NOW FOR PATRICK KIELTY AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE
Mary Carr talks to the host about home, speaking to plumbers and the sense of fun-filled responsibility he feels as he kicks off the Irish Christmas next Friday by taking on The Late Late Toy Show
By my reckoning, when I spoke with Patrick Kielty about the Toy Show, the news of his wife Cat Deeley’s taking over from Holly Willoughby on ITV’s This Morning was bubbling under the surface, just about to break.
But if the newish Late Late host was excited about the prospect of becoming one half of TV’s new power couple or even the new Richard and Judy, he certainly didn’t betray it.
Nor indeed did he disclose any classified information about the upcoming Toy Show, the official start to the Christmas season, Irish style. Tight-lipped secrecy was his password as he waded through questions about the 2023 extravaganza and how he plans to put his own stamp on it.
‘We have a theme, but it’s not based on a musical. We have done a little filming for it already. There may have been a sequence with a safety harness, a little stunt that we have already filmed. We have got pretty much all the auditions sorted and I have seen quite a lot of those, so that’s coming together and we have been working hard on the costumes,’ he says by way of a progress report via a Zoom call from his home in north London where he is looking after his sons Milo and James, one of whom is down with an ear infection, while talking to plumbers about installing new toilets.
‘It’s all glamour here,’ he says drily. ‘Look, I have a five and a seven-year-old, so the Toy Show is coming together as much as anything that you can do with small people can be planned. They will end up being the stars of the show, they will end up taking you in a direction that you probably didn’t think you were going to go in and that was never planned but the show might be all the better for it.’
Will he be treating audiences to a song and dance act like his predecessor? ‘That has to be decided,’ he replies. ‘Up to me seeing the auditions with the kids, I would have said there was a good chance of that but now, having seen how good the kids are, there is a less of a chance. So, watch this space.’
Will he wear a Christmas jumper? ‘I couldn’t possibly comment on that,’ he laughs. ‘We are very, very busy on the costume front but whether it will be a jumper or a geansaí or a jacket or a jumpsuit, you will just have to wait and see...’ Will the inexhaustible Billy Barry kids be doing a turn? ‘One of my very first memories when watching the Toy Show as a kid was Gay bringing out the Billy Barry kids. Again, watch this space.’ He’s giving nothing away. Low key and friendly with an ability to deflect nosy questions in a most affable manner, 52-year-old Kielty has cultivated a style that is folksy and self-deprecating.
The younger Kielty was a bit of a firebrand on the comedy circuit, making his name donning a balaclava to mock paramilitaries and explore the boundaries of comedy in a sectarian society. Perhaps age has mellowed Patrick Kielty, or the daunting challenge of presenting a catch-all show in his native country where likeability is the most powerful bait.
Thankfully he doesn’t disguise his thoughtful intelligence, particularly when he applies it to exploring topics like the Late Late’s quintessential appeal. His unique personal history, the murder of his businessman dad Jack by loyalist paramilitaries in 1988 when he was only 16 and in his home village of Dundrum, Co Down, plus his marriage to a bona fide red carpet celebrity who made her name Stateside presenting the show So You Think You Can Dance and won rave reviews for her This Morning debut, put Kielty in a different league than our small town celebrities.
If you can’t go out and have fun with it yourself how can other people be expected to?
Some years ago he made a much praised documentary for the BBC which examined the fallout from his father’s death, the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement and thorny issues like Irish identity.
But Kielty doesn’t play up his more cosmopolitan background, preferring to present himself as a bit of an Everyman who, in terms of the Late Late’s iconic place in Irish culture, is comparatively insignificant. ‘People talk a lot about the amount of begrudgery in Irish life but I’m not seeing it. There is enormous goodwill towards the show. People don’t want me to do well, they want the show to do well. There’s an ownership about the Late Late show. You are not the host, you are the lighthouse keeper, you are the custodian. The Late Late was here before you and it will be here long after you are gone,’ he says.
Like the Late Late, the Toy Show comes with the weight of expectation and Kielty deals with both similarly. ‘I’m definitely looking forward to the Toy Show. I made a promise to myself the very first week of The Late Late Show which was to ask myself why I was doing it if I wasn’t enjoying it. Why put yourself through anything that you are not going to enjoy? But while I’m very much looking forward to it, obviously I know what a massive, massive night it is in terms of family get-togethers.
