‘I came through a much frostier generation'

Dara O Briain says comedians have grown a lot more supportive over the years he’s been in the business. 

Reflecting on the 17 years he spent as host of Mock The Week he noted that there were ‘older acts who came from a generation who were not, "Great, new people! We love new people!" 

‘I came through a much frostier generation. Whereas this generation are much more collaborative. They all do each other’s podcasts, they’re used to working together.

’It made [Mock The Week] a much more enjoyable show to do.  We had great fun with it.’

Speaking to Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett on the Dish from Waitrose podcast, he mused: ‘ It was weird when it ended. It's suddenly like, everyone went, "Oh yeah. We like  that show". So it was nice to have an end to it that was upbeat. We also got – which people don't normally do – six episodes of goodbye.’

He also acknowledged that there were sometimes ‘dips’ in the shop as ‘we kept having to introduce a new generation of comics. There'd be bits where they were new and they're shy and they weren't working well, and just getting used to it. 

‘Then they would get better and they would become the faces of it for a while. It  wa s basically like running a finishing school. We would pick people from the top of Edinburgh and we'd have them on the telly a few times, and they would learn how to do telly and jokes on telly, and then they would go, "Great, I've had enough of this now".

‘Mock the Week required a certain amount of work, more work than most of these shows do. The bit at the end where I press the buzzer and they'd walk out and forward? People would go in with 40 jokes for that.

‘Frankie [Boyle] and  Russell [Howard] used to talk about having a memory palace. Because not only did you have to have 40 jokes for that, you’d have to do the rest of the show. So it was very technically, very difficult to do. People just sort of went, "I'm just gonna go on Would I Lie To You? and just talk shit because really that's all you have to do".

‘We went through four or five generations. It was an interesting thing to work on because, I liked the young comics coming through. Which is not a given in people who work on long-running panel shows.’

• Dish from Waitrose is available on all podcast providers.

Published: 8 May 2025