Dara O Briain: Craic Dealer Page #5

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In fact, in Newcastle on the tour,

we had three prison officers from a prison called Frankland Prison.

And we were saying to them, how brilliant would that be if every

day they went round to the cells and read the lads their horoscopes?

How fantastic? "Oh, you might be going on a long journey. No..."

LAUGHTER:

"Oh, but there's new love!"

LAUGHTER:

It is a soft target, but here is why I like doing it.

They took a complaint against me and they submitted it to the BBC

and they did one against Brian Cox as well.

Every time the complaint was rejected they'd resubmit it, so it moved up the levels.

And it kept going up the levels to a thing called the BBC Trust,

which is like the head of the BBC.

You should read the ruling of the BBC.

You should just read the tone, which is just,

"Ah, would you ever f*** off?

"What? I've got to worry about this?

"I've got all of Mexico complaining about Top Gear."

LAUGHTER:

"I don't give a shite about this."

Cos the bloke who runs the BBC Trust is an old Dublin lad going,

"Ah, Jesus, stop it...

"Ya big prick. Ha-ha-ha-ha..."

Sorry, just one for the Dubs.

Sorry. Anyway, they took the complaint.

If you want a fight, let's have a fight.

Very, very straightforward. Here's my argument against them -

you have to come with me a little bit, but I know you will.

This is how it starts.

A lot of people are very down on racism.

I do like pausing at this stage and feeling an audience go,

"Where's he going with this?"

LAUGHTER:

"An unexpected twist!"

Very down on racism -

they say it is one of the worst social evils they can imagine.

"How dare you do that?" they say.

"How dare you ascribe to me personality traits?

"You don't even know me, but you tell me that you know me

"and you know these things about me.

"You say I share these traits with a large group, you don't

"know them, I don't know them,

"and you're saying not only do we have these same character traits,

"but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny.

"And you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what?

"On the back of a fluke of birth.

"How dare you do that? What?

"Oh, Capricorn."

LAUGHTER:

Here's the thing.

If you want a clumsy tool to divide the population into distinct groups

so that you can make predictions, racism is way better than astrology.

In fact, if you remember nothing else from this gig,

if you wake up with everything else out of your head, remember just

that fragment where I went,

"Racism is way better than astrology."

That's your hashtag for the gig - #racismiswaybetterthanastrology.

Don't mix it up. Don't you...!

If I find any of you going, "What was the show about?"

"Oh, it was great. He said, 'Racism is for the dads.'"

LAUGHTER:

"When you're a dad, you're allowed to be a little bit racist."

"He's right, I've learnt a lot of things..."

Anyway, racism - way better than astrology.

Here's the proof.

Write down all the star signs - 12 of them.

Then get another piece of paper

and write down all the different racial groupings you can think of.

You get to 50, 60, easily.

Then, if you're Irish, you can start going county by county.

That's another 32.

Here, in this country, you start going,

"Glaswegians do this, whatever.

"Geordies do this and Scousers..."

You'll get up to 80 easily, at which point racism is six or seven

times more powerful than astrology in dividing up the population.

And here's the clincher...

how much better would Daybreak be...

LAUGHTER:

..if once a week they had a racist in making predictions?

LAUGHTER:

We'd all tune in to watch that.

"So, Terry, what's ahead of us for the next seven days?"

"Well, it's going to be a big week for the Jews."

LAUGHTER:

That's my racist face.

I am a nerd. I'm a tech-nerd as well.

I quite like watching us scrabble to keep up with technology.

We think because we're at the very breaking edge of all

technology that somehow we're geniuses.

If we ever fell back in time, fell through a wormhole

and landed in Renaissance Italy and

we landed in front of a council of the finest minds -

Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo -

and we think we'd be gods.

They'd look to us, like, oh, my God.

We'd jump-start science. We'd be a wonder of the age.

We'd tell them things they've never heard - it would be incredible.

No, we're three questions away from looking like f***ing eejits.

Question one - "What do you have in the future, traveller in time?"

And you go, "We have an amazing think called a computer.

"A computer sits in the room. We have them in all houses in the world

"and it sends information all over the world and it draws information in."

"My God," they'd say, sketching furiously, "that is amazing." "And how does it keep going?"

"Well, it's connected to the wall by a cable."

"And what happens there?"

"I don't really know."

LAUGHTER:

"They've tried to explain it to me any number of times.

"I've never really got it, to be honest.

"Basically, there's a thing that lives in the wall...

"and it makes the pictures change."

They are walking away at this stage and you are clutching,

"Wait, wait. We have a thing called a fridge in the future.

"A fridge is an amazing machine because it keeps cold on the inside and we can put food in it

"and it doesn't rot and that means we are healthier for longer..."

They'll go, "That's amazing. How does it work?"

- "It hums."

- LAUGHTER

"And the humming is in some way related to the cold."

"What keeps it humming?"

"Ah, it's connected to the wall..."

LAUGHTER:

"Is this the same thing that made the pictures change?"

"Could be."

Name a simple machine we use every day.

MAN:
Microwave.

Microwave is the simplest f***ing machine you could think of?

What house of the future do you live in where the simplest machine

you have...? "I'll just go to the microwave...on my jetpack."

- Simpler than that.

- AUDIENCE SHOUTS OUT

Kettle, toaster - very good.

Could you imagine explaining a toaster to Michelangelo?

"You take a piece of bread, you put it into the machine.

"You press down...and you wait."

LAUGHTER:

"What happens? Does it double the bread, change the bread into other foodstuffs,

"thus ending hunger?

"Does this machine stop famine?"

- "No, it just makes toast."

- LAUGHTER

"But we can make toast. We hold bread up to a flame on a fork."

"Ah, but this does two sides."

LAUGHTER:

APPLAUSE:

"500 years of science and advancement

"and you can make two-sided toast?"

"I like two-sided toast."

"And what keeps the machine hot?"

LAUGHTER:

HE MUMBLES:

"It's connected to the wall."

All right. Non-electrical.

Simple non-electrical machine we use every day?

AUDIENCE SHOUT SUGGESTIONS

Toilet! Of all the things. Can you imagine explaining a toilet to Botticelli?

"You gather your robes around you and evacuate your waist into it.

"Then you press a button and it's all taken away."

"Where does it go?"

LAUGHTER:

"It goes into the wall."

LAUGHTER:

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