The Scholar discovers that Rockall, that disputed gasfield-rich rock in the North Atlantic, is hollow and contains a secret undersea colony of Irish people exiled in the 60s by popular supervillain Eamon de Valera. Guest starring Tara Flynn, Donnacha O’Brien, Giles Brody and Rachel Ní Chuinn. You can listen on iTunes* or here on conorotoole.com or on your android podcast app! Just search ‘The Captain’ or ‘O’Toole Captain’ if that isn’t working. If it’s not in app’s database yet you can add the RSS manually by inputting http://conorotoole.com/feed/captain — About The Captain The Captain is a radio comedy about a plucky Irish oceanographic research ship whose captain is more interested in seeking Adventure than any of the boring science stuff he’s meant to be overseeing. Starring Conor O’Toole, Alison Spittle and Paul Timoney Written and directed by Diarmuid O’Brien and Conor O’Toole. Recorded by Rachel Ní Chuinn. Music by Bobby Ahern of No Monster Club. First broadcast on Ocean FM in County Sligo. Funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the television license fee.

So here’s a synopsis of what happened over the rest of my time at the Edinburgh festival: The old guy singing about the past who was on before our show kept running over and it was annoying! He even collected money off the audience that had come in to see me and Alison’s show who instead had to watch the end of his. -100 fringe points from that guy. I saw a dog with a flyer in his mouth who looked really excited and who I felt, was walking with purpose. We saw one of those awful minion guys and Alison wanted to get a photo with it. I didn’t want her to give it any money, so we took a shot from a distance and took off. Besides, we were in a rush to see Simon Munnery. I accidentally left my phone in the Stand for the second time at Munnery’s show. Luckily I had no UK data so the staff couldn’t send tweets out, as I fear they would’ve destroyed my online profile as a cool, collected guy. I saw Tom Parry’s show [and penis]. It was excellent [I’m talking about the show, I am totally unqualified to cast judgement on penises]. I introduced Giles to the pasty place. I think I ate every kind of vegetarian pie or roll they had in the place by the end of the week. Which is more pies and rolls than you’d expect. We did a show in an Irish bar for a few nights, which was intermittently really fun or really grim. We met some of Alison’s buddies from Westmeath and they bought us more pints than is reasonable to expect from anyone, except maybe if that person had previously stolen your wallet, cuckolded you, or killed one of your family members. I do not believe that was the case with these lovely people. Weird socket placement. I saw a car stop in traffic and shout at a parking attendant. The parking attendant had far more tattoos than any person who wears a uniform in Ireland. The person in the car tried to get his attention, but then didn’t seem to care once he could drive his car again. I guess he was technically parked for a couple of seconds. Hmm. I got a icecream in a tub with a plastic protective seal around the top so that it wouldn’t spill. But I’m a god damn adult with some self confidence and I don’t need help to not spill icecream, so I took it off. Then the wind blew it out of my pocket and I had to chase it around St Andrew’s Square for ages. I almost caught it without loss of dignity by walking up to it, but ultimately I had to run a bit. Still didn’t spill my icecream though. I did the Best of Irish showcase in the Stand, which was fun, although I’m not the most Irish comedian on the go. I should write some jokes about coddle and famine roads, I bet that’d make me more popular. I was also playing the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society’s last show that day. They specialise in more off-the-wall stand up, so I decided to do a live version of episode one of Conor O’Toole’s World of the Animal Kingdom. I recut it the night before to get rid of the sound and the intro titles and I was ready to go! Until I found out an hour before the show that Colin’s projector only accepted .MP4 files and my film was in .AVI! Also, I didn’t bring a USB stick to play the film off! So I sat outside the venue furiously re-exporting the film in the hopes that I could find someone with a USB stick inside. Also I really should’ve sat down and properly learnt the script of COTWOTAK e01 at some point. Surprisingly few people have USB sticks on them these days, but luckily Rose Matafeo was there to save the day, and it all came together and no one was any the wiser and I was totes professional on the show and did all talking about birds properly. It was probably the most fun gig I had in Edinburgh [not counting the Glasgow one, because that was in Glasgow].

