You Can Take The Man Out Of Northern Ireland...

These are busy days indeed for Patrick Kielty, the North of Ireland's most successful ever comedy export. Not only is the 39-year-old funnyman fronting a brand new Channel 4 show, Stand Up For The Week, but it's just been announced that he's landed a three-month contract with BBC Radio 2 to present the Saturday morning 10am-1pm slot after Jonathan Ross leaves (Graham Norton will take over full-time in October).

Based in the UK for the last fifteen years, the amiable stand-up from County Down has come a long way from hosting live comedy nights at The Empire in Belfast. Over the past two decades, Kielty – whose father was murdered by the UFF in 1988 – has carved out a massively successful career, dabbling in everything from TV chat shows (PK Tonight) and light entertainment (Fame Academy, Love Island) to acting (he appeared in Marie Jones' comic play A Night In November).
As he's about to explain, though, despite his regular forays into mainstream media, he still sees himself first and foremost as a stand-up guy.

OLAF TYARANSEN: Busy day, eh?
PATRICK KIELTY: We do the show on a Wednesday. It goes out tonight (Friday), but the day off is really a Thursday. So yeah, it's been busy! It'd be nice if we could do it a bit tighter to the deadline but we tape the show on a Wednesday, and then you do the edit on a Thursday, and run it past lawyers and all that stuff. And then we kind of start writing again for the next week. They do it on Mock The Week as well. Mock The Week tapes on a Tuesday to go out on a Thursday.
Do you have a big team of writers?
Yeah, but they are assigned across all the other acts on the show, so some people use more writers than others. I tend not to. I've got one guy that I use and bounce ideas off, and churn stuff out with – a guy called Lee Stuart Evans.
When you're watching the news nowadays are you always looking for a humorous angle?
You have to be kind of careful when it comes to what makes the news and what makes broadcast-able comedy. For instance, this week you have got Raoul Moat running around on the loose for I think five or six days. And the police can't catch him, and they've tried everything, and there's definitely an angle on that, but you're always worrying that because they haven't caught him, that if this guy shoots someone in the face an hour before your show transmits, you can't be up there doing a gag about it.
It must be quite difficult to gauge what's going to offend audiences: Frankie Boyle got into big trouble for that line about Rebecca Adlington when she won a medal in the Olympics ('She has a face like someone looking at themselves in the back of a spoon')?
Yeah, but as he's said himself, Frankie has said far more offensive things than that. If you're paying to see Frankie; if you're going to pay to see Dara O Briain; if you're going to pay to see me; or Tommy Tiernan – you know what you're coming to see. Therefore the people in the audience aren't offended. And then journalists take a line, and once you actually put it into prose rather than deliver it on stage, all sense of irony; inflection; sarcasm – a knowing look as you are delivering the line, which makes people know you are not being serious, goes – and then that's delivered on to someone's breakfast table who would never come to see one of your gigs. And then they say it's the comedian that has offended. And then you are kind of going, “Do you think? Maybe it's you that has offended, because you know the people who are going to read this”. Ha, ha! But I think a lot of people are catching on to that.
Tommy Tiernan maintains that the comedic stage should be a protected environment where more or less anything goes.
Yeah, the job of a comedian is to challenge, and I think that there are very few forums where stuff that isn't normally allowed to be discussed can be discussed. I'm not saying the comedy stage should be sacred – but if you're going to start judging the comedy stage by the same rules as the newspaper on the breakfast table, then where are you?
You caused controversy a couple of years back with a joke about Madeline McCann.
Yeah.
Do you regret that?
Well, if someone is offended by any material that you do, you are sorry that they are offended. But what actually happened was a guy who couldn't get his money back went to the papers. So there's always more to these things than meets the eye.
Speaking of controversy, you're about to take over from Jonathan Ross on BBC 2. Are you looking forward to it?
