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Thursday 4 December 2008

A child of the Troubles

A child of the Troubles with a smile on his face

An interview with Patrick Kielty

There have been rumours of a French girlfriend, but he describes his present status to me as single. That is not, however, the only reason why he may be able to stave off for a while yet the third unhappy age of a comedian’s life. Following in the footsteps of Eddie Izzard, Johnny Vegas and Billy Connolly, Kielty is about to try his hand as an actor. He opens this week at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall in a comedy called A Night in November by the Olivier award-winning writer Marie Jones.

He is ambitiously playing not one, but all 12 parts in the play, which recounts the adventures of a man from Belfast who, at the time of the Shankill bombing, leaves his country for the first time to watch Northern Ireland play the Republic at a game of football. The only serious actor that Kielty knows is John Standing, who, when told what Kielty planned to do, exclaimed, ‘Darling boy, are you f—ing mad?’

Kielty is nothing if not stubborn, and, having learnt his lines by playing them over and over again on his iPod, he has been deemed to be up to the job after a trial run in Ireland. ‘There is this mystique about acting that has been created by actors to keep people like me out. Of course I was nervous, but I took a bit of advice my father once gave me and, when I was up on stage, I just leant on the leg that was shaking the most.’

With his boyish good looks, gentle Irish brogue and quick wittedness, Kielty had seemed born for prime-time television. There had been a long relationship with Amanda Byram, the former Big Breakfast presenter, and the two of them had been dubbed ‘the Posh and Becks of Northern Ireland’. For all the smiling pictures in the feelgood magazines, he was conscious of the fact that, even then, he was simply acting a part.

At Queen’s University in Belfast, Kielty studied psychology and supplemented his grant by performing a one-man comedy show. Encouraged by a schoolteacher, he realised, once he had started sounding off in the comedy clubs, that he had found a natural milieu. He could push the boundaries, which is what he believes genuine comedy should be all about.

‘If you have grown up in Northern Ireland, if you have lost a parent in the Troubles, if you have grown up around people who have all lost someone, then there isn’t a topic where there isn’t a laugh to be had, there isn’t a place that you cannot go.’ When he was 16, Kielty’s father, Jack, was shot six times by the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters. His three murderers have since been released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and one lives in Dundrum, County Down, the village in which Kielty was raised and where his mother, Mary, still lives.

More articles from: Tim Walker | this section

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