Showtime for the O'Comics

A seven-minute slot in the Montreal comedy festival can be a passport to chat-show hosting - or, at the very least, a sitcom part. Brian Boyd finds out how the Irish showcase, the O'Comics, got on and sees it through the camera's eye

"The Irish are here - and this time they're not looking for potatoes." Thus ran the blurb for the first ever Irish comedy showcase show at July's Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, held annually in Montreal. In its 20th year, Just For Laughs is the biggest comedy festival on the American continent and while it may not have the strength or depth of Edinburgh, it's the route one approach, for the invited comics, to break the US market - a good seven-minute slot at the festival can, and frequently does, get you a role in a sit-com/a film deal/your own chat show. It is, in fact, so much of a trade fair that you wonder why the acts don't just don bikinis and drape themselves over cars, such is the level of schmoozing. Little wonder it's known as "Edinburgh without the art".

For many years, Channel 4 sent over a TV crew to follow the proceedings but, it having dropped out a few years ago, the Dublin independent Graph Films went over with a camera crew this year. For six weeks from next Monday on Network 2 you can see what they found. "We got in touch with them at a TV fair," says Graph's Darren Smith, "and it was just an amazing piece of luck that this year the festival had their first ever Irish comedy showcase, which they called O'Comics. Ed Byrne, who had been at the festival before, will host the six shows which are broken up thematically: "there's one on Canadian comics, one on British comics, an Irish special, a female special, a US special and a Best Of The Rest," he says.

Mixing footage from the shows, interviews with many of the acts and Ed Byrne wandering around the city taking a reading on the cultural barometer, it's a good look at the business end of the industry as well as a chance to see many acts who, for whatever reason, never make it to this side of the Atlantic.

The Irish showcase, compèred by Byrne and featuring Deirdre O'Kane, Colin Murphy and Dara O'Briain, happily proved to be one of the talking points of the festival. The fabulously titled O'Comics show - "They will shamrock 'n' roll you!" exclaimed the programme - was held, like the majority of the Just For Laughs shows, in one of Montreal's 40 performance venues.

The big gala shows featuring household names are held in the city's St Denis Theatre and the footage from these is shown around the world. Dara O'Briain did so well in his club show that the festival's organisers, in what is believed to be a first, asked him on to perform at one of the gala nights.

"I did 30 minutes at the O'Comics night and evidently made an impression, so was asked to do the big televised gig," says O'Briain. "To be honest, at the time I was more impressed that Fred Willard (the star of the amazingly funny Best In Show film) was in the audience than anything else. Doing the gala is a big deal and because it's North American television, they give you seven minutes, so it has to be tightly scripted and they're very, very strict about profanity - I was told I couldn't use 'Jesus' or 'Christ' in the act, which for me was difficult, because they're the terms I use when I'm told I can't use the word 'f***'. And the tragedy here was that because I had to stay on to do the gala, I had to cancel a gig in a nightclub in Killarney."

As some idea of how a good gala appearance can affect your career, the Iranian-British comic, Omid Djalilli, who was on the same gala night as O'Briain, came off stage and was offered a £200,000 development deal by Frasier's Kelsey Grammer.

"It was a bizarre experience," remembers O'Briain. "You had to get to the theatre four hours before you were due to go on and you were warned about a red light flashing if you went over your allocated seven minutes. For me it was extra-strange because 10 years ago, watching those Channel 4 programmes of the Just For Laughs gala nights made me want to become a stand-up comic.

"Joan Rivers was the host and that was really strange because I noticed she had this poodle with her but had an assistant who would mind it for her."

You can see how O'Briain got on in programme three of the series. After the show, he was warmly congratulated by a man who he didn't recognise but turned out to be Brian Mulrooney, Canada's ex-Prime Minister. "Joan Rivers said to me afterwards: 'you've got a great future in the industry,' but she probably says that to everyone," he says. "But all the time when people were congratulating me, I had to ask around who they were."

With some interest being shown by US TV, O'Briain is hoping to go back again to Just For Laughs - "but only if they change the name from O'Comics".