Ed Byrne chats ahead of his shows in Yorkshire

d Byrne has been an acclaimed stand-up (with audiences and critics alike) for 20 years now. He is currently on tour with his new show Spoiler Alert which heads to Bradford Alhambra next weekend.

His success has led to him appearing on television in the diverse likes of Mock The Week, Father Ted, and The One Show and Countryfile. He is also co-host with fellow Irish comic Dara O’Briain of the highly acclaimed Dara & Ed’s Big Adventure and follow up Dara & Ed’s Road To Mandalay, both on BBC 2.

One of the things Byrne discusses in Spoiler Alert is family life. He is firmly of a belief that the current breed of parents spoil their kids rotten whether it’s to do with the ever-increasing size of garden trampolines, or his own kids’ demand for elderflower cordial. “My dad wasn’t a bad dad, he was just a 1970s dad,” he says. “I could never see my children ever again from this moment on, and I’ve already done more parenting then he did in my entire life.”

In the show he compares and contrasts the old-school child-rearing days with 21st century methods and suggests that there are different ways to learn how to be a mum or dad. “I grew up in what I would call an aspirational household in that my parents bettered themselves over the course of my childhood. My mother was a radiographer and ended up a lecturer in radiography, while my dad was a sheet metal worker and went up to a supervisory role. I’d still say that you are expected to do a lot more parenting than our parents did.”

For the show Ed extends his analysis on the culture of entitlement to look at areas where we could perhaps do with being spoiled a little bit more. “Where I think we’re not acting spoiled enough is in the political arena. We have a tendency to accept what’s happening and that’s where we should be acting more entitled: we are literally entitled to the government we want.”

Spoiler Alert also continues a theme that he’s tackled in previous shows, that of his gradual shift from being a working-class Dubliner to a fully paid-up rural-residing member of the middle classes.

As well as stories about his two young sons, Ed weaves in routines about running out of petrol in the most awkward place imaginable, helping rescue an injured man in the Cairngorms, and the nation-dividing EU referendum campaign and result. His way of tackling Brexit is to draw an analogy with the time his son was determined to touch an electric fence with his dad trying to warn him of the dangers. “I was telling the story of the electric fence for a while, and then suddenly it struck me that it was Brexit in microcosm. I don’t want to alienate half of the population or maybe a third of my audience, but it works as an analogy whichever side you’re on. The government told you not to do this and that it would be a terrible idea, but you said ‘no, we want to do it anyway’. So now we’re doing it and it’s proving a terrible idea. I do think it’s a fair analogy, but no doubt for some it will come across as me being a typical liberal elite Remoaner.”

Bradford Alhambra, 
December 9. 01274 432000 or bradford-theatres.co.uk 

Ed Bryne appears in other Yorkshire venues in the New Year www.edbyrne.com