Favourite book?
I'm currently reading Tales of the Hafidin – it's a series of Jewish folk tales. The western imagination is part-Greek, part-Jewish and, on this island, part-Celtic, and this book goes to the roots of old Jewish storytelling. The tales are slightly beguiling. They lean towards daft, Zen stories about a man walking into a pond and a frog popping off his head or something. It's storytelling research – it's more to keep me interested, but I'd hope that the fact I'm interested in this form of storytelling might give it a chance of surviving in a crowd. There's no formula to stand-up like there is in a boyband, it's about following whatever curiosities emerge.
Play
I recently went to see King of the Castle by Eugene McCabe in Galway, which was a phenomenal piece of work. It was about an old man and his inability to get his much younger wife pregnant, and what he does to try and remedy that. Eugene lives around the Border area, and I love the use of language by writers up there. To me, a writer like Eugene McCabe is like a morphine suppository: pleasant to receive, and the effects are overwhelming.
Artist
One of my favourites of the past few years is the artist Vicki Crowley. I think she's based near me in Galway but I saw her work in Brooks Hotel in Dublin, where I often stay. There's a simple picture (Friendly Discussions) that captured my attention. It's something you could do in a life drawing class, of four men leaning over a stone wall having a chat, and I was quite taken by it. It reminded me of male camaraderie and the easiness of manchats.
City
I went to Paris recently, and there was a spark of liveliness that I was very drawn to. If I was going to relocate, I’d try to find myself a little apartment there and get a tiny dog and spend the evenings in North African bars watching European soccer, and spend the days writing unperformable plays. The part of the city I was in seemed cultured and matured; it seems there’s an idiocy in cities you might find in Australia and America. That’s not their fault; their roots aren’t very deep. Those cities are maybe 200 years old, but cities like Paris are 2,000 years old.
Podcast
I've been listening to RTÉ's Drama On One. They have a great archive, so often after a show when I might be by myself in the bridal suite of a hotel in Monaghan, I'd have a couple of glasses of whiskey, then lie down in the dark and listen to a play by Pat McCabe or Aidan Matthews or a bit of Shakespeare.
Gadget
I’ve started smoking a tobacco pipe recently, and I have a three-pronged gadget that’s fairly indispensable. It’s used to tamp the tobacco into the bowl, to scoop the ashes out, and to open the airway between the bowl and the mouthpiece. Pipe-smoking is an old man’s sport. The way people smoke nowadays it looks like a pose, so I tend to do it on my own without anybody seeing me.
TV show
I get really turned off by murder and sex on television. I tried to watch Top of the Lake, but I got to the end of the first episode and I shouted "Jesus Christ" out loud, to myself. Something I did enjoy was Happy Valley with Sarah Lancashire. Even though it's a police procedural and there is some violence, it doesn't feel gratuitous.
Film
I'm a huge fan of cinema, and possibly the best film I've ever seen in my life was Song of Granite a week and a half ago, about a sean nós singer called Joe Heaney. I was totally engaged and altered and hypnotised by that film. Irish sean nós singing is so different to anything we'd hear – it's the opposite of pop, it's so far away from rock'n'roll and it's even a huge distance from folk singing. The film is shot in the same way, it has an unusual narrative that's unlike most of what you'd see in Irish cinema. It follows songs and moments, as well the life of Joe Heaney.
In conversation with Shilpa Ganatra
Tommy Tiernan appears in Derry Girls, airing on Channel 4 on Thursday, January 4th at 10pm
