I have a surefire remedy for jet lag – I replace it with a hangover
DEBATABLE TV QUIZ MASTER PATRICK KIELTY CHATS TO MARION McMULLEN ABOUT FAMILY LIFE IN LA, ONE DIRECTION FANS AND HIS PERFECT CURE FOR JET LAG
You and your wife Cat Deeley spend your time between LA, Ireland and England these days. How do you cope with jet lag?
I’M in LA at the moment – cushions are blowing across the garden so it’s not all sunshine and glamour. All of us as a family were in the UK and Ireland in December, January and February so I saw plenty of frost. (Laughs) I have a surefire remedy for jet lag – I replace it with a hangover. It’s the only way to do it. A bottle of wine before you go and another before you go to bed. Anyone who says it doesn’t work, I just tell them they are not drinking heavily enough. It cures jetlag, but it doesn’t cure the hangover that follows.
Have you embraced the healthy LA lifestyle?
CAT is very healthy and she gets up in the morning and she juices vegetables. She’s always kept herself in good nick. I normally have six cans of Guinness in the back of the fridge. I always say she’s on the green juice diet and I’m on the black juice diet. (Laughs) That’s about as LA as I get.
What’s your perfect night in?
LIKE everyone else we binge on the box set thing. Our son Milo is 17 months old so we put him to bed and then watch TV episodes solely depending on how long they are.
Anything 90 minutes or two hours and we are going to be sleeping on the sofa. Anything 60 minutes – The Crown or The Fall with Jamie Dornan – we’re there.
Is Milo likely to grow up with an American accent?
WE were talking about this the other day. Cat’s mum and dad come from Sutton Coldfield and they have got Midlands accents and I have an Irish accent.
I’ve found myself talking to him in this over-the-top Irish accent like ‘Would you like to play with your toys? Shall we do that? Shall we?’ I came down to the kitchen and Cat was like ‘What was that?’. She had heard everything on the baby monitor. He’s probably going to turn around one day and say ‘Hi Mom’ in an American accent and tell me ‘Dad you sound so quaint. Say that again.’
Do you ever get starstruck living in LA?
IT’S really weird. I’m used to meeting big stars on my chat show and radio programme.
Denzel Washington came in and I was wee bit starstruck, but I’m used to that in the studio. But sometimes in LA you actually see people on the streets. I bumped into someone the other day and we were saying ‘I’m sorry’ and then I realised it was Samuel L Jackson. There’s also a little restaurant down the hill where every Friday Mel Brooks and his friends have dinner. The first time I was in there I was like ‘Woah, that’s Mel Brooks’ and they were like ‘Yeah, he’s here every Friday.’
Things like that just don’t happen on the streets of Dundrum where I grew up.
You’re now back with a new series of BBC2 quiz Debatable with celebrities like Angela Rippon, Phil Tufnell and comedians Tim Vine and Ed Byrne. Do they get very competitive?
I PUT them into two categories – those that are very plausible and probably could sell you anything on the shopping channels and those who just know stuff.
Sometimes you can go to random places and you find out stuff you didn’t expect like Esther Rantzen saying she had been looking through old photos of herself dancing through the garden just wearing a straw hat.
What else is in the pipeline?
(LAUGHS) I’m going to Nashville to make a documentary for the BBC to see if I can make it as a country and western singer.
I wrote a sitcom for BBC radio called Big Country and I’m writing more of that and then there’s the chat show Delete Delete Delete. It seems when you’ve a small boy, the diaries get busy.
Did you get much reaction from One Direction fans when you appeared as Niall Horan in the tribute band No Direction for Red Nose Day two years ago?
OH, my god! I played a charity football match last year and Niall was on the team and I was talking to him about it.
Vic Reeves was Harry Styles, Johnny Vegas was Liam Payne, Nick Helm was Zayn Malik and Jack Dee was Louis Tomlinson. It was part of a campaign to get people watching Comic Relief night. I put the odd jokes and bits and pieces on Twitter and had about 120,000 followers at the time.
For this, I had a card saying something like ‘Hi, I’m Niall’ and the One Directions guys were then retweeting the messages. Johnny Vegas did the first one and called me saying ‘Recharge your phone. It’s going to melt down.’
I thought ‘It can’t be that bad’ and I went out for a few hours. I couldn’t believe it when I got back – I’d had something like 15,000 to 20,000 new messages in two hours saying things like ‘Do you know Niall?’ ‘Can you get a message to him?’
If there’s a third series of Debatable, we should have One Direction on. Sorted.
Patrick Kielty hosts Debatable on BBC2, weeknights from Tuesday, 6.30pm/6.45pm every weeknight.