Oliver Callan: ‘Varadkar’s office constantly complained about columns, sketches. Harris has been in a month and nothing’

“I used to wonder why no one else could do voices,” says Oliver Callan. “What’s wrong with them? They just choose a voice and then they stick with that voice, forever? That doesn’t make sense. There’s the musical instrument of an amazing larynx and diaphragm, your entire mouth, roof, tongue and teeth. How does Michael O’Leary stay as Michael O’Leary the whole time?”

These days Oliver Callan is being Oliver Callan a bit more than in the past. Though the 43-year-old still satirises the nation every Friday on Callan’s Kicks on radio, he’s now employed to be himself for five hours a week on RTÉ Radio 1′s recently vacated 9am-10am slot. In person he speaks very quickly, zipping from subject to subject, referencing forgotten politicians and obscure footballers, his own voice rich and expressive but regionally neutral.

He’s long ago lost his Monaghan accent. “I always blame news reading, which is probably what it is,” he says. “I suppose I just designed the voice I like the most … I love listening to old clips of broadcasters. Pat Kenny today sounds nothing like he did 30 years ago.”

Where did his fascination with voices come from? “I was always the quiet one so I was definitely the observer and not the participant.”

He impersonated teachers for his classmates. “You had to participate just enough to not get bullied. Comedy and doing voices was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s a bulletproof vest’. We had a [teacher] from Roscommon who did a very aggressive clearing of the throat. And when he would laugh – ‘Heh heh heh’ – the most evil, villainous laugh.”

He imitates Michael O’Leary and Marty Morrissey in quick succession, noting the part of the throat or larynx or chest the vocal character comes from. “I’m thinking, Where is that accent from? Maybe Dublin, but the parent is from the country. You need to know Marty Morrissey’s spent time in the United States to understand what’s going on with that accent. There’s a snarl on the vowels.”

What did his farming parents and three siblings make of his childhood interests? “I was kind of bookish and my mother spotted it and would bring me to the library, but no one else read books. I always wonder, especially now they’re older and we talk about it, what [my parents] might have been if they’d continued going to school. My mum didn’t even do the Inter Cert [now Junior Cert]. My dad was expelled for clobbering a Brother.”

He talks about his parents’ work ethic and the physical labour of farming. “I remember I was helping [my mother] when she was pregnant with my sister, in a very hot summer. I was 11, helping her milk cows.”

He recalls sharing tapes of Dermot Morgan on Scrap Saturday and staying up during the 1997 election writing the results in a foolscap pad. “It was a big deal in Monaghan because it was the first Sinn Féin TD since the hunger strikes. My grandmother [in Cork] was obsessive about the news. When she died, we found that she had kept cuttings of marquee moments in Irish history – the pope’s visit, Bobby Sands, the [Bishop] Eamonn Casey affair, and then abuse cases. She would open the newspaper on top of crumbs and dirty dishes and you could not interrupt her for love nor money.”

I always regret the way I left Today FM. I had made great friends there and Ian Dempsey was especially kind to me

—  Callan on working at Today FM

What did he want from life as a teenager? “It was knowledge you wanted. There’s so much out there and it was so hard to get.”

In transition year he did a stint at The Dundalk Democrat, a “Dickensian local newspaper” with a printing press in the basement where he savoured the “smell of ink” before going on to study journalism in DCU. Soon after he graduated, he was working as a newsreader on Today FM and noticed Mario Rosenstock’s comedic Gift Grub segment on Ian Dempsey’s show. “I’d search the voices he wasn’t doing and give [a MiniDisc] to Ian Dempsey. I started doing it when Mario was off, which is where I invented the Dobbo character and Plastic Sheeting [Paschal Sheehy].”

How did that fit in with news reading? “Someone texted in [once] and caused a crisis. ‘That guy doing Pat Kenny on Gift Grub sounds a little bit like the guy who reads the news’.”

He left Today FM to create his own projects, ultimately moving on to create Nob Nation on The Gerry Ryan Show on RTÉ, but the departure was more acrimonious than he would have liked. “I always regret the way I left Today FM,” he says. “I had made great friends there and Ian Dempsey was especially kind to me. Mario was generous with his time and encouragement too.”