— Boil those stones! That was Alison’s advice to me yesterday morning. I’ve a bit in my new show that involves me filling my mouth with stones, so I got up this morning and collected some from the park across the road. I got a selection of sizes, but as it turns out, my mouth is smaller than I imagined. I taught Alison the Hemlich Manourve, and gave her express permission to break my ribs if she deems it necessary. I made some rock soup and stuck them in a sock for safe keeping. When we were flyering I met some scouts and showed them my belt [a scout belt] and they were really excited. Scouts is like a secret society except everyone knows about it and we get rained on more than other SS’s. Another troop walked by and I flashed my belt at them too, but I don’t think they understood and must’ve thought I was just showing them my belly. They jettisoned our flyer to the breeze a few seconds later, which was very un-scoutlike of them. That wasn’t courteous, or kind. It wasn’t even thrifty! Also I saw a info-giving guy who had maps stuffed down the back of his trousers, presumably to hand to tourists. He looked some some kind of cartographic bird of paradise. I didn’t do the rocks-in-the-mouth routine today, because my phone wouldn’t read my SD card so I couldn’t play the track that goes over it. Since my phone was set up to play the pre-show music, the only thing I could play was a theme tune for a sitcom Giles wrote about substitute teachers. Bobby from No Monster Club wrote the song, and I’d obviously downloaded it to my phone’s internal memory. It was only a minute long, so I had to play it like five times. It was that, or play a crummy recording of one of my old gigs, which probably would’ve ruined the show a little bit. Alison’s grandfather came up to see the show today, and was trying to find a cheap sandwich. His best price was 50p, which I think may have been a tad optimistic. Because he was at the show today, Alison kept saying ‘BJ’ instead of ‘blowjob’, insisting quite optimistically that he didn’t know what that meant. We met Sarah ‘Griff’ Griffin and Ceri ‘Nye Bevan’ Bevan after the show. We had tea in the flat and talked about phonies. Damn phonies!!! I made egg fried rice for myself and Peter, which I absolutely would’ve burnt had it not been for the new non-stick pan that came with the flat. Non-stick pans are amazing, but only for a while. Then they become terrible. It’s not like in the old days when pans were just medicore forever. Better times, if you ask me! [Did you?] Peter and I took the bus to Glasgow, to do Red Raw at The Stand. I bought a pack of my beloved one blade orange Bic razors and some discounted parmasan. Peter met his friend Peter [no relation] and went to drop stuff at his flat, while I set about wandering around Glasgow, in theory towards the Stand. I think I might have missed all the good bits, I seemed to mainly be on a motorway. Glasgow seems nice though, I wandered through the university and saw a double decker bike stand! Very cool, if you like cycling and storage. I thought Glasgow was supposed to be grittier than Edinburgh, and it wasn’t living up to that reputation, until a found a literal grit dispenser on the side of the road. A big gritty box full of grit with GRIT written on the front. I take it back Glasgow, you gritty beaut. I decided to have a go of the subway since the walk wasn’t so inspiring. It was really fun! it’s just one loop with trains going in either direction; inner line and outer line. Very cool. Props to the subway for having a nice typeface too, looked like something Erik Speikermann might have designed. Not like that imperial Johnston in the London Underground.

I’ve been going to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival, since 2010. It’s so big and yet the scariest bits are the small intimate moments with the frequently tiny ‘crowd’, for want of a better word [like audience], at the shows us new-ish/up-and-coming/still-up-and-coming acts do. The first show I ever did in Edinburgh was at 11.30am in a barely converted hotel room to an audience of two, who were both reviewing the show for major magazines. I got four stars! In total. This year I’m only doing a week of shows, and I’m splitting the hour with my good buddy Alison ‘Ginger Beer’ Spittle, instead of doing a full show for a month like usual. The reasons for this are complicated and boring but more-or-less amount to our venue getting hijacked because of a disagreement about toilets, and whether or not venues should have them. It’s gonna be fun! Our show is at 2pm so we’ve got lotsa time to dick around after the shows and play tiny, tiny games of backgammon. I got a tiny, tiny backgammon set recently. The dice feel like rolling air! I’m in the airport at the moment, I’m really hoping they let me bring my bag on the plane. It’s a little big, but not due to over packing; it’s just got big steel braces running up the back. I’ve attempted to crush the cloth down the make it look smaller, but the steel is uncrushable, at least with the tools I was able to get through security. I’m flying on Aer Lingus Regional, which used to be operated by Aer Arran [RIP] and is now run by Stobart Air, the shipping dudes. I’m not jazzed about that idea, as I’ve heard from truckers that Eddie Stobart is a bit of a shyster [is that a slur on Jews? It sounds like it might be, apologies if it is, apologies for bringing it up if it isn’t.]. But I don’t care! They have propeller planes and that’s all that matters to me. Vroom vroom! They’re like sideways helicopters! Man, I’m hitting these mints hard in gate 333. I’m gonna be buzzing on the plane. I was hoping to get a few hours sleep on the flight, but unfortunately it only lasts eighty minutes. I had a nice walk around the Botanical Gardens with my Da before he dropped me to the airport. More on that as I have it. — I’m doing a show in the Tiger Dublin Fringe in September, look at it and consider coming on www.fringefest.com!

