How does Patrick Kielty balance presenting Z-list celebrity TV shows with being an edgy club comedian? No problem, he tells Brian Boyd
'These people and this programme must bear the distinction of being the most stupid things to grace British television." That was just one of the highly negative reviews of ITV's Celebrity Love Island show of last year - wherein a bunch of putative "celebs" were packed off to an island in Fiji to do whatever Z-list attention-seekers do when they're stranded on an island in front of television cameras.
Despite taking a hammering by the critics, the show eventually proved to be a ratings winner. Irish comedian Patrick Kielty, who co-hosted the show, cleverly refers to the programme as "television heroin".
"What I mean by that is the people who did see it, or use it, won't readily admit to seeing it, or using it," he says.
Kielty is sitting in his dressingroom in RTÉ in advance of an appearance on an afternoon chat show. He has an Irish tour coming up and is keen to get back to the clubs after his Fiji sojourn.
"I know what a lot of people thought about Celebrity Love Island," he says. "But I think people now realise that the term celebrity is based now more on profile than on actual ability. The reason I took the job was that they allowed me to write my own scripts, to rip the piss out of the contestants.
"Whenever someone left the programme, on their first day off the island they'd meet up with me for a drink, but after they had rang back to the UK and discovered what I had been saying about how pathetic they were, they'd suddenly start to avoid me."
Kielty has no problems with the career balancing act that is presenting reality TV shows (he also works on BBC's Fame Academy) and that of edgy club comedian. "The simple fact is that television has changed," he says. "The best hosts used to be people such as Bruce Forsyth and Bob Monkhouse. But the type of shows they hosted aren't there now. The big TV shows now are Wife Swap, The Apprentice, Come Dancing. Now, either you climb aboard that train or you're left at the platform."
He's well aware of how his TV work can skew his audience profile. "One of the early shows on this tour was in Huddersfield and when I came out I noticed there were these three older women in the front row of the audience - they looked like The Golden Girls," he says. "I went into my stuff, material about jihad and bombings, and I noticed that they left during the interval. They had obviously come along to see 'that nice young man off the telly' and had got a bit of a shock."
FROM DUNDRUM IN Co Down, Kielty became a comic after graduating from Queen's University. Belfast in the early 1990s wasn't exactly coming down with possibilities for young comics, so Kielty set up his own comedy club - the Empire. "Belfast was a bit of a ghost town at the time," he says. "But we were determined to keep the club open even during horrors like the Greysteel massacre or the Shankill Road bombing. A lot of international media would do stories on the club - it was always stuff like, 'While Belfast burns, young people laugh . . . Today, in downtown Belfast, Patrick Kielty, whose own father was murdered by paramilitaries, hosts the Empire Comedy Club - a success story in a city which has seen few successes.' It was such cliched stuff - as far as we were concerned we were just giving ourselves a venue and bringing over acts such as Bill Bailey and Lee Evans."
Kielty's father had been shot by Protestant paramilitaries - his only crime was being a Catholic and being the head of the local GAA club. His killers have since been released under the terms of the Belfast Agreement.
Kielty was an equal opportunities comedian - dishing it out to both sides as he felt fit. His material was necessarily scabrous and he used his mimicking skills (he remains a first-class impressionist) to great effect.
"All I was doing at the time was talking about things around me; it just so happens that what was happening around me was pretty hardcore."
He notes in his new show how the people of Northern Ireland are now being held up as "an example" to other warring factions around the world. "That's just great - if you want to be an example, all you have to do is kill people for 30 years and then stop."
The old and familiar theme of violence features heavily in his new material, albeit with a twist. "After the July bombings in London, I can do stuff over how in the UK people are wondering what happened to those nice Irish terrorists - the ones who used to phone up and give you a bit of notice. We were almost the gentlemen terrorists."
It was comedy gold for Kielty recently when some friends from Belfast rang him in London to explain how they couldn't go over and see him because they were afraid of the bombs. "It's funny how the Muslims have become the new Irish," he says. "I'm in a position to give them advice. Just give it 30 years is what I'd tell them. Then there'll be Muslim theme pubs everywhere . . . and Osama Bin Laden will be minister for education."
He notes how doing this type of material in recent weeks in the UK has led to some walkouts from his shows. "I've had a few Muslim walkouts," he says, "which is strange, I think, because it's like a Catholic walking out of a gig because the comic is doing IRA jokes."
He's clearly enjoying the fact that his material is still getting such a strong response. "I have this thing in the new show about gate-crashing the Pope's wake earlier this year - it's a true story. Let's just say I wasn't there as a pilgrim. I did it in Ballymena recently. I mean, when in Ballymena, you just have to do Pope material, don't you?"
Patrick Kielty is at the Black Box, Galway, tonight; University College Hall, Limerick, Wed; Opera House, Cork, Thurs; INEC, Killarney, Fri; and Vicar Street, Dublin, Mon 21 and Tues 22