There were other things happening in his life at the time. He has spoken in the past about being controlled by a “toxic” person around this period. It wasn’t a romantic situation, he says, but it was “five years of horrific violence and coercive control”. While under the influence of this person, he missed family events, distanced himself from friends and alienated himself from professional contacts. And he experienced terrible violence. “I had my nose broken. I had my collarbone broken. My front teeth are chipped.”

[ Barely a month into his talkshow, Oliver Callan’s nearly asleep at the wheel ]

He walked away for good after a prolonged assault. “I can’t even remember how I got to the hospital,” he says. “I had to go home in a state a few days later.” His parents were shocked and called the guards. “I didn’t want to because I didn’t want [people to say], ‘Ah that’s the poor comedian who was hammered on, the fecking eejit,’ which was the attitude people had [at that time].”

He has had the opportunity in recent years to reflect on how his experiences affected his attitude to life. “I know that a huge part of what we call coercive control is to sever you entirely from friends and decent people. I was in the closet, young and green: a perfect candidate for abuse.”

Recently he interviewed abuse survivor Meav McLoughlin-Doyle and, “even though I wasn’t in a relationship with [my assailant], it was almost exactly the same stuff”. He thinks he had post-traumatic stress disorder for a while.

“You have moments where you have a dream and you wake up and go, ‘How the f**k is that still in my head?’ But at the same time you wake up and go ‘Oh my God, I have my life!’” His husband, John Lannin, has helped him recover from it. “It takes someone to tell you ‘You know you’re now shaking with fear? What’s going on?’”

Callan revealed publicly that he was gay live on the Saturday Night Show in 2011. He believes that this was one of the things that helped free him from coercive control. Being in the closet made him vulnerable. “You’re watching, making sure you don’t get caught out.”

When he came out, everything changed. “Everything you kind of pined after but didn’t think you could get, just starts to happen,” he says. “I met John in March of 2012. My gay friends are always going, ‘F**king eejit. He’s been in the closet all of his life and now he has a boyfriend and now he’s married.’”

At the time he had no work but was out and free of the person he calls his “tormentor”. He wants to stress the hopeful side of his experience. “I was broke, had no career, but had never been happier. I do often wake up and go ‘I’m free! Dobby is free!’”

The work returned. His satirical show Callan’s Kicks began in 2013 (there have been radio and TV iterations). In the ensuing years he seemed more fearlessly outspoken than he used to be, writing pointed articles The Irish Times and for the Sun. He had opinions, he says, “but not an agenda”. In 2016 he spoke out on The Late Late Show about the oversized influence of litigious, then media-owning billionaire Denis O’Brien. “I didn’t plan it. I was out in RTÉ thinking, ‘Why is nobody talking about this stuff? This is a huge gargantuan chilling effect thing that’s hanging over the entire country, literally affecting the conversations we’re having.’”

How did RTÉ execs respond to his outspokenness? “They hated it,” he says. “I was just constantly being threatened to be sacked. But most of the daft managers who used to take social media way too seriously [are] gone now. There’s a good few sensible people in there.”

There have been some issues over the years. The Callan’s Kicks TV series he did in 2014 wasn’t recommissioned. It only returned to TV in 2020. “We didn’t find out for years that it was literally [because of] all the complaints from government,” he claims.

Does he still get complaints? “[Leo] Varadkar’s office constantly complained,” he says. “Endlessly. About columns, about sketches. The most innocuous bit about the housing crisis got a complaint. Simon Harris has been in a month and nothing. The complaints have ended.”

He talks about the mechanics of developing voices and personae for public figures. He talks about the “Beavis and Butthead laugh” he gave Leo Varadkar, the way Simon Harris repeatedly says “as Taoiseach, because he can’t believe it himself” and the posh way that Michael D Higgins says “Ye-es … I’m convinced that only happened after his first official trip to Britain”.

He’s also an audiophile. “I do my own sound mix so I can layer stuff up,” he says. “Some super-nerds like to listen to it more than once because they can catch little throwaway jokes in the background if they wear good headphones.”

I tell him that I don’t wear good headphones. “The executive producers aren’t wearing them either.”

