TV PREVIEW:Jarlath Regan knew that a month at the Edinburgh Festival could be the making or the breaking of him - so bringing along a camera crew to witness how he got on was almost as big a risk as becoming a comic in the first place, writes Catherine Cleary.
WHAT DO YOU do when you are a nice, soft-spoken young man who wants to make a living from stand-up comedy? You've started out writing some of Ryan Tubridy's jokes, and now the Edinburgh Festival is coming up. It could be the making of you or it could be the most emotionally bruising and financially ruinous four weeks of your life.
So you do what anyone would when faced with potential adversity - reach for a TV documentary crew, create an alter ego with preposterous sideburns to act as your fictional agent, propose to your girlfriend in the middle of it all, and give it the ironic title Nobody Knows . . . Jarlath Regan.
The three-part documentary shows the talented young comic struggling through his ordeal, and reveals the economic realities of Edinburgh. The festival might have a history of catapulting Irish newcomers into the big time but it can cost the unknown act some €10,000 for a month of spirit-sapping, nightly gigs for an audience that might consist of a couple of people.
A 27-year-old former graphic designer, Regan was among the early wave of casualties from the property crash when he was fired from his job as an account manager in January 2006. He had been dabbling in part-time stand-up for a while and decided to turn it into a livelihood. He e-mailed "everyone in Dublin who needed someone to write a joke". The lucky break that paid his rent was his first gig writing a joke a week for Ryan Tubridy's television chat show.
Three months later, he was one of 13 hopefuls picked from a try-out in Vicar Street for a place on a trip to Montreal with more established Irish acts. This set him on the road to Edinburgh. It also introduced him to the comedy fraternity, that band of (mainly) brothers who had been in his shoes in earlier times.
During the documentary, Regan asks a few veterans for advice. The insights about Edinburgh from Kevin Gildea are memorable. Des Bishop told him to wake up every morning and "pretend yesterday didn't exist". PJ Gallagher tells him not to go and Dara Ó Briain warns him that he will be "fresh meat for the kill".
Regan very swiftly learned what they meant. Edinburgh is a hostile world for a newcomer during festival month. There were more than 1,000 comedy acts clamouring for audiences. Standing out from the crowd took large amounts of brass, of both the neck and cash variety.
"The people who are making all the money are the people who are selling the tickets, not the people who are performing," he says. An average audience might be two people. And after 30 nights of performing your act it becomes "a bit like saying Mass".
If Regan has a pushy bone in his body, it is not evident in his comedy persona. His conversational routine, with jokes about cautious parents ("my mother gets out the money for the toll bridge the night before she's due to drive over it") is rarely heckled because "it would be like picking on the weakest kid in the class".
But he found that nice guys tend to come last in Edinburgh. So he tamed a floppy fringe with hair products, glued two sideburns and a soul patch onto his face and dressed up as his own agent, Risteard Pritchard. Then he went around Edinburgh demanding press passes, poaching flyer people, braying into his mobile phone and representing his "client" as a bit of a fool who could do with a break.
"I was trying to see how much I could blag, really, so I invented this arrogant guy who thinks I'm an idiot."
As difficult as he found the festival, it is something he thinks everyone should experience. "It has its own peculiar logic and it is the most amazing place. This cloud of hysteria descends on the city."
Regan first travelled to the festival in 2006 with his friend, comedian Maeve Higgins. Afterwards they discussed the idea of making a documentary to chart the perils and pitfalls of a first-time performer. He was conscious that inviting independent production company Peer Pressure was a considerable risk.
"It is your career and you're left with a potentially damaging documentary after they move on to something else." Once they started, however, he "quickly forgot about the camera", and the director was interested in "trying to find the story in it" rather than imposing something from above.
One unexpected (and unfilmed) element was that he asked his girlfriend, Tina Rowland, to marry him. She said yes. Proposals apart, the programme is a glimpse of the business end of comedy, which is much more television-oriented than a decade ago. Does he find you have to be a regular guest on, say, The Panel to get audiences to go to live gigs?
"It's definitely the case and it's the nature of the beast. People are less likely to go to gigs if they haven't seen a comedian on the telly and it's normal that if you're going out for the night you won't take a risk if you know that there's sure-fire bets going. But that said, open-mic nights are doing fine."
Regan is at Cat Laughs in Kilkenny this weekend, his first time performing as a fully fledged act, honed slowly and painfully on the mean streets of Edinburgh. "In Kilkenny it's like a holiday camp for comedians."
He likens the role of the jobbing comic to his father, who is a horse trainer and who went to England at the age of 13 to follow his dream. His own childhood living in the Curragh was "near to perfect", he says, and family and friends provide much of the raw material for his act.
"I got a picture message on my mobile phone from my father," he tells an audience in the Laughter Lounge after our interview. "My first thought was, 'Someone's stolen Dad's phone.' When I opened it, there was the cutest message I've ever seen. It was a picture of a white board with the words 'Hi there. Haven't got the hang of texting on this phone yet but everything is going well'."
Nobody Knows . . . Jarlath Reganstarts on Friday, June 6th on TV3