Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Honest Ed mocks his funniest fakes
IT’S not quite on the scale of when the BBC got into hot water with Buckingham Palace over some dodgy editing of the Queen.
But comic Ed Byrne has admitted he was involved in TV fakery on two occasions, both of which makes him a little embarrassed.
The Mock The Week star said: “I did a show driving round Siberia with Andy Parsons. I am a terrible driver and Andy is not good, so we came off the road a few times.
“There is a weird thing with those shows. I really enjoyed Long Way Round with Ewan Mcgregor, where they made the crew part of the story.
“But when the BBC do these shows they still like to create this thing that you don’t have a crew with you. So we go off the road and they say we were helped on to the road by a ‘passing motorist’. Yeah, a passing motorist who happened to be part of our crew. I never understand the desire to pretend.”
The other amusing incident came when a woman played him in scenes for another BBC travel documentary, while Ed was working with best pal Dara O’briain. He told the RHLSTP podcast: “We were travelling round Central America with Dara. I got to slide down a volcano on a sledge and it was ash. I don’t know if anyone watched it but there is a long shot where I appear to be going faster.
“That was somebody else, a girl doing a fast slide. They tried to find someone who looked enough like me and the best candidate was female. So I have a female stunt double.”
Ed, 45, in Edinburgh for a month doing stand-up show Spoiler Alert at the fringe festival, is also a regular on quizzes including Tipping Point, Pointless and Family Fortunes. But he remembers one quiz above all...
Asked about Street Cred Sudoku from 2005, he says: “It was a terrible show, absolute dogs***. They wanted to make a show that had the word ‘sudoku’ in it. Do you remember when they came out, it was massive.
“And there was not even an audience when we went to record it. The audience company let us down.”