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Dylan’s back on the road

By Mike Barnett

GLAD TO BE BACK ON STAGE: Dylan Moran

Mike Barnett

THERE'S something of an edge to the live set of Dylan Moran, the star of Channel 4's Black Books.

Perhaps it comes from its unpredictability, but perhaps it comes from something deep inside Moran.

Wandering distractedly around the stage, fag in one hand, glass of Jacob's Creek in the other, Moran muses on anything and everything, from modern technology to global diplomacy. He veers off on seemingly unconnected tangents before returning, if he fancies, to the point. So, asking him what his current show is all about elicits a typically opaque response.

"It deals with the inter-governmental crises in Corsica between 1986 and 1987 while, after the interval, I demonstrate the pitfalls of gargling ground glass in a wind tunnel. There's a good deal of strobe-lighting throughout, hence the popularity of the show with the over-85s." Technically, none of this is true, but you get the picture.“

Moran, who won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1996 having carried off Channel 4's So You Think You're Funny? award three years previously, has not toured for two years. He's been busy with his award-winning TV work - Black Books won a BAFTA for Best Sitcom in 2001 and a Bronze Rose at the Montreux Festival the same year - and has just completed making The Actorss, a film with Sir Michael Caine due for release in the spring.

Screen versus live

Telly and film work completed, is that why this most idiosyncratic performer is back on the road? "Being on screen is all very well," he offers, "but there's nothing like roaring into a stranger's face to make you feel alive."

Moran is famously one of the most diffident acts on the circuit, but his reticence to give much away is not a mere affectation of someone in the public eye. Even when he was just one of many up-and-coming acts slogging round the country, he was notoriously discreet, not unlike, perhaps, Bernard Black, the dysfunctional customer-hating owner of Black Books.

Shambling around the stage, Moran gives the impression that he could quite easily have strayed from the bar and onto the stage and, having found himself there, thought it as good a place as any from which to launch his laughter missiles on the bizarre complexities of modern life.

It's an impression he does little to dispel. Is he attempting to make a social point with his jibes at the way we are? "No," he says clearly. "Absolutely not.”