91热爆

Dara Ó Briain is best known for his razor-sharp stand-up comedy and the hugely popular panel show Mock the Week which he hosted for 17 years. He grew up in Bray, County Wicklow, on the east coast of Ireland, and is a self-confessed nerd who studied maths and theoretical physics at university. He presented Stargazing Live on 91热爆 Two with Brian Cox, and has a fine collection of telescopes.
Here's what we learned from his Desert Island Discs...

1. He’s loved his first musical choice since he was 15 years old

“This very quickly became my favourite tune of all time,” explains Dara. “If you imagine being a schoolboy in Ireland, 15, everyone's bags had either U2 or AC/DC written on them, and so [this artist] came along and delivered... a song that blew the minds of everyone who is at that age. We had never heard a sound like it.”

“That noise,” continues Dara, “that just sweet guitar thing... [Dara imitates the guitar] - it's the finest sound in the world.”

“Actually, a lot of the time I don't dwell on the lyrics of things. Particularly I remember doing interviews where I’d mention [that this] is my favourite song, and they’d go, ‘What does it say to you?’ And I’d say, ‘I was a shy, dorky, virginal, 15-year-old in Dublin, really awkward in his own skin. At no stage was I going: That man in the bolero outfit with the high heels, he's really speaking to me’. But the guitar sound was just the sweetest thing.”

The song is Kiss, composed, written, and produced by American musician Prince. It was released as the lead single from Prince’s eighth studio album, Parade, in 1986. It topped the charts around the world and NME ranked the song fourth in their list of the 150 Greatest Singles of All Time.

2. He credits his love of performing and storytelling to his parents

Dara’s father was part of the Irish language revival movement in the 1960s and a trade union negotiator - and by all accounts “a tenacious one,” says Dara.

“My dad during the 1960s travelled in Europe a lot and found himself very irritated that every country he went to had their own language, and Ireland had let its language slip. And so he became part of Athbheochan na Gaeilge which was a movement to revive a very moribund language. For him it was tied into choral music and there was a push for an Irish language mass at the big Catholic church and that he would establish a choir for that and sing in Irish.”

“There's a huge church in Bray and he’d do these carol services and there’d be 600 to a 1000 people at these things, with various choirs and music groups playing. And he would conduct this, and then he would turn to the audience and would give some spiel… and I remember standing there, watching him and I’d be very impressed by that.”

“My mother is a chatty storyteller. Talks really quickly which is a trait that is really unattractive,” says the speedy speaking Dara with a laugh.

"So she would gabble on about things constantly, and would tell the story and then just change the story and we'd go, ‘You can't just change it, we were there!’”

3. He doesn’t remember when he first found out he was adopted

“The interesting thing about it is that I sort of can't remember,” says Dara, “to the extent that it became a thing that I sort of forgot.”

“I sat down with my father at one stage in my 30s and said, ‘Look, just confirm this for me, am I adopted?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, how did you forget?’ And I said, ‘Well, did you tell me?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, but we got bored of telling you.’”

4. A film made him decide to explore his own history

After he saw the 2013 film Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, Dara decided he wanted to find his birth mother. “Philomena is the story of a woman who - and I always say this with quotation marks - ‘gave her child up for adoption’ because obviously there was a lot of coercion and societal pressure involved in that, and she then spent her entire life trying to find out what happened to the child.”

“And I genuinely walked out of the cinema going ‘Oh, you're not the main protagonist in this story. There is a woman who gave a baby up for adoption 45 years ago, and you have made yourself invisible because you've not engaged with the search. So therefore she has no idea what's going on.’” Dara traced his birth mother, and has now met her and the extended family: “I have met Steve Coogan [who co-wrote the film] and said thank you for this.”

5. His third choice reminds him of his homeland

“I felt I needed a nod to our traditional music, of which there was a ton when I was growing up, and also to my school, and to the Irish language, and the band I’ve chosen is called Kila,” says Dara.

“They’re a ragtag collection of incredibly different, traditional musicians who've combined in a kind of very modern format, and they do these huge spectacular shows. The song’s called Glanfaidh Mé which is about removing somebody from your heart - I'll clean you from my heart!”

6. He doesn’t feel the need to shock his audience

"My style is generally conversational, anecdotal, personal or I tend to do whimsical connections and make improvisational things,” explains Dara.

“I find it weird that people can go: ‘You can't say anything,’ and I’m going, ‘I'm literally talking for two hours’. I genuinely dislike it when people try to narrow comedy down to... 'Well, the point of comedy is to be saying [something] shocking...’ and it's really not.”

“That's the way some people like to do it, and it's one of the things it can do, but it also has been a hugely broad church. People tend to skip all that and talk about it as if the only thing that comedy should be doing is having a take on whatever - the trans issue or whatever the thing is that people are getting very, very passionate about.”

“I'm not saying that we all are doing twee puns and funny parody songs or whatever, but we're finding ways to talk about other things in shows without this constant roil of people going, ‘Yeah, but why aren't you being shocking?’ That's not what we all do.”

7. He would like his final choice of disc to be played at his funeral

“For some reason I was on a flight landing, either into or from Dublin to London. And at the time when they tell you to the take off the headphones they forgot to tell me. So there was a sense of, ‘Oh, this is naughty, I’m being allowed to listen to this.’”

“And remember listening to this as the plane came into land and it made the whole thing very epic. And then I realised, ‘Oh my God, he's sustained this for so long. And now, and now he's building it again. He sustained it again. This is incredible.’”

“And then, it's only then I realised it was on repeat. I've just come back to the start.”

“But it is the thing that I would have played at my funeral over a montage of photographs of me looking incredibly young and beautiful, because it would kill the audience. The audience? My funeral? Yeah, there’s a Freudian slip – there's always an audience!”

The track is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.