Life after the man who was nearly James Bond

It was the show that Des Bishop had dreaded most – the first since his father’s death. How did he feel once it was over?

'I KEEP getting my tenses mixed up," Des Bishop laughs into the microphone. He could be forgiven if he is slightly confused. For almost a year now, Bishop has been performing his comedy act My Father Was Nearly James Bond, based on the life and times of his father Mike, whose dauntless battle with lung cancer forms the framework for the show.

Except there is the blackest twist to this night, because the audience knows that Mike Bishop died in New York a week before and now his oldest son is back on stage in Galway and about to tell hundreds of strangers in a darkened room details both raucous and intimate about the man he knew.

Bishop’s flight arrived on the Friday morning of the show: he was beyond exhaustion. “A lot of Red Bull,” he will say later when asked where he found the energy to get up there. And he is a bit mixed up because he has grown used to performing this show with his father spiritually and actually by his side; on several occasions, his father made a cameo appearance at the end in full tuxedo.

But tonight, he is still trying to come to terms with the fact that the subject that both father and son decided to treat with a mixture of cavalier humour and fierce honesty – death – has had its way. So when he strides on to the stage with startling energy and notices four empty seats in the front row, he takes the chance to detonate whatever sense of fragility he may be feeling.

“What the f***? Where are the c********rs in the front row? They better have a good excuse, man! This is gonna be a good show. Mightn’t be funny . . . but it’s gonna be a good show!” And then he is off, all bravura and unapologetic honesty.

Who is Des Bishop? Over the past decade, most Irish people became gradually aware of this lean, intense American bouncing around the comedy clubs making recognisable and sometimes stinging critiques of Irish society in the broadest Noo Yawk accent. He was caustic, affectionate and generally profane. Occasionally, he alluded to his childhood in Queens, but more often than not, he was just Des Bishop, proclaiming on Ireland and inviting the question: who does this guy think he is?

This is the show that answers that and more. Bishop first began working on the material after his father’s diagnosis in November 2009.

“I had a lot of very flat nights in Australia,” he recalls after the Galway show. “You know, people turning up to see a comedy show don’t expect to hear about cancer.” (Although Bishop chronicled his own diagnosis with testicular cancer with unflinching honesty and humour.)

Gradually, the show evolved into what Bishop calls “the heroics of fatherhood”. Performed with a slide show of family snaps, Bishop narrates his father’s life, from rootless childhood – “My father was born of an English father and Irish mother. So he was raised to hate himself” – to highly successful male model in London in the 1970s. “He was a pretty sexy dude,” Bishop states.

His father had the cinematic looks of Paul Newman, if not the same range; he lost out to George Lazenby in a screen test to succeed Sean Connery as Bond. Instead, he became the "Condor man" in the tobacco advert of the 1970s and had minor speaking roles in Zuluand Day of the Triffids, in which he played a blind pilot. "He was blinded during the flight," Bishop clarifies on stage. "He wasn't hired blind. It wasn't Ryanair."

But when Bishop senior moved to New York, he abandoned all dreams of celluloid glory, took a job in a Fifth Avenue retail store and, with his wife, Eileen, raised his three boys.

And this is at the heart of Bishop’s theme: that his father’s role as father was much more glorious than the lost fantasy of Hollywood that he privately held for most of his life.

The Bishop boys were simultaneously proud and dismissive of their father’s glamorous period, repeatedly watching his films but taunting him with lines from his brief acting career spoken in plummy English accents. “Mayday! Mayday! There’s still no reply, Sir.” Only through his illness – and the comedy show – did his father fully let go of the idea that he had missed out on the acting life and, of course, ended up hearing the ovation he yearned for.

“He was a ham,” Bishop shrugs, assuring the crowd that his father would find it okay to laugh at all this. The show is energy and moves from confrontational to tender with hardly a pause for breath: as in Pat Comer’s wonderful documentary on the show that was broadcast just a few weeks ago, Bishop brings people into the family home in Flushing.

Many of the audience would have seen Comer’s film, so they could picture the house. The comedian goes back to a night in 1993 when he comes in drunk and believes he has “caught” his father watching a porn channel. Or he recounts a very intimate conversation they shared in the hospital. He talks about the absurdities of the American-Irish childhood, about alcoholism and the smallest rows and stories that came to feel significant as he pieced this show together. This particular show – the first after his father’s death – was the one he dreaded most.

Afterwards, he was exhausted and content: glad he had gone through with what was a risky idea.

"I heard the music for Zulubefore I went on and I just thought: this is going to be tough. But once I got out there, it was fine. It felt good."

In fact, it felt electric. Bishop has a loyal constituency here and they were with him on this night. This is far from comfortable material and confident and commanding as Bishop is, you never for a moment forget you are watching a son up there under lights struggling with the fresh loss of a father that he clearly idolised.

In the end, doing the show was a showman comic’s natural response to the showman in his late father. And he made it work. He stormed it.

See desbishop.com for upcoming tour dates