Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West Review: Comedian Serves Too Much And Not Enough

​For various summers, he drives around the country in a vintage Mercedes, like the one his father owns, in a number of Sunday night holiday-themed series on RTÉ1.

If you’re looking for something a little louder and brusque, something to entice the RTÉ2 audience after the turn, you can get a comedian to host it.

And if no comedians are available, you can always ask The 2 Johnnies.

I guess episode one of two parts Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West (RTÉ1) tonight can leave viewers watching with certain expectations — perhaps for something a little lighter and funnier — feeling a bit confused.

It has all the familiar attributes of a travel magazine: zoomed-in photos, stunning landscapes, glorious skies. It even had a Honda 50 and later, Tiernan sailed to the Aran Islands.

But despite all this, and the similarity in title to the aforementioned 2016 Mr Creedon series Creedon’s Epic East, it is not a travel magazine in the usual sense.

It has as much to do with contemplation as it does discovery – “the rambling through part of the Irish imagination”, as Tiernan put it.

“People with curved heads end up in crooked places,” he said. He wanted to find out how artists, writers and musicians of the past were inspired by the winding landscapes of the West and the different characteristics of its three constituent parts.

In Munster, according to Tiernan, it is “money”; in Donegal, it is “naughty”; in Connacht, it is “a feeling of sadness and suffering”.

Among those helping him today is the poet Louis De Paor, director of the Center for Irish Studies at NUIG, who notes that the “silence” of famine is still present in the West, “for periods of time” empty used to be occupied”.

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The mood lightened slightly as Tiernan spoke to the traveling novelist and short story writer Kevin Barry, who was born in Limerick but settled in Sligo.

Tiernan found it amusing when Barry revealed that he works with his desk facing the wall. The first time he looked out the window to see his surroundings, he thought, “This looks like John McGahern, just like that!”

Honestly, I could have done a bit more with Tiernan and Barry together. But the traveling nature of the show is that the encounter is brief, and then it takes place somewhere and someone else.

In a newspaper interview last week, Tiernan said he and the production team essentially picked a starting point and then followed them for the next two years.

It certainly was like that as Tiernan glided from place to place, identifying annotations flying by.

Sometimes, if he puts a condensed version of his Saturday night talk show, back in January, into the wild.

He spoke with the violinist Altan Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, who agreed with him that there was a section of Donegals who seemed to belong to the “afterlife” of spirits and fairies.

He met Garry Hynes, co-founder of the Druid Theater, who recalled producing JM Synge’s first film. Playboy of the Western world on Inis Mean in 1982.

There’s an archive footage of the production, as well as a clip from 2002 Tiernan talking to narrator and religious thinker John Moriarty. Tiernan said his “dream revelations” have been “a constant companion” to him throughout the years.

The show briefly included WB Yeats and Lady Gregory, playwrights Tuam Tom Murphy, Flann O’Brien, and painters Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry. It is simultaneously too much and not enough.

Tiernan paused to catch his breath to enjoy Skellig Michael’s “strange, quirky, and exhilarating” atmosphere. The Star Wars connection was not mentioned. It’s not that kind of program.

Rating: Three stars

Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West airs tonight (December 7) at 9:35pm on RTÉ One