Dara Ó Briain: Mock The Week's Zoom audience, James Acaster and large head jokes

Virgin Radio

18 Nov 2020, 12:49

Comedy panel show Mock The Week has been making us laugh for almost two decades now. As it returns to the BBC for its nineteenth series, host Dara Ó Briain appeared as a guest on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky and reflected on how it’s changed since it began. 

“It was all a much more young, savage show at the time,” he said of the show’s beginnings, “We’re much more whimsical and silly now.”

This change resonates throughout the comedy world too, according to Dara, who said that newer comedias are “really collaborative” and “they actually work together well. It’s fun to work with young comics now.”

Like many shows, Mock The Week has had to adapt its production due to coronavirus restrictions, with Zoom audiences replacing studio audiences. “It’s working surprisingly well,” said Dara, “It’s actually better than having an audience who are spaced five feet away from each other, having them in their own house.”

“We did a joke where I said “everybody disappear from shot”, so they all disappeared from shot and we said “let’s check in with the Zoom audience” and there was just like fifty empty chairs in suburban houses, and then they all crept back in shot again. It’s fun, you find ways to play with it.”

Quizzed by Chris on which stand-up comedians get the ‘coolest’ crowds, Dara said: “When I was in Edinburgh, I’d see people go to Noel Fielding’s shows, for example. James Acaster gets a very cool crowd. And that’s great - I got everyone up to 16 and everyone from 30 on. And the 19 year-olds all went to somebody good like James.”

Continuing to praise James Acaster, he said: “The key to really doing the big shows well is you create a world, and people come and subscribe to it, and boy does he create a world.”

In the world that he’s created on Mock The Week however, Dara think the ideas that are most consistently funny are the simpler, most light-hearted ones: “The stuff that’s really always worked is the silly stuff towards the end, where me and Ed Byrne just start giggling about private browsing, or me playing the harp naked, or me looking like a Megabus. Weirdly that is the stuff that will live beyond who is in government at the time, is the fact that I have a large head.”

Mock The Week returns to BBC Two on Thursday night at 10pm.