ANOTHER SIDE OF DYLAN MORAN?

Well, not really. With a new series being prepared for Channel 4, a second series of the BBC sitcom How Do You Want Me?, and a, ahem, Austrian millennium opera planned, an unrepentantly merry Dylan Moran takes time out from his busy schedule to talk to Paul Byrne.

Anyone who's been lucky enough to witness a Dylan Moran stand-up show will no doubt agree with me when I say this is one Navan man who really is a comic genius. And, if you happen to be one of those to have seen him perform anytime within the last year or so, you'll probably also agree with me when I say he's a comic genius who's plainly fond of a drink. Or ten.

Of course, such a mix is hardly rare, drink driving many to the belief that everything they slur is incredibly witty and insightful. Only in Dylan Moran's case, it's true. But when the very thing that may or may not make him so richly comical results in an increasing number of poor shows (missing the opening curtain at Kilkenny's Cat Laughs last year), the question has to be asked; is Dylan Moran's drinking sending him on a slippery slope to bad time-keeping and, worse still, bad comic timing?

"Well, I don't know how to answer that really," offers the 27-year old comic. "It doesn't bother me, and, as far as I know, it doesn't bother anyone else. Maybe some people have come up to me after a show to tell me it's a problem, but if they did, I was obviously too drunk to notice."

Having toured for the last three years with largely the same show that won him the Perrier Award in Edinburgh in 1996, Moran is now busy writing new material, testing it out with a series of 10-minute guest spots.

"I'm not allowing myself to use any of the old material whatsoever," he states. "So everything I say now has to be completely new. It did bother me that I was touring the same material for such a long time, but I'm on the case now. So it'll be soon safe to go and see a Dylan Moran show once again."

When he's not perfecting new stand-up material, Moran's busy cultivating a growing TV career. Having scored a hugely critical and slightly commercial success last year with the BBC sitcom How Do You Want Me?, Moran has now completed a second series. On top of that, he's also busy writing the script for a new sitcom he's created for Channel 4, called Black Books, which will co-star fellow comedian Bill Bailey.

"I think the new series of How Do You Want Me? is far superior to the first. I've seen about four of the episodes, and they work extremely well. The BBC had been putting it out on a Tuesday night at 9.30pm, which is hardly primetime viewing, but I think there's a growing audience there."

"The Channel 4 series takes place in a bookstore, and, of course, is incredibly funny, imaginative and, dare I say it, innovative. And I can tell all that just from having written the first page."

But all else in the Moran canon pales in comparison to his most ambitious project to date; an Austrian opera to mark the coming millennium.

"I'm working on it at the moment," Moran pauses. "It's a very, very intense piece, reflecting both the end of an era and the dawning of another, revelling in all the hope and fear that that entails. The central story involves the scaling of eels, a symbol of these strange and sometimes slippery times."

"I don't want to reveal anymore, in case I ruin the magic of the big day. I'm just going to go over here by the window now and gaze out of it for a few hours."

"Begone, and Godspeed!"

 

Paul Byrne
8 Jul 1999