Keeping it Neil

Comedian Neil Delamere spoke to David Hennessy about bringing his new tour to the UK.

Offaly comedian Neil Delamere is currently touring the UK with his latest Reinventing the Neil show.

Neil has long been a familiar face on Irish television first becoming known from RTE panel comedy show, The Panel but he has been becoming more prominent on UK screens with appearances on The Celebrity Chase and Live at the Apollo.

He has also featured on Radio 5 Live’s Fighting Talk, BBC Northern Ireland’s The Blame Game and The News Quiz also on BBC.

Neil took time to chat to the Irish World about his tour that brings him to the UK throughout much of 2026.

What can you tell us about this new show, Reinventing the Neil, what sort of things are you talking about?

“Well always I have a collection of weird and wonderful stories that have happened to me the last year.

“I can’t give away too much about this year’s but last year’s show I talked about going to work as a zookeeper in Dublin Zoo for the day.

“I did that for RTE which was amazing.

“I got to hold a tiger’s tail while blood was withdrawn from the tiger.

“That was bonkers.

“And this year, for another television show, I went to the bunker that the Irish government would have used in the 60s if they were attacked.

“People were obsessed with nuclear Armageddon in the ‘60s and everybody has to have a bunker.

“Well there is a bunker in the barracks in Athlone that the Irish government had earmarked for the government to be evacuated to, so I will be talking about that.

“I will be talking about going to Bulgaria for the same television show.

“I’m talking about learning how to use various different firearms because a lot of people in Eastern Europe think that there is a major European war coming.

“Anything that I do during the year that’s a little bit weird or wonderful makes it into the show.

“It’s grist for the mill.”

I recall you talking about your time in the zoo on the Late Late, what was that like?

“It was amazing.

“For my holy communion many, many years ago, my dad found a hole in the fence to Dublin Zoo.

“About 30 years and I have come full circle.

“Surprised they didn’t charge me the outstanding fees.

“They were telling me stuff I found fascinating.

“One says to me, ‘The droppings from the zebras or from the giraffes, we use that as manure’.

“And I was like, ‘Okay’.

“And he goes, ‘But for the monkeys, we incinerate it’.

“And I said, ‘Why?’

“And he goes, ‘They’re too close to us so you don’t ever want zoonotic diseases jumping species and stuff. As a safety precaution, we incinerate all that’.

“I love that, this kind of access behind the scenes so that was fascinating or they were saying to me the gate going into the tiger’s inner enclosure, the bar goes vertically. It doesn’t go side to side because a cat’s swipe is side to side so they might be able to open it that way whereas a chimp could open it upwards.

“I was just like, ‘This is access that I’ve been very lucky to get because we happen to be making a TV show’.

“So I found it absolutely fascinating and to be up close to something so beautiful like a tiger was just an incredible moment.

“I’d love to do Would I Lie to You? on BBC and my truth or lie would be, ‘I held a tiger’s tail while they withdrew blood from the tiger’.

“I think that would be brilliant on that.”

You have appeared on the Celebrity Chase, you did very well but was it nerve racking?

“Yeah, all quizzes are kind of the same in that if you get two or three right at the start, it steadies your nerves and your adrenaline lowers, and you’re okay.

“I’ve done shows where every 50/50 guess went wrong, I’ve done shows where every 50/50 guess went right and the Celebrity Chase was the one which just happened to go right.

“It was wonderful from the very start because the Chaser was Darragh Ennis and Darragh is not only a lovely man but he’s obviously an Irish man and he was very pleasant and very welcoming on the show.

“We were really lucky.

“I took a step closer to him so they offered me 106 grand for the pot and I got back so in total, we had 120 grand in the pot and we won it for four different charities with half a second to go so unbelievably entertaining television.

“We just got very lucky on the day and it made unbelievable television and it gets repeated as well.

“You can literally see the traffic to your website spike and you go, ‘I wonder what that is..’ and you’ll find that The Chase was repeated.

“That show is so big that if you go, ‘God, I sold a rake of tickets today and I haven’t done  any PR or publicity’, it’s because the Chase has been repeated.”

You are doing more in the UK these days it seems…

“Because I’ve been so busy here (Ireland) for years, I didn’t do much in the UK and then I kind of started going, ‘I should do a bit more over there’.

“Because I’ve done fun stuff like The Chase and QI and Live at the Apollo and stuff like that, then you can branch out to pastures new and that’s really fun because you can tell it’s a new audience discovering you.

“Yes, there’s people who know you from home but there’s also people who know you just from your work over there and it’s nice to watch discovery in their eyes because sometimes  they have only seen you online and seeing the full live show is a different experience.

“But myself and my wife lived in London just before lockdown for a year and we just adored it and loved it and really got a taste for the city. Everything became familiar.

“London in particular feels like an old friend now so we have our little haunts when we go over.

“Now London has both things.

“It’s familiar enough to be comfortable and new enough to be exciting.”

Where did you live over here out of interest?

“We lived up near Great Portland Street so it was lovely.

“That was a real thrill walking past the George Orwell statue, past Wogan House and into the room in Radio 4 that Spike Milligan did shows with Peter Sellers.

“That was a bit of comedy history.

“That was such a thrill.

“That was a real adventure.

“We really, really enjoyed that year.

