:: HOW does it feel to be back doing live comedy again after such a long break?
It's been so nice back doing gigs again. I was doing some gigs in England towards the end of last summer when they were doing more experimental outdoorsy stuff there: my first gig back after having not done a gig in 18 months, the longest gap I'd taken for 22 years, was in a field in Bristol in front of 2,000 people who were all sitting in painted white boxes. It was like being the half-time entertainment at a jousting festival or something.
That was a good way to remember how to do it, but it's a lot more familiar being back in theatres again. The reaction has been extraordinary, which I don't attribute to my comedy. People are just happy to be back at doing anything.
I did kind of forget that it's a very fun thing to do. Once you get past the point of, 'Oh, I hope I remember how to do this' and, 'I hope I can think of enough things to talk about', then you can start kind of playing with it.
That sounds pretentious, but my dad is a jazz musician and that is what you do with jazz: you go out with a plan and the intention of tearing that plan into small pieces. That is where the fun is for me, and the kind of freedom within it as well.
:: The new show is titled Whoa is Me, what can you tell us about that?
I can tell you there's been a lot of debate as to how I should be spelling 'whoa', with a lot of people thinking it should be spelled 'woah'. But I looked it up and I spoke to Susie Dent - the one advantage of going on Countdown is that you have live access to Susie Dent - and the official spelling of it is 'whoa', which also sounds right as opposed to 'wow-ah'.
:: You recorded a live album called Live In His Own Car During a Pandemic while in lockdown with your parents on Achill Island. Why?
I had a break-up at the start of 2020, so I did what I've done for the past 20 years which is to just book in eight-months of gigs. I think it's called 'running from your feelings while simultaneously monetising them'.
I thought the show was good, but then somebody ate a bat and the world stopped. I still kind of had the show in my brain even if the pandemic turned everything that had been in a major key into a minor key.
When Dublin started being referred to as a 'reservoir of disease', that was the moment myself and my parents chose to get out of town. We moved into the cottage where my granny lived, which is in a remote part of Achill Island, which is already very remote.
We were doing our best, even though moving back in with your 84-year-old parents after a gap of 24 years is a big pivot. One night, there was a storm. I couldn't sleep, so I went out to sit in the car because you can watch ships coming into the bay from the Atlantic to get out of the storm.
I had my little keyboard with me, so I kind of thought, 'Hey, it might be quite fun to record something right now' - but then I just kept going. Eventually, I realised that I'd done an hour and 10 minutes of 'something' and the beauty of modern technology is that immediately afterwards I just uploaded it onto Bandcamp and did one tweet: 'I have released an album.'
I hadn't even thought about recording it six hours before, but it went out into the world then and became my biggest album so far. And it was recorded into my phone, which - for anyone looking for that Glyn Johns/Beatles magic - was balanced on the top of the steering wheel with the mic pointed towards me.
The car became my Abbey Road. And the album is like Let It Be, except recorded in a car with a phone. Six months later, I did Live From My Basement During A Pandemic - a one-hour special recorded on my phone, which was gaffer taped to a stepladder.
:: You also did a thrice-weekly podcast Isolating With David O'Doherty, again recorded in your car. Was that you attempting to 'keep busy'?
Comedy was probably the first thing to stop [in the pandemic] because at first they thought Covid was droplet-based - so laughter was immediately identified as not being 'the best medicine' after all.
Singing was also identified as being very dangerous, and that does not leave me with much - that just leaves me with 'talking that is not funny'. I knew that gigs were not coming back, so I wrote a book for kids in that time [Irish Children's Book of The Year-winner The Summer I Robbed a Bank] and then I was just hustling, trying to do anything really.
For one thing, you just lose the knack of doing comedy after a while. I know a lot of people who, post-pandemic, just haven't come back to it. It's such a stressful silly thing with all that's going on in the world, so when you stop to think about it, it's like, 'Why would I bother?'.
I salute those people. It's like when someone leaves Twitter, I always think 'good for them'. Maybe the people who have quit comedy have reached some point of enlightenment that I haven't got to yet - so I'm still trying to make strangers laugh.
:: Are you looking forward to coming 'home' to Derry this weekend?
I know it's like what annoying Americans say when they come to Ireland, but my family do come from Derry: it was my great-grandfather, so we are getting a little bit tenuous, but he did definitely have a butcher's shop at 23 Creggan Street.
I may one day do a tour where every date is billed as a 'homecoming', just picking a random street address in every town and pretending my grandfather lived there.
:: Finally, your Channel 4 cycling show Along For The Ride With David O'Doherty was great, gently entertaining TV. Will there be a second series?
I definitely wanted to make a show with no jeopardy in it whatsoever. So much TV is just so tense now - daytime quizzes are all blue lights and ominous synths. Even in something like Gone Fishing, there is the chance that they might catch a fish.
There was no such jeopardy in my show, which was just me and Grayson Perry riding up the highest mountain in Wales. I guess there was some jeopardy of 'will they make it?' but, spoiler alert, we did.
And what the show didn't quite get across was that we had drunk an infeasible amount of wine the night before, when we stayed up singing Tom Waits songs and only got four hours sleep. So it was also a triumph of the human spirit, because it turns out that drinking two bottles of red wine has pretty much the opposite effect to 'performance enhancing drugs' in a cycling sense.
I would like there to be a second series but who knows – it was only meant to be a one-off 'post-pando' bit of escapism. But I'll certainly make more if the Irish News would like to sponsor it.
:: David O'Doherty: Whoa Is Me, Sunday March 13, Millennium Forum, Derry. Tickets from Millenniumforum.co.uk
