Kielty brings it all back home
MY DAD, THE PEACE DEAL AND ME BBC1, TONIGHT, 9PM
TO be summoned to the headmaster’s office when you’re 16 is seldom good news.
To arrive there to be told that your father is dead must be traumatic. To be told that he had been murdered by terrorists must be unimaginable.
But that was the experience that shaped the young Patrick Kielty, who would go on to be one of Northern Ireland’s most successful comedic exports.
Kielty developed a strong reputation towards the latter end of the Troubles as an unusually, even foolhardily, brace comic.
Openly mocking both sides, at a time when the wrong look in the wrong direction to the wrong person could see you shot in the street in the middle of day, was remarkably ballsy move by any comedian, let alone one as young as he was.
Many will remember him as a sort of go-to lightentertainment presenter from shows like PK Live and even lighter fluff such as Fame Academy and Love Island, but there was always a darker, flintier edge to his stand up.
The men who killed his father were released under the Good Friday Agreement and now, 20 years on from the signing of that deal, Kielty returns to the province to see if the peace and reconciliation which had been promised by the politicians ever really came to pass.
Despite the personal cost, Kielty voted for the Good Friday Agreement, and as he says in My Dad, The Peace Deal And Me (BBC1, tonight, 9pm): “People talk about making peace, and then they draw their line in the sand and say ‘I’ll make peace here’, but peace is about going beyond where you want to go. The reason there haven’t been many places where peace has broken out is because people cannot go beyond the place they need to go.”
As an analysis of the North’s intractable problems, that’s as sensible as anything a politician has ever come up with and when you consider the toll his family paid, his forbearance and willingness to move beyond his own pain is remarkable.
It was also a brave decision which was mirrored by thousands of others in his situation, who suffered enormous personal cost but realised that they had move past their own grief for a better province.
My Dad, The Peace Deal And Me makes for riveting viewing from one of the most interesting cultural figures to emerge from 1990s Northern Ireland...
Tears of a clown of a different sort are available on the Sky Player with The Zen Diaries Of Gary Shandling (Sky Atlantic), a genuinely fascinating look at the complex, brilliant and infuriating mind behind The Larry Sanders Show.
It’s a must for any comedy fan.