Tiernan's new DVD, Loose, is a bit of a first in that it's one whole show but it's spliced together from seven different gigs over a two-year period.
The first show was at the Glór centre in Ennis, then it moved on to his home-from-home, Vicar Street in Dublin and then on to Cuba comedy club in the city where he lives, Galway. He then took it down to Cork to play the Live At The Marquee Festival as part of the city's European City of Culture celebrations before bringing it over to Montreal where he performed at the Gesu Centre de Creativite at the Just For Laughs festival. It then travelled back across the Atlantic to take in the Assembly Rooms venue at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before finishing up at the Electric Picnic music and comedy festival in Laois last September. There were tons of other appearances around Ireland and the UK as well, but for logistical reasons, he kept it down to these particular seven shows.
"It was just to do something different with it," he explains. "I wanted to try a new format and because the show had been to so many different places, it seemed like the best thing to do. It was a nightmare to piece it all together. I spent a full two weeks locked into an editing suite, trying to cut from one show to the next so there would still be continuity. I think it works well and I don't seem to miss a beat. What usually happens with my tours is the show that I start off evolves into something completely different by the time it's half-way through so at the very end of a tour, you're sort of seeing a different show. It's just that things change, and material comes and go. The core remains the same but if you went to the very first Loose show and then to the very last Loose show, you would notice a big difference. What I've done on the DVD is to keep the essential parts of the show intact, so it does flow. There was no real reason why a certain part was taken from the Ennis show or a certain part was taken from the Montreal show for example. It's just to give people a flavour of the different contexts the show was delivered in.
I don't think this sort of thing has been done before, at least in terms of a comedy DVD".