van, basically – would visit the island several times a week.
From the age of about five onwards, we – the city kids – would just be plotting how we were going to rob the travelling bank. So, it's about two kids who rob the travelling bank on Achill.
Sounds intriguing. Are you hoping for cross-over appeal a la Harry Potter?
Well, I've put a lot of good jokes into it now. I've been doing a lot of kids shows for the last year and it's always remarkable how much of my grown-up stuff works perfectly well on kids – and vice-versa.
So, hopefully it will be a book that grown-ups will like too. But I mean, who knows? At the moment it's just an 86-page Microsoft Word Document.
Are you looking forward to your Belfast shows at The Whitla Hall next week?
I am. And I love the fact that while Saturday night is completely sold-out, at the moment there's been about 40 tickets sold for Sunday. There's just something very 'Belfast' about that, like you've all decided "Sunday is no day for comedy".
What's The Whitla Hall like? I think I get intimidated sometimes playing in rooms that are too ornate: mid-gig, you'll look up and your eyes will meet some sort of cherub carved in plaster who's staring down at you like "What the hell are you doing here? Laurel & Hardy once played here!"
The new show is called You Have To Laugh – surely one of your better titles?
Thanks, I think it works best in capital letters though, because 'You Have To Laugh' could be the title of a Tom O'Connor book of gentle golf anecdotes, whereas 'YOU HAVE TO LAUGH' – ideally screamed from a rooftop, at midnight – better befits the times we live in.
How have the shows been going since you debuted it at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer?
The nice thing about this show is that it's not tightly themed or structured. I'm always writing loads of new stuff as I get sick of certain bits.
It's not like a movie script where you keep honing draft after draft: if something's not funny, you just ditch it and replace it with something else. So it's quite a different show now to the one that started off in Edinburgh – for one thing, it's about an hour longer.
I've got two new songs that I've just written in the last two weeks, so this is kind of the fun part [of the tour] now. At the start, you're kind of trying to remember what the next bit is, whereas at this point you're trying to not make it go on for about six hours.
Part of You Have to Laugh involves an imagined conversation with your 18-year-old self – and he's not exactly thrilled with how things have worked out. Are you really such a disappointment to the young David O'Doherty?
Well, the problem is that when he asks me what I do, I tell him that I play a novelty children's keyboard that I got for my Confirmation – and the 18-year-old me calls me a loser and refuses to listen to anything else I have to say.
But no, I think he'd be reasonably impressed. I really wanted to be musician. Dad's a jazz musician and I'm still kind of obsessed with jazz, but unfortunately jazz piano is one of those thing where you either have the ability or you don't – and I sadly very much did not.
So, I'm a failure from that point of view. But to be honest my family were always huge comedy fans, so this probably wouldn't be too far off the beaten track for the 18-year-old me.
Have there been any particularly memorable shows thus far?
The last gig was in Waterford on Friday night: a drunk man walked in, mid-gig, and stood in front of the stage.
I was like, "What are you doing?" and he goes "I'm your personal security". He genuinely maintained that he had come to protect me from the perfectly nice Waterford audience, despite being massively late and quite clearly drunk.
These are the sort of crazy things you get with life on the road.
Have you ever felt like you needed a security person to protect you from over-zealous fans?
Sometimes I tour with Flight of The Conchords and there are actual security people at those shows. They'll sometimes have a police escort from the venue to the interstate to make sure they get to the next gig, while we're all sitting there going "this is absolutely ridiculous, we're a bunch of novelty musicians who the police are now trying to get through busy traffic".
But the stalkers on my tour haven't got so bad as yet – although maybe that changes at The Whitla Hall? In fact, people could apply to be my stalker. They can contact me on Twitter.
So you're still waiting for your Alan Partridge 'mentalist' moment?
Well, there was the time at the Milton Keynes Hilton when I opened the door to my room after a gig and saw that the TV was on – and that I was actually on the TV.
I was like, "wow, this is amazing – I've arrived!" But then, as I moved into the room, I saw there was also a naked man lying on the bed, watching me on the TV.
He wasn't a super-fan though: reception had accidentally given me the key to the wrong room, where this guy was just trying to have a gentle evening in much the same way as I would often lie naked and watch The Supervet.
I'm still disappointed that I didn't manage to say "Hey! That's me!" instead of just going "Oh s***!".
:: David O'Doherty, Saturday February 9 (sold out) and Sunday February 10, The Whitla Hall, QUBSU. Tickets via Tinyurl.com/dodwhitla2?, see Phlaimeaux.tumblr.com/shows for full tour details.
