Comedy Festival 2017: Dane Swan’s in Conversation with Titus O’Reilly is boozy but entertaining ★★★

DANE Swan is an odd comedy festival inclusion, but his boozy one-off show reveals he didn’t try hard enough at footy, thinks the Brownlow Medal’s a ‘pain’ and how he could have became a mortician.

TO a generation of footy fans, Collingwood great Dane Swan needs no introduction, having played 258 AFL games, winning a Premiership in 2010 and a Brownlow the year after. Then there’s a whole new set of fans, who know him as “that guy from the jungle” from his runner-up showing in this year’s I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here.

And for this casual, predictably loose, one-night-only conversation with footy satirist Titus O’Reilly, about his glittering and sometimes chequered career, Swan has a room full of footy tragics (mostly Pies fans) eating out of the palm of his hand.

Love him or hate him, there was no denying he was one of the best midfielders of his generation and throughout it all, he displayed a dogged determination to do it his own way. On more than one occasion during the show, he maintains that he never really gave his all to football, shirking weights sessions and ice baths, so that he could leave more room for friends and family (read partying). If that’s indeed the case – and sometimes it’s difficult to separate Swan the man from Swan the self-deprecating yarn-spinner – it’s frightening to think what he might have achieved if he’d had the laser-like footy focus of some of his peers.

The engaging Swan recounts the early days of his footy journey from the streets of Westmeadows (he reckons he got his talent for sport from his dad and his talent for drinking from his mum) when by his own reckoning he was a basketball-loving sporty kid who was either bound for the docks or prison. Weirdly, a school counsellor had picked out a career as a mortician for him, so footy became a saviour – and one he would come to appreciate more and more over time.

The stories behind Swan’s being drafted at No.58 at the age of 17 are some of the show’s highlights – and speak volumes about the way he approached the game. Not only did Swan’s mother supposedly tell Eddie McGuire to piss off, not believing it was the Collingwood big wig on the phone when he called to say her son had been drafted, the player himself declined the club’s demands to start training immediately so he could spend a few more days at schoolies on the Gold Coast.

Former Collingwood champion Dane Swan realises football player will always be his best job in life.

Footy satirist Titus O’Reilly helped Swan open up on his glittering and sometimes chequered career.

With the benefit of hindsight, he’s brutally honest about being too “young and immature” when he was drafted, having never held a real job and with no idea what life in the real world was like.

He’s also open about his fractious relationship with fame and celebrity after his partying and a string of off-field incidents earned him a reputation as a “bad boy” – and how he turned his life and career around with the savvy realisation that life as a football player will still be the best job he’ll ever have “unless I get really lucky”.

Even more refreshing — with revelations about coach Mick Malthouse, the infamous Rat Pack and his own success — is his at times ambivalent relationship with the game itself and the sometimes ridiculously high regard in which it is held. Despite having a medal himself, he describes the Brownlow ceremony as “a pain in the arse” and is at pains to point out “all I did was play footy – that doesn’t mean I’m better than anyone else”.

If there’s one gripe to the show – and although frequently funny, it’s an odd inclusion for the comedy festival – it’s just how booze-soaked it is, from the moment Swan steps on to the stage clutching a bucket of beers. He said he didn’t want his autobiography released last year to be a “collection of drinking stories” but for better or worse, this show pretty much is, when there’s clearly more to Swan that meets the eye.

Yarraville Club, 135 Stephen St, Yarraville