Patrick Kielty on the Late Late: 'I'm not the substitute teacher anymore'

“There seemed to be more than a few bars there named after painters,” he says, “so can you confirm this: was that really because the guy who owned them was a painter and decorator? Is that just a brilliant Derry story or is it true?”

I tell him this is indeed the tale I’ve always heard but I can’t say for sure, partly out of a steadfast commitment to journalistic rigour, and partly to make space for the questions I have for him...

One pitfall in interviewing a chat show host, after all, is they’re only ever a few seconds away from interviewing you. 

In full disclosure, however, I did take the time to investigate the story more thoroughly, so he’ll be happy to know that Derry developer Dessie Coyle was indeed a painter and decorator who owned and operated several artist-themed venues, including The Delacroix, Da Vinci’s, ElGreco and The Gainsborough.

Kielty is — it goes without saying — a talker; open, charming and expressive, the kind of natural conversationalist who could chat his way out of a sunburn. 

By the time he was treading the sticky floorboards of my hometown’s most painterly pubs, he was barely in his 20s, but already a household name in Northern Ireland and a common presence on local TV and radio.

Then, his stock-in-trade was scabrous commentary on Northern Ireland which, back then, meant delivering scandalous impressions of bigots and terrorists, to laughing crowds which may well have been filled with supporters of both. 

It’s a starting point that may seem odd for the man now hosting the biggest show in Ireland, not least since it began with the unrealised promise of a single keg of beer.

“I was doing impressions from when I was about 16,” he tells me, “but I didn’t do anything until I got up to Queens and ended up sharing a house with some lads from Derry and Tyrone.” 

These housemates saw his comedic potential and seemed eager to push his career on, albeit for reasons Kielty now chalks up to naked self-interest.

“There was a talent competition in Fresher’s Week,” he recalls. “They thought if I entered, they’d have a shot at the keg of beer that was for the winner.” Their faith in their flatmate was well placed, since Kielty won the gong, although the treasured booze went elsewhere.

“I was basking in glory, hanging around,” he recalls. “Thinking all the girls that had walked past me all Freshers Week would look at me now that I’d won this. Meanwhile, the lads had taken the keg back to the Holy Lands and drunk my winnings by the time I came home — without even getting so much as a snog.”

I ask whether he now puts it in his contract that RTÉ provide him with a keg of beer after every episode of the Late Late. “Yes,” he insists, “but RTÉ have to drink it before I come off stage.”

RTÉ Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty.

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Though youthful for his 53 years, Kielty has been in showbiz for 35 of them, so chatter about nerves or impostor syndrome could sound dramatic, if not insincere. 

It is, however, a subject to which he returns time and again, most especially in the context of those years as a standup, an artform he believes fosters, and indeed requires, a certain amount of performance anxiety.

“The gigs that go well are the ones where you are either really nervous or slightly nervous beforehand,” he insists, “that just focuses the mind. I always promised myself I’d keep doing live gigs because if you’re wired that way it gets you right back to Queen’s and that gig and a quarter-inch of microphone cable between you and the people. The terror and excitement of that. It’s both those things but if you step back from it, the terror of it means you’ll step back even further, whereas you need to remember the excitement of it as well.”

When he was announced as Late Late Show host last year, it seemed a logical fit. I’m old enough to remember the press mooting him as Gay Byrne’s successor back in 1999, and at least one gag alleging Pat Kenny only got the gig because they’d already had the dressing gowns monogrammed with Kielty’s initials. (Kielty has always denied he was ever contacted before last year).

His claim that it took him by surprise this time out is given more weight by the headache it proved for the promoters of Ballywalter, a touching indie drama in which he made his film debut last year. The film was slated for release the same month as The Late Late was due to come on air.

In my ignorance, I suggest this must have been great for cross-promotion. This was, it turns out, not the case.

“Our film distributor had their head in their hands,” he laughs. “The second that I got The Late Late Show there was a conflict of interest, so we couldn’t even advertise the film on RTÉ.”

But the gig also followed a few years of becoming better known for work outside the light entertainment sphere. 

He’s presented a suite of BBC documentaries on Northern Irish themes, including one examining the centenary of the State in 2021, as well as cheerier programmes on tractor manufacturer Harry Ferguson, and Belfast-born engineer William Mulholland, who constructed LA’s waterways, and for whom the famous drive is named.