The people who come in after always get penalised and they have to talk about the thing they’re not involved in, and also adhere to all the new horrible rules

—  Callan on the RTÉ pay controversy

There’s been a bit of a shift towards absurdism in his work in recent years. “The first [Callan’s Kicks] 2013-2016, it was normal, conventional politics,” he says. “Politicians started exaggerating the world themselves in 2016. When the backlash to progressive politics really begins, with Trump and Brexit, we had to exaggerate the exaggerated, which is probably why I had to become slightly absurd.”

His new career as a daytime presenter came as a surprise. When RTÉ instigated home-working at the outset of Covid, he offered to do any work they needed because he had his own studio. He didn’t expect to be deputising for Ryan Tubridy shortly afterwards. He certainly didn’t expect to eventually replace him.

He has found his own approach. “I treat the monologuey thing as journalism. I read the news anyway and have thoughts in my head and I just say them aloud. I’m not famous enough to say ‘I had ice cream yesterday on Dún Laoghaire Pier’. I can’t get away with that, because I don’t host The Late Late Show, and people don’t care what I do.”

What was RTÉ’s disastrous year like from the inside? “RTÉ is suddenly on red alert, feeling really battered,” he says. “Someone told me years ago that the biggest fear of RTÉ producers and executives is being called in front of an Oireachtas committee.” He mimics a TD. “I want to, first of all, begin by making 10 minutes of a statement that your man has already said, but I need to do it anyway, so they’ll use this clip on my local radio.”

What did he make of the scandal? “If I say anything about the scandal, I’ll have said more than any of the people involved in the scandal. The people who come in after always get penalised and they have to talk about the thing they’re not involved in, and also adhere to all the new horrible rules.”

A little later he says: “Ryan Tubridy has left the national conversation but his scandal is still there … We’re all still looking at each other going, ‘What the hell happened there?’”

He feels closely observed. The recent radio listenership figures showed the programme had lost 13,000 listeners. “I was going, ‘I’m going to be one of those heads [in the newspapers] with the arrow going down!’ but I was kind of looking at the figures going, ‘Oh my God, 330,000 people listen to the show. This is insane.’ I don’t have the billboard of The Late Late Show, and given the way they treated the previous presenter, the star who was paid extra in secret, this theoretically should collapse. It’s still brand new so it’s going to take a long time to know what the figure is.”

He laughs. “That sounds like I’m saying, ‘If you think that’s bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet’.”

Callan loves interviewing people. He’s always been good at reading people and now he uses those skills to create rapport. He flags some of the show’s successes. “We got sponsorship in the first month of the show [from Its4women.ie], which is almost unheard of. And the sponsorship for a year covers the entire contract I have. [An interview with actor] Ruth Jones gave us a million views on social media. And at least two of our guests have got book contracts [from their appearances].”

He talks about better-paid presenters who feel sorry for him on his €150,000 salary. Personally, he thinks he’s well paid, but “I do think I should have got the same as [Ryan Tubridy] was being offered, which was €170,000. But there was no movement on the contract because there were about 30 other people waiting anxiously behind me to take my place.”

In the new, post-Tubridy regime, he needs to get permission from RTÉ for external work. He recently turned down a well-paid corporate gig. I say: “I guess your live concerts will be permitted.”

He says: “That’s what I guess too.”

He’s guessing? “I had to sign a contract that said you agree to all the rules that weren’t available at the time of the contract. My lawyer is going, ‘You can’t agree to rules that haven’t been written yet, it would just get thrown out everywhere.’ That’s just the new regime we’re in post scandal. There’s nobody sitting and having a long lunch with an agent and just writing [the contract] together, which probably, I now feel, is what happened.” Ultimately, he likes the people he works with and the people he works for. “I trust [management] to be sound and practical about things.”

The truth is, he’s loving both of his jobs and is in a good place. In 2022 he married Lannin, who works in tech and so is refreshingly detached from the entertainment industry. “Happiness is the best revenge,” says Callan. “Someone wrote that on a fluffy Instagram [post]. It’s completely true. I know there are worse things that can happen than being fired.”

He also knows that few licence payers will have sympathy with a radio presenter lamenting his working conditions but he can’t help joking about it.

“I was thinking of the glory days of people being paid at least twice what I’m getting for the same show, and [they] could do whatever the hell they wanted. And also, executives literally flew themselves and their spouses abroad for [junkets] on RTÉ credit cards.” He laughs. “I’m Tony Soprano, amn’t I? I’ve come in at the end!”