Spoil yourself – Ed says it’s OK

Up for a night of raucous laughter? Comedy legend Ed Byrne hits Dunfermline’s Alhambra Theatre on March 15 and then heads to Dundee Rep on March 16 and 17.

You might look at a poster selling some brand of entertainment and think: ‘Well, that picture isn’t exactly real’.

So when you see mild-mannered and well-dressed Irish comedian Ed Byrne wielding a chainsaw as the main publicity shot for his Spoiler Alert tour, it’s clearly been photoshopped by some boffins, right?

Wrong. Not only is it a genuine chainsaw, it actually belongs to Byrne.

“Yeah, it’s one of two I own, and it’s actually the smaller of the two,” he says. “I think it worried my parents that I had bought a chainsaw.

“In a previous show, I told a story where I had bought an angle grinder to get rid of an old tank in the garden. I phoned my dad to ask for advice, though mainly to let him know that I was doing that. I thought that he’d put down the phone and be so proud but he said: ‘Yeah, I’d rather you didn’t do it so I’ll come over this weekend’. And he came over and did it in his pyjamas. He did a very good job but I’m sure I would have done, too.”

Ed Byrne’s status as a modern father who has fallen into the inevitable trap of spoiling his kids a little too much and the comparisons with his own childhood comprise the main chunk of Spoiler Alert.

“I’d still say that you are expected to do a lot more parenting than our parents ever did, and that’s a weird thing because you tend to think that your mum and dad are where you learned parenting from. But it’s more that you look around you to see what’s going on with other parents.”

While Byrne has lavished huge trampolines and lashings of elderflower cordial on his two sons Cosmo and Magnus (“there’s no particular significance to the names, but it was pretty cool going on stage in Reykjavik and saying I had a son called Magnus: that’s a cheap round of applause”), he looks back on a very different earlier time when childhood was arguably less sanctified.

“If you look at it over a number of generations, people would have about 14 kids because they knew that they’d lose a few: ‘They’re not all going to make it, so we’ll pop out a load of them’. I’m not saying it wasn’t sad when you lost three of your 14 kids, but that was just an accepted thing.

“Now it’s the worst thing in the world to lose a kid and so we over-protect them. And what is it going to be like in three or four generations? Will they ever be allowed to leave the house?”

While all these pedestals have filled up with our children, Byrne reckons there’s one area in which we aren’t being pampered enough. “Where I think we’re not acting spoiled is in the political arena,” admits this fervent Remain voter.

“We have a tendency to accept what’s happening and that’s where we should be acting more entitled, by getting the government we want. We’re spoiled in all these little ways but not spoiled enough where it matters.”

For more than two decades, Ed Byrne has been an acclaimed and theatre-filling stand-up whose shows have included Roaring Forties, Different Class and the 1998 Perrier-nominated A Night At The Opera.

As a spin-off, he’s appeared on TV in everything from Mock The Week to All Star Mr & Mrs, while his love of hillwalking led him to writing a regular column for The Great Outdoors magazine.

Still, he wasn’t always as healthy as he is now. “I did that classic thing of hitting my 40s and exercising,” he says.

“Once when I was on the road I came out of the bathroom naked and there was a full-length mirror opposite me.

“I caught sight of my full glory and immediately phoned my wife to apologise.”

edbyrne.com

“We have a tendency to accept what’s happening and that’s where we should be acting more entitled, by getting the government we want. We’re spoiled in all these little ways but not spoiled enough where it matters