Back during prohibition times, when we were teenagers, I used to run a small speakeasy from my garage. I didn’t drink, as I didn’t want to upset God, but I facilitated all my buddies, like Jesus would’ve done. The garage had guitar amps and deck chairs and a desktop PC we used to very gradually torrent things over the space of a few months. Pretty sure it took like six weeks for Snakes on a Plane to complete. It was basically the crime headquarters of Greenhills. We even had a couch for a while that Gary’s family were getting rid of. We carried the big wooden frame exactly a mile along the main road from Orwell to Greenhills, looking like a bunch of unambitious goth burglars. I remember being very annoyed when someone drunkenly scratched their name into one of the big flat armrests. I think we had to get rid of the couch eventually, ’cause it took up too much room amd smelled a bit, from all the teenagers. It wasn’t a big garage, about the size of two of those airlock thingies they have in banks, but I remember one time we had about thirty people in there, and every bit of floorspace was occupied. I think it used to sometimes be called the Cavern, after the Beatles venue in Hamburg, but it was a very forced nickname. It wasn’t like a cavern, it was like a big hollow brick. In a photo I found of it our politics were very clear from the decorations on the wall: a small photo of Bill Hicks on printer paper, an A2 poster detailing International Humanitarian Law, and one of those green and blue spirally optical illusion things. This was back at the dawn of the MP3 player, which were these electric boxes people played music from before records were invented. My MP3 player powered the house sound system; a set of computer speakers that sat on the armrests of the couch, with the sub-woofer under the middle seat. On my Creative Zen Vision M, a mp3 player with a 320 pixel by 240 pixel 4:3 display, specifically marketed for watching movies on the go, there was a shortcut button that you could set to do whatever you liked. I set mine so that it would start recording audio if it was pressed. My buddy Niall accidentally pressed it more than most. I kept those recordings deep underground until I found them the other day. These are those recordings: Postscript: Niall is now a computer engineer.

I’d like to teach you a little bit about colours. I’m not a teacher, but I did play one in a short lived RTE webseries, so I’m pretty sure I know how to do it. Colour is a property of light that we humans like the most. It’s the one that makes the setting sun so beautiful, the one that prevents RGB computer screens from being an bizarre inexplicable over-complication, and it’s the one that told our ancestors which fruits were ready to pick, and which ones weren’t ripe yet. Even today, it still tells people which fruits are ready to pick, and which ones aren’t ripe too, but I’m not related to any of them, so it barely seems worth mentioning. Allegedly, rainbows are formed when light goes through some water droplets. I find this hard to believe, as I know some water droplets personally, and they rarely stay in the same place for more than a couple of seconds, before being yanked around by gravity or wind or a dog. Why don’t rainbows shake all over the place if the water droplets thing is true? Eh, Newton? Explain that, you dead jerk. Another issue I have with rainbows is that no one seems willing to address the fact that INDIGO AND VIOLET ARE THE SAME COLOUR! They’re both purple! This seven colour idea is a load of horse apples, propagated no doubt by crayon manufacturers, and fans of 1987 fantasy film The Princess Bride. Only LGBT people are progressive enough to address this fallacy. They removed indigo from their flag in 1979. Whether this had anything to do with the comments indigo had made in the press about the gay community that year cannot be substantiated, and is likely just coincidence. Obviously, there are an almost infinite number of colours in any rainbow, all the hues, covering the entire visible spectrum. The intricacies of colour-o-metry facinate me. So you can imagine my disappointment when I read the book 50 Shades of Grey. If I had written that book there would’ve been less sex, and more shades of grey. She didn’t mention charcoal, or very light black, or ANY of my favourites. I recently saw a trailer for the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey, and boy, was I disappointed. I hate when movies are unfaithful to the book they’re based on, and get this; the whole thing was in colour! The book was printed in monochrome, presumably because it was cheaper, but perhaps it was because Wind and the Willows style illustrations would have been unsightly. Colours are interesting, QED.

I went in to visit Tony today, the man who sells onion rings and chips. I thought me and Tony’s relationship was strained somewhat as I once tried to record a documentary about the Jack Special, a chicken-bacon-taco-garlic-cheese-chips dish he invented in an attempt to get a boy named Jack to ‘make nice boy’ in the shop. I think he thought I was making fun of his unorthodox command of English, which I was only very slightly doing. Well, it turns out there’s a new menu! And with it comes The Stephen Pounder! Tony got a worried look in his eyes when I asked about it, and insisted on checking my hands for recording equipment. The Stephen Pounder is a quadruple quarter pounder, named after a guy called Stephen who used to buy one every night. Tony tells me since he put it on the board he sells ten to fifteen a week. He asked me what my name is, and said he might name a burger after me some day. I jokingly suggested an onion ring in a bun, as I rarely get anything there other than onion rings, chips, and the occasional bouncy ball. Much to my surprise, Tony tells me there are some little girls who come in for onion rings in a bun on a weekly basis! So maybe there’s hope for a Conor Burger yet. That said, I’m not sure I can handle the pressure. Tony tells me with much disappointment that Stephen now only comes in to get a Stephen Pounder once every six months or so, and as such on the next run of menus it will be called The Big Pounder. I do not want to cross Tony.