I am. I think what's nice is that there's really no pressure. There'd be a lot more pressure if you were taking over that slot full-time. So I think that's why they want to put someone like me in there – to kind of take the heat off Graham a little bit. And for me it's just a good chance to shoot the shit on a Saturday morning.
What did you think about the whole Sachsgate affair?
When you look these things retrospectively, it just seems to be like a storm in a teacup. What's really interesting was the interview that Andrew Sachs himself, you know, he was coming out going, 'Hello'. 'Hello, yes.' You know, 'I'm still available for work'. And the granddaughter herself wasn't exactly a paragon of virtue. It's a bit like the spy scandal this week, you know, where you've got this girl who is happy to be pictured in nipple clamps, and you're kind of thinking, 'my guess is secrets maybe aren't really your forte'. I was just thinking about that this morning. I remember watching Jonathan walk out of the BBC and have so many news cameras on him, and you are kind of thinking now, in hindsight, what was all that about?
It's often the case.
Yeah, but there's a subtext. Jonathan's wages were being scrutinised about a year before that Sachsgate thing, and he did a joke at the Comedy Awards – one of the newspapers had printed 'you could have so-many news journalists for what you're paying Jonathan Ross', and he made a gag in front of all the comedy industry: 'Well, I don't know about you, but I think I'm worth a thousand journalists!' Which got a big cheer in the room. And when you look back at how the dogs didn't let go of the bone, they were waiting for him in the long grass. The Sachsgate affair, I think, had a lot more to do with Jonathan's pay packet than what he actually said.
Do you get back to the North of Ireland often?
I go back every month or so. I still have a house in Dundrum, the village that I was born in. And I try to get back as much as I can.
Did you laugh at the recent Robinson saga?
I did laugh. The fact that politics in the North is now moving on to where we can actually be corrupt is fantastic. Everywhere else in the world, that's the definition of politics. It always was about planning, it was about people getting money in envelopes. And in a way I look back on Northern Irish politics over the last thirty years with a kind of naïve fondness – that it was quite simplistic. It was just about Catholics hating Protestants, and Protestants hating Catholics. 'Bless.' And now they have kind of moved on to what politics really is, which is telling lies and taking money. Progress. Progress, Olaf!
Do you see yourself primarily as a host now, or as a stand-up?
As a stand-up. I was a host for a few years, and it was very, very difficult to ride both horses. It was difficult to walk out and host big mainstream shows, and then actually expect people to come to listen to your comedic opinions. But a few years ago I took a decision that the stuff that I wanted to concentrate on was the stuff I was writing myself – you know, writing a performance, rather than just walking out and reading an auto-cue. So that's when I got back into stand-up. That's when I did Live At The Apollo; that's why I did the Marie Jones play in Dublin, and Belfast, and the West End.
Were you nervous going back into it?
I was nervous. Stand-up is really about two things: it's about having something to say, and having the confidence to say it. And if you haven't got both then it's… there are a lot of confident stand-ups out there with nothing to say – that's bad. So I went back out on tour – I think it was 2006. And, you know, there's that moment when you put the tickets on sale, and then suddenly they're sold, and then that panic is over, and then you realise, 'Right. How is this going to go?' That first tour was more me getting myself back up to speed, than a triumphant return to stand-up.
Do you see stand-up comedy as moralistic in any way?
You've got to be very careful. I think in good comedy there's an element of truth to it. All you can do when you are on stage is actually to tell the truth about what you think on a subject. It's very easy to think to yourself, 'This is a funny thing to say about this subject'. Well, if you believe it and it's funny, and you can make something funny out of it, then that's a good thing. But the notion of morality – in the same way that Tommy talked about that arena of comedy – I think to get up there and to moralise, and to say, 'This is what's right, and this is what's wrong', I think that's nonsense.
What advice would you give to someone starting out in comedy now?