But it was a more personal piece, 2018’s My Dad, The Peace Deal and Me, which saw him centre the 1988 murder of his father for the first time. John ‘Jack’ Kielty was shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries a week before Kielty’s 17th birthday, and Kielty’s film examined the trauma felt by his family, and the entire country, during the Troubles.

This was followed by a contribution to James Bluemel’s extraordinary 2023 series Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland, in which he spoke more candidly about the psychological effects of the killing than ever before. 

In a queasy portent of his future career, he speaks about walking into his headmaster’s office to hear the news, having presumed he was due a scolding for sticking Comic Relief posters around the school without permission.

There follows a montage of Kielty finding fame as comic himself shortly thereafter, a wide-smiling enfant terrible barely out of school, lampooning paramilitaries and politicians to uproarious laughter. 

The segment ends in 1992, with none other than Gay Byrne introducing him, aged 20, to The Late Late Show audience. To thunderous applause, he bounds to the microphone wearing a balaclava.

“It wasn’t until I did the documentaries that I realised,” he says, when I ask if this material was just a way of exorcising his own trauma without talking about it directly.

“I wasn’t embarrassed, but when so many people have been through the same thing that I had gone through, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about that because people up here would turn round and go ‘you think that makes you special? Wind your neck in, we’ve all been through it’. That was the reason I was talking more generally about what was going on, because I didn’t want people to think I was being self-indulgent.

“After the documentaries, I realised maybe I should be talking about this because so many people watched them and said ‘thanks for saying that, because it resonates with me even deeper and it helps me get through my own stuff’.”

Now, he feels like this later period of his career, and a newfound willingness to grapple with the dark as well as the light, placed him in better stead to take over The Late Late Show.

RTÉ Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty. Picture: Andres Poveda Wardrobe: Helen McCusker Hair and Make Up: Barbara Toner

A REALLY WEIRD THING

“I couldn’t have hosted it 10 years ago,” he insists. “In terms of the life experience that you build up, in terms of the stuff you have to do on that show. The entertainment stuff, the stuff you kind of think you know how to do? That’s OK. But it wasn’t until I had a tinier understanding of the human condition, or what people are carrying inside them — even silly stuff like talking too much, and not listening enough. Gay Byrne was brilliant at just asking the question and then just shutting up. He’d ask brilliant questions and let them speak.”

Does that mean he feels like he’s got his feet well and truly under that famous desk?

“Can you see my body language?” he says with mock horror. “My palms are still genuinely sweating. It’s a really weird thing because a couple of people were going, ‘that’s your gig now’ but I still can’t quite compute that it is.”

Again, he brings it back to stand-up, and the collective anxiety a crowd has before a comic lands the joke that makes them sit easy in their seats. I venture that it’s like when a substitute teacher enters a room and you and your mates could tell within seconds if they had the authority to control the class, or would shortly be suspended out the window by their tie.

“It’s exactly that metaphor,” he says, “because in my mind, about once per show there’ll be a moment where someone is telling a story and being great craic and I’m looking out at the crowd and in my own mind I’m going ‘SHIT, you’re hosting The Late Late Show’. 

So, for me, I’m still coming to terms with the fact I’m not the substitute teacher anymore, I’m the teacher. I don’t know why that is. 

The notion of The Late Late for me was that this is the constant in the corner of the room, no matter what happens. In a nuclear war, the cockroaches and the ants will still be here, and so will The Late Late Show. Literally, after the fallout you’ll turn the TV on and The Late Late will still be there and you’ll be like OK, this is here. So, for me to be that constant, I still have to get my head around the fact that… that’s me, I’m not watching any more, I’m it.”

Not that he’s a total bundle of nerves as he greets his second year in the hot seat.

“Definitely going into the second series,” he says, with a pause to compose his words more carefully, “it’s different. First series, I knew what I wanted to do but a lot of the audience might have been tuning in out of curiosity. Some of them didn’t know me, some hadn’t a clue whether I could walk, talk and chew gum at the same time. So, I don’t necessarily think I’ve got my feet under the table but” — another pause – “I will say that I feel like people know that the person at the front of the bus knows how to drive it.

“They still might not be sure where I’m taking them,” he adds, “but that’s OK.”

CREDITS:

Picture: Andres Poveda Wardrobe: Helen McCusker Hair and Make Up: Barbara Toner