Ardal O’Hanlan: ‘Ho risentito i miei genitori per avermi mandato in collegio’

Full article: The most innocuous things can sometimes bring about an existential crisis. A few years back, Ardal O’Hanlon – stand-up [comedian](https://inews.co.uk/category/culture/comedy?srsltid=AfmBOordAQtSTefxYaoYrJCPnkCJ2HmnD13PWl1e1KDZRNpXhqAGsD5s&ico=in-line_link), actor, novelist, presenter – was walking through the automatic doors of a supermarket. Except he couldn’t get through. “The doors were opening for everyone else,” he says. “They even opened for a pigeon. I was waving my arms, I was trying to make myself hotter in case it was a body temperature thing… It was embarrassing and absolutely baffling.”

It was the final straw. He’d already noticed a few similar things happening. On a flight to New York just prior, he was sitting next to someone watching episodes of O’Hanlon’s early noughties BBC sitcom, *My Hero*. “He was enjoying it like, but after about an hour, we strike up a conversation and he genuinely asked me, ‘So what do you do?’”

It was enough to have him questioning everything: “Who am I? What am I? How did I end up like this?” It was very much in his wheelhouse. “I’ve always been one of those navel gazers, from a very early age,” he says. “Possibly to your own detriment – too much time up your own hole.” He starts to laugh. “It’s a terrible confession to make. But I’ve always reflected very deeply on: ‘What am I doing with myself?’”

The answers help make up *Not Himself*, O’Hanlon’s latest stand-up show. He’s just embarked on a second round of dates around the country, injury permitting: he’s just turned his ankle playing tennis, and is sitting on video call from his Dublin home in a boot with a bag of frozen peas on the swelling. “It’s shocking timing. But the Gods are probably trying to tell me something.”

O’Hanlon is most famous for his first TV role as Father Dougal Maguire in the 90s clerical sitcom *Father Ted*, the loveable but hapless boy-child priest too innocent for this world. But before his TV career – where he’s also notably played DI Jack Mooney in BBC crime series [*Death in Paradise*](https://inews.co.uk/topic/death-in-paradise?srsltid=AfmBOopasOIpJPcRWnZGsxwqnY35QTK6bKTIEbG3M90pFdwweUvneHa6&ico=in-line_link), appeared on *Derry Girls* and *Taskmaster* and made documentaries for Irish television – his first love was stand-up. He’d grown up in Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, moving to London in the early 90s, where the surreal everyday observations of his early routines quickly marked him as a sharp wit; he won the 1994 Hackney Empire New Act of the Year.

He views comedy with high ideals. “I think it’s a type of public service. I know that’s a very grand statement, but I think it’s very therapeutic for the public. I think for the performer, you get an awful lot out of this kind of self-analysis.”

And while *Not Himself* is “silly and stupid and full of jokes” about everything from cauliflower as a main meal to the role of technology in our lives – “Most days you’ve got to prove you’re not a robot,” he says, “That’s a ridiculous way to be living your life” – it contains a lot of reflection. As suggested by the title (“It’s a common enough saying; my wife keeps saying to me, ‘You’re not yourself’”), O’Hanlon, now 60, is looking at who he is.

“At every stage in life, your certainties are undermined. The rug is pulled from under you. In the very broadest brushstrokes, I am Irish, Catholic, a man of a certain age. That’s who I am. But it’s so interesting now that comedy is really all about identity. And it’s a broad church. It’s very diverse, which is a great thing. Every gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, all telling their own stories. So I’m having a little bit of fun with that. I’ve never really questioned my identity in that way before.”

He’s always seemed very sound