A child of the Troubles with a smile on his face

Patrick Kielty says that there are three ages in a comedian’s life. ‘He starts off as the young Turk who is angry about the state of the world and wants to put it right. Then comes the age of hypocrisy — when he is still quite angry and still quite young, but quietly goes home after the show is over and puts his feet up at his nice pad in Chelsea. Then there is the final age when he is well into middle-age and making jokes about the goo-goo noises his children make. That is when he should, if he has any sense at all, give it all up.’

At 36, the man who hosted the BBC’s Fame Academy and ITV’s Celebrity Love Island admits that he is halfway there. He is talking to me in a fashionable club in Chelsea just around the corner from his home. For all his protestations that it is at the ‘wrong end of the King’s Road’, he has clearly done very well for himself.

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.