The same advice as Owen O'Neill gave to me in 1992/93, which is to just try to write as much as you can. A lot of comedians get their twenty-minute set together – a fifteen/twenty-minute set – and then they think to themselves, 'Right, I've got my killer set', and if you're going to get any bigger, if you want to sell any tickets, the first thing you have to do is go on telly, or let people see what you're doing, or put out a DVD. And the minute you put that material out – it's kind of like the second album for a band. So just keep writing. Funny enough, whenever we started The Empire – myself and Jackie Hamilton – in Belfast in 1992/93 I was only going to compère once a month because I didn't think I had the material. And Owen O'Neill said to me, 'No, do as many gigs as you can, and write as much as you can'. And he was right.
Do you have any other writing ambitions? A novel, a script?
I have been knocking around on a script idea. I've been writing a few bits and pieces over the last couple of years. Doing the play in the West End was a big learning curve for me, working with a writer like Marie Jones, and seeing the way that a story needs to be structured, and stuff like that, it gave me confidence that maybe some of the ideas that are floating about in the back of your head – there is a way of telling those stories, and getting them out there.
Do you have any ambitions to crack America in the way that Russell Brand has?
Every comedian wants to be as big as they can. But I don't have any game-plan. I'm certainly not going to go over to America and start playing empty rooms. I did a couple of gigs in New York last year, and they went quite well. I did Montreal last year, and I would like to do a bit more. But there's no strategy.
You're not the most dedicated tweeter, are you?
I'm not a tweeter at all really. I am a sloth when it comes to the tweets. It's one of those things that the brain farts are becoming less and less. I think that when you are writing a stand-up show as well, it's em… I almost use Twitter more as a notepad than, like who gives a fuck what I had for breakfast? It's like I read some of these Twitter accounts, and it's, 'Oh. Woke up this morning. Had a headache. What a night! Whoa. Go for some eggs!'
Would you not worry that people would steal your jokes?
Yeah, but you could say that it means you've got a copyright on them because it's timed and dated. It's like Twitter is the ultimate posting the idea back to yourself! That's what people used to have to do years ago whenever they went in to see TV or film companies. The day they finished the script, they'd post it back to themselves to a safety deposit box so the envelope would be sealed and dated. So if you've any remote thoughts I would generally say this to anyone: stick them on Twitter. Stewart Lee has a comedy website, and he had a corner on it, which was 'Plagiarist's Corner'. And he was playing video clips of people who had stolen his material. And myself, Ricky Gervais and Jack Whitehall ended up in his 'Plagiarist's Corner'. And someone rang me up, and I said, 'What the fuck?' And then it got taken down two days later when someone pointed out that I had actually done the material eighteen months before, and they were able to date it. So he actually removed me from his 'Plagiarist's Corner' and put himself in it. So the silver lining of the cloud of sharing your thoughts on Twitter is that it's timed and dated.
Do you think that jokes are already out there in the ether, and are just waiting to be written down?
I think that's a natural thing that happens. The challenge always is that you either try and get your joke out first or you actually discard your first thought, and try to go to the second thought because the first thought someone else will get to. There used to be an older school of comedians that would have been happy to steal jokes. I think there's definitely a school of thought among comedians nowadays that you just don't do that.
Do you have a good Northern Ireland joke that I can use to open this piece?
Em … (long pause) . . shit! I haven't written a Northern Ireland joke in fucking years!
Do you find that you're out of the Northern Irish mentality, after fifteen years away?
I think a Northern Irish attitude stays with you, which is a kind of an inbuilt bullshit detector that you hope you can keep switched on most of the time. But it was really interesting …the ceasefire was '94, and whenever I did PK Tonight, the chat-show in Belfast – I only did one series of it, and that was in '96 – and that was because, for me by then, there wasn't really a lot to be said on it. Once the Peace Agreement was made, it was like, you start looking elsewhere. So if I had a Northern Irish joke, I would more than happily text it on to you later on!
I'll just check your Twitter page.
There you go. 'Just did a Hot Press interview. Embarrassingly cannot think of joke …I have no touchstones for Northern Irish comedy at all'. Followed by a smiley face turned upside down!