Ed Byrne's got some sparky thinking on Brexit issue

Tickets have gone on sale for Marine Hall date by Irish comedian Ed Byrne

Past tours have earned him slots on shows such as Mock The Week, The One Show and All Star Mr & Mrs, while his love of hillwalking resulted in him writing a regular column for The Great Outdoors magazine.

As he prepares to launch his latest touring show, Spoiler Alert, which comes to Lytham’s Lowther Pavilion on November 7, the Irish comic is firmly of a belief that the current breed of parents spoil their kids rotten, comparing old-school and 21st century child-rearing.

“My dad wasn’t a bad dad, he was just a 1970s dad,” he says. “I could never see my children ever again from this moment on, and I’ve already done more parenting than he did in my entire life.

“I’d still say that you are expected to do a lot more parenting than our parents did and that’s a weird thing because you tend to think that your parents are where you learned parenting from.

“But you don’t, really, it’s more that you look around you to see what’s going on with other parents.”

For the show, Ed extends his analysis on the culture of entitlement to look at areas where we could perhaps be spoiled a little bit more.

“Where I think we’re not acting spoiled enough is in the political arena. We have a tendency to accept what’s happening and that’s where we should be acting more entitled: We are literally entitled to the government we want. We’re spoiled in all these little ways, but not spoiled enough.”

Besides stories about his two young sons, Ed weaves in the nation-dividing campaign and result of the EU referendum - drawing an analogy with the time his son was determined to touch an electric fence with his dad trying to warn him of the dangers.

“I was telling the story of the electric fence for a while, and then suddenly it struck me that it was Brexit in microcosm. I don’t want to alienate [any of] my audience, but it works as an analogy whichever side you’re on.

“The government told you not to do this and that it would be a terrible idea, but you said ‘no, we want to do it anyway’. So now we’re doing it and it’s proving a terrible idea. I do think it’s a fair analogy, but no doubt for some it will come across as me being a typical liberal elite Remoaner.”

Spoiler Alert also continues a theme he has tackled in previous shows, that of his gradual shift from being a working-class Dubliner to a fully paid-up rural-residing member of the middle classes - going so far as to brandish those signifiers of social mobility: A bowtie and a chainsaw.

“It’s one of two I own: that one is the smaller of the two,” Ed remarks of his chainsaw rather than his neckwear.