‘I feel that the Toy Show at the end of November is our Thanksgiving. The Americans get together for Thanksgiving, we get together for the Toy Show so I’m definitely aware of the history and what it means to everybody, but at the same time, if you can’t go out and have fun with it yourself then how can anyone else be expected to enjoy it? So, I sort of feel all of those things — a wee bit nervous and excited and looking forward it.’
Kielty believes that although the Toy Show could only happen in Ireland, its quirky appeal makes it an object of fascination in televisionland.
‘I was on the Chris Evans Show in September promoting my
movie and Chris was going, “Oh my God you got The Late Late Show. Talk to me about the Toy Show, who’s coming to the Toy Show, can I come to the Toy Show?”
‘Years ago in America, the head of Fox studios, who was Cat’s boss at the time, stopped me at one of the recordings for her show to ask me if I was from Ireland and then chatted to me about the Toy Show. He wanted to know if I thought it would work in America. It is known a lot further afield than you may think.’
Christmas in the Deeley-Kielty household is, he says, the same as for every young family. ‘The boys are five and seven and so we do exactly what most married couples do in the run-up to Christmas; we have the chat about whether we are going to my mum’s or whether we are going to her mum and dad’s. Some years we are in Birmingham and that tends to be a smaller gang. Last year we did Christmas in Dundrum and that was 23 people around the table. The boys are at the stage where they are bang in the sweet spot for Christmas. I’m well, I wouldn’t quite say a functioning grown up, but I’m 52 years of age and yet we are still splitting our Christmases between the two families.’
Yet he wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘I have no interest in Christmas in London. Home is Dundrum for me. It’s weird, for all the years and different jobs I have had in the UK or America, I still find it hard to say that home is in London, because home is in Dundrum.’
The pull of home was one of the main reasons he and Cat left Los Angeles in 2020 after 15 years there and just as Covid struck. ‘We wanted the kids to know their cousins and my mum’s not getting any younger, or Cat’s mum and dad either. The boys are mad to see their cousins now, doesn’t matter what time of year, summer holidays or Christmas.’
He appears happy with his stewardship of The Late Late Show so far and believes the show’s only getting into its stride although he is aware of the criticism, particularly about the lack of high wattage celebrity guests. ‘I do understand that people want to see some of those big names and that has been tricky with the writers’ strike and all of those things coming our way. Hopefully as we get through the strike and deeper into the run, we can have more of those names but I kind of feel that the Late Late is a different animal to other chat shows. Gay Byrne wasn’t interviewing Peter Ustinov and Billy Connolly every week, so I think The Late Late Show is maybe more about the quality of the chat than who the guest is. Chat is one of the things the Late Late does best. If someone has an interesting story to tell, the Late Late will have them on no matter who they are because it’s not necessarily tied to celebrity in the same way other shows are.’ The charm of the show, he believes, is that it’s live. ‘I think the Late Late is the only chat show that is fully live, most of them are taped on the Wednesday or Thursday and all tidied up before they go out. When it’s live, you are trying to capture an energy, a moment, an exchange. You are shooting the breeze with someone and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. I will be the first to say if it does or it doesn’t. I’m not precious about that sort of thing. But I think that sometimes the energy you get from a live show makes up for the fact that it’s not polished. Life isn’t polished so maybe that makes the show realer. Maybe that helps. I don’t know.’
Who would be his dream guest for the Late Late? ‘For me it’s a guest I will probably never have. Billy Connolly was my hero growing up. He was the guy whose tapes myself and my dad used to sit in the car listening to when I was a young teenager, the two of us laughing equally hard, and all that bad language. Billy has obviously slowed up his personal appearances now, so I doubt his coming on the show is ever going to happen.’
Kielty’s emotional monologue about the Israeli/Gaza conflict went viral as he drew painful parallels between the conflict he grew up with in Northern Ireland and the one that is tearing the people of Palestine and Israel apart. ‘I had mentioned it early in the week and we had been talking about it,’ he explains about the genesis of the epilogue. ‘I think we were all feeling slightly despairing that week. And in the depths of all that despair I felt it was important for me to say that there were points growing up when we felt that same despair and thought there would never be an end to the violence. Even though things don’t look good, sometimes things can change when you least expect it. The Middle East is a very complicated scenario… nobody has a monopoly on pain or hurt or loss. I was just trying to talk about it in some small way.’
For all the years and jobs I had in the UK and America, home is in Dundrum
■ The Late Late Toy Show is on Friday at 9:35pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.