Here Comes the Science Bit: An Interview with Dara O’Briain
Watching Dara O’Briain attempt to cross the packed Green Room at this week’s Cheltenham Science Festival, it was impossible not to be reminded of the analogy that CERN scientists came up to explain that infamous particle, the Higgs Field. It goes something like this: Imagine a famous person suddenly appears at a busy party. As they move through the crowd, they attract a circle of people around them, slowing them down. It is in the same way that the Higgs Boson is said to give a travelling particle mass. The analogy was too perfect; as it happened, the Wicklow-born comedian was on his way to interview the very man responsible for predicting the so-called God particle: Peter Higgs himself.
O’Briain is on a somewhat of a roll, having found himself in just three short years becoming the people’s champion of science. His many fans might point to his Physics degree which he earned from UCD – which indeed is nothing to sniff at – but it is really only in the last three years that he properly went public with his love affair with science and mathematics. Since 2011, he’s hosted two series of Stargazing Live with Professor Cox for the BBC, Dara O’Briain’s Science Club and The School of Hard Sums, a mathematics show for cable channel Dave. He was an ambassador for the prestigious ESOF international science conference that took place in Dublin last year and was named Festival Director for this year’s Science Festival at Cheltenham, the biggest of its kind in the UK. It’s a niche he has out carved for himself and he is quick to admit he can’t believe how lucky he’s been.
Of course, luck has little to do with it. O’Briain has that rare mix of intelligence, charisma and modesty that makes him impossibly affable. He’s a natural, and that’s why he’s on the top of every producer’s wish list. His popularity keeps him busy; the PR team had explained that he had refused every other media request that day, and so it was a surprise when his people came back and gave the go-ahead. Perhaps it was the Irish connection. Whatever the reason, I was delighted, there are few comedians who can be genuinely funny on demand, but for O’Briain it’s in his DNA.
I asked him about his role in the Festival. ‘It’s great. Last night we had a talk with Peter Higgs; it was an hour of particle physics not particularly dumbed down and the place was jammed to the rafters. I’m enjoying it enormously.’ Could the idea of a science festival like Cheltenham work back here? ‘Absolutely. This is the kind of thing that they should have in Dublin – I know they’re starting a thing called the Curiosity Festival in July and their plan is to build that up after the success of ESOF last year and Cheltenham would be a wonderful model. There are way more people in Dublin and I can see people queuing up to see these sort of people talk.’
Speaking of DNA, Jim Watson, one of the men responsible for discovering that its double-helix shape had just been speaking at the festival. He is quite the character, known to throw out a few clangers during his interviews, some of which have gotten him into hot water. He didn’t let the audience down: in the space of a 40 minute talk he pronounced all doctors idiots and spent a good few minutes demolishing Rosalind Franklin, the woman who was passed over for his Nobel Prize despite being heavily involved in the work.
‘Watson does have a track record of saying things that are outrageous and exciting’, chuckles O’Briain knowingly. ‘In fact, he is held up as an example of someone who gets the Nobel and then clearly thinks everything he says is Nobel-worthy, and then decides to give his opinion on everything from women to every contentious issue on the planet. Last night I was talking to a journalist due to interview him and he said he just didn’t know where to start because there he’d already said so many controversial things’.
Does biology excite him as much as physics, I ask, waving a red rag to a bull. ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead going to a lot of exhibitions here as they are biological in nature and well, frankly, that’s not real science’ he says, only half-joking. ‘We found when that when we did Science Club in the first year, we would say that we were covering the brain or for example Einstein, but nobody was interested in the brain, they all wanted to see something about Einstein’. But while he appears to have endless enthusiasm for the subject, O’Briain does admit that physics can sometimes bit opaque. ‘Centrifugal force, don’t get me started on whether or not that’s a force at all. I had a drive home with Brian Cox after shooting Stargazing Live for BBC, who threw a whole load of thought experiments at me, like what happens if you’re on a weighing scales and you jump down a lift shaft and that lift is in space. I was thinking what is this now? I mean, come on, you may not be able to measure multiple universes or string theory, but they are still delightful things’ he says, his voice trailing off in that way that has practically become a trademark of his live stand up shows.
Like anyone who has a massive national profile and over a million followers on Twitter, there are consequences to his celebrity, not least of which are the internet loonies. What’s different about Dara O’Briain is that he engages with them. When he retweeted a comment by a young Muslim girl who said that she felt the same way about the Woolwich killers as Christians do about the Westboro Baptist Church, he spent the rest of the night clarifying that he did not sympathise with terrorists.
‘There is a rule on the internet that I also think is just a good general rule for life and that is: don’t be a dick. If people use Twitter just to be rude to people and they happen to pick on me I generally abuse them for it. I think it’s an awful waste of a great medium just to abuse people you just occasionally see on the telly.
Finally, I ask him about Stephen Fry, who was in the morning’s papers because he had told a theatre audience that he had attempted suicide last year while shooting a tv programme. I have a huge tremendous amount of sympathy for Stephen and I admire his honesty. Stephen is a very wise and intelligent man who puts a very interesting face on this problem because you know him from being charming and upbeat, and so you know this is a very serious issue. But apart from that, there are two things, firstly, it would be an awful shame if this gets all bundled into that ridiculous cliché about all comedians being depressed. There is no ‘tears of a clown’ thing going on with comics. There’s actually some research on this and our rates of suicide aren’t any higher than any other profession. If you want to worry about someone, think about postal workers, they have their own verb for when they lash out. The other thing is I that I will probably question now whether or not I would like to take part in Richard Herring’s Podcast from the Leicester Square Theatre if this is the sort of stuff they’re expecting you to put out there.
You can hear Jonathan’s full interview with Dara, learn about the science of pregnancy and hear the story of the two astronomers who discovered one of the biggest things in our solar system in our Cheltenham Science Festival special of Futureproof here