Comedian Dara O Briain has said he wanted to find his birth mother to tell her “it worked out OK” in his life after being adopted as a child.
The Irish stand-up, 52, spoke about his experience of searching and finding his birth parents in his previous comedy tour So Where Were We?
Appearing on ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Tuesday, he said he felt inspired to find his birth mother after watching the 2013 drama film Philomena which sees a mother work with a journalist to search for her son after he was taken from her decades before.
“I remember going ‘Oh, I have an obligation to this woman to tell her it worked out OK’. So I then started doing the search”, he said.
“I think there’s a tendency to portray it as with a swell of music …
“You’re two complete strangers standing across from each other. So it was more awkward.”
The comic, who grew up in County Wicklow in Ireland, said his wife Susan pointed out that the “informality” of his home country may have eased the tension.
“We have an informality in Ireland with each other and a very good kind of warm, surface level of conversation, and you can slip into that very, very easily”, he explained.
“(My wife) she’s British, she said that might have been more formal, more difficult maybe here (in England), but in Ireland we can do a chat, and then we can cover the fact that this is an enormously important thing.”
“They were very sweet about not letting on until somebody accidentally mentioned that they had watched me for years”, he added.
The comic transformed the experience into a stand-up show, with the first part being an “emotional” story along the lines of Philomena, and the second part described as more like the Christmas classic Elf.
“If you imagine where I appear in a man’s life, a giant man in a clown suit appears in some guy’s life and goes ‘Hello daddy’, so that’s the second chapter of the story”, he said.
He added: “It’s probably more that the first chapter involves a woman having to make a terribly difficult decision, and then the Irish state obscuring the information, and it being a whole thing about me having to go into an office and go through hundreds of files to find the information … it was more like a detective story of trying to find out what it’s about.
“The second thing is much more negotiating the fact that these people do not know and you have to go into their lives.”
He said his birth and adoptive parents were both “very good” with him going on this journey as they understood it was his “story to tell”.
The comic is back out on the road touring his new show, titled Re:Creation, in Ireland and the UK.
O Briain previously hosted the popular topical panel show Mock The Week, which ended in 2022.
