A REGULAR feature on our television screens, Neil Delamere is back this month with a new TV show and will bring his stand up routine ‘Smartbomb’ to the University Concert Hall next week. Neil met with Limerick Post to talk about ‘Next Week’s News’ and the upside to falling out with your friends.
The Offaly funnyman began his career just ten years ago. In that time he has presented ‘The Republic of Telly’, featured on ‘The Panel’ and BBC’s ‘The Blame Game’. He makes the annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival creating a new stand up show every year.
The new show is ‘Smartbomb’, the blurb on his website promises that the show will, “explain Ireland’s recession, eye patches and email viruses. Probably not in that order.” Over to you Neil, what is ‘Smartbomb’?
“The show is really about six people I’ve had a run-in with in the last year, who think slightly less of me than they did last year. When it came to collating what the show should be about, I figured out that I’ve had a few strange situations with people I’ve had run-ins with. I’m starting to think it’s me, I’m the common thread in all this.”
It is a motley crew of six that have provided creative fodder for Neil’s show. It includes a nurse, an industrial cleaner and a now ex-friend in Germany. In a similar way to comedian Larry David who uses his real life mistakes and fallouts to create the wonderful ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, Delamere has found that conflict reveals a rich seam of inspiration for the writing. Instead of avoiding conflict, he embraces it.
“If something happens to you as someone who isn’t a comedian you just get annoyed but as a comedian you go, mmmm, maybe this could be turned into a few minutes. I sometimes think that during that situation, ‘Are you deliberately trying to wind somebody up so they’ve lost the plot just to get an excellent end to the story?’”
Along with the usual banter with his audience, Neil will lay bare the what he has learned from his fallouts when ‘Smartbomb’ plays at University Concert Hall on Saturday 25.
Neil has more good news to impart during our interview. The comedian has created a new TV show, ‘Next Week’s News’ ready for broadcast at the end of the month. As a star of the much missed, ‘The Panel’ on RTÉ and ‘The Blame Game’ and ‘Fighting Talk’ currently running on BBC, Neil is delighted to be getting a panel style show back on Irish television.
“I’ve been developing this for a while. I’ve looking forward to getting into it again. Reading the news and looking at it through the medium of looking to the future.”
The panel of comedians on ‘Next Week’s News’ will take current news stories and try to predict what will happen with these stories the following week.
“The idea is to try and find out what is going to happen in next weeks news using this week’s news stories. I’ve grown up doing ‘The Panel’ and ‘The Blame Game’, all panel shows. It is great fun to do, PJ Gallagher is involved and Eoin McDermott is going to be the host.”
The show is filmed in front of a live studio audience in the O’Reilly Theatre in Dublin and made its television debut on new year’s eve night under the name ‘Next Year’s News’ where TV personality Dermot Whelan was on PJ Gallagher’s team and Corkman Chris Kent was Neil Delamere’s winning team. The show’s most controversial piece was a Condom Snorting Race between Eoghan and PJ where the presenter managed the snort a condom up his nose and pull it out his mouth.
“Filming before a live audience really made us up our game. It is contagious when a studio audience laughs, it drags you along with it.”
‘Next Week’s News’ will run concurrently with his nationwide tour that will take Neil to over 30 venues. Neil enjoys the variation that making a TV show while touring brings.
“If you have a normal job, you mix with people but doing comedy is more solitary, so on a panel show there is a great collaborative effort with other comics. It’s like having some of your mates around the table and really making you laugh.”
Neil has more TV work in the pipeline, making a follow up to his hilarious award winning historical documentary, ‘The Only Viking in the Village’. This time he will concentrate on Irish historical figures Granuaile, Cú Chulainn and Red Hugh O’Donnell. ‘Next Week’s News’ begins on RTÉ Two in February and Neil Delamere is on stage with his show ‘Smartbomb’ at University Concert Hall on Saturday January 25.
by Eric FitzGerald