“COVID obviously meant that it wasn’t viable to be maintaining two different places but we’ve stayed working in the UK more than we did before probably because of that year.”

It was as far back as 2012 that you came over for a special festival of Irish comedy at the London Irish Centre in Camden..

“You put Irish people on anywhere in England or in Scotland or Wales, other Irish people will go out and find them and support them which is just kind of tremendous.

“Some of my friends are Danish comedians and Swedish Canadians and Dutch comedians and they’re almost jealous of the diaspora of Irish people around the world because we could do a gig in Australia and it wouldn’t matter if we were known or not- If you put up on a ‘best of Irish’ show, put it in New Zealand, put it in Australia, put it in Hong Kong and you will get an audience because people want to go out and see a taste of home.

“I’ve been lucky enough to play 14, 15 16, different countries and many years ago before I had any degree of profile because if you put on a ‘best of Irish’, there is enough people out there that will go and see it.

“I did a ‘best of Irish’ show in Manila in the Philippines.

“I did ones in South Africa and Australia, New Zealand, Canada and everything so it’s kind of an inbuilt audience that we’re very lucky to have.

“And it’s nice when you’re away from home to see friendly faces as well.

“The good thing is now with social media and the internet that people are discovering people all over the world.

“I do a podcast with Dave Moore (Today FM).

“We get people texting us in from Minnesota and from Lesotho and from Tanzania and they just randomly found two Irish guys talking.

“I kind of think that’s sort of magic in some ways, that we have some guy in Tuvalu or something who goes, ‘I listen to you every week’.

“I find that very thrilling in some ways.

“The other good thing about that sort of stuff is that it literally, with the advent of new media like social media and like podcasts, for a live touring act like a comedian, you can have the data there.

“It’s taking the guesswork out of touring in many ways for comics because you can go, ‘I have 10,000 listeners in Sydney. I have 400 followers from Instagram in Melbourne. I’ll do a bigger gig in Sydney then I’ll do in Melbourne’, or whatever.

“So it’s kind of great that there’s not as much uncertainty when you’re hitting the road.”

Do you find the UK audience different to the Irish one?

“There would be little bits and pieces.

“We definitely have different cultural references.

“But then there’s also how institutions are seen in certain ways.

“I think of the trope of the friendly police officer, the friendly guard who is very close knit to the community and has discretion.

“I think that is a different reference point than the Met Police for example, massively different so when you say, ‘Somebody stopped me’, I think if you’re talking to Irish people in Ireland about that, immediately they have a different setting in their head than an English person has about being stopped by an English police officer, so your starting position is different.

“I think Ireland is a more agricultural society.

“We’re all only two generations, maybe one generation from the land. We have a different attitude towards farming and land than people in a mainly urban society.

“We are probably more closely connected because it’s a smaller country so there’s lots of different things that are different.

“That doesn’t mean that if you have a really good story, you just can’t set context.

“You might just explain the context a little bit.”

You’re not especially offensive as a comedian but did anyone ever get irked by something you said?

“Oh, I’m sure they have.

“Yeah, of course they have if you’re doing it long enough.

“I think most people know comedy is pretty subjective.

“Most of the time if somebody has taken a chance to go to a comedy gig, they’re broad minded enough to know that there are experiences of comedy in the world that they might may not like.

“I think the main issue, in my experience personally looking on others, is they get offended by a clip in isolation that’s shown on social media or on TV or in the newspaper but it’s very unlikely someone will get annoyed by something if they’ve gone to see someone because they have it in context then.

“Say you say something that could be taken one of two ways and position A is offensive and position B is not offensive.

“If someone has seen you for an hour before the joke and they go, ‘Okay, I know exactly what he means by that’ because that’s the context.

“It’s very unlikely to take it the wrong way the way he didn’t intend but if they see it in a certain newspaper and the newspaper is designed to stir up some degree of sentiment and they’ve shown just a clip in isolation, they’re much more likely to get offended by that.”

I was laughing at your story of pulling into a funeral procession accidentally and wondering, did that rally happen?

“Yeah, it happened near my house.

“It’s very hard to conjure something absolutely from nothing.

“The general rule of producing a story is the kernel of it is absolutely true and then if you go into a story and you exaggerate, the audience knows you’re exaggerating so we’re all in on the story if you’ve done it properly.

“But absolutely, yeah.

“I was pulling up to a T junction.

“I saw the arse end of the car kind of going around the junction.

“I didn’t realise what it was and pulled in behind it but the first car had been a hearse and now I was the lead car in a stranger’s funeral procession.

“It was school time so the kerbs were kind of rammed.

“It probably didn’t last very long but the actual blind panic of an Irish person in a stranger’s funeral going, ‘How am I going to get out of this? How am I going to get out of this?’

“Then you can go through that sort of denial of going, ‘Maybe it’s not a funeral, maybe it’s not a funeral’ and then the voice in your head going, ‘Well, I mean, there’s a coffin in the back of a car so unless it’s Dracula getting a taxi, what else is it?’

“I think it was a bizarre experience but that is the point.

“I told that story to the Two Johnnies and that was one of the ones I used to illustrate the difference between London and Ireland.

“I think we have a different attitude towards funerals and towards wakes and towards death generally than say  Londoners and that was one of the stories I used to illustrate that because I would tell it in London and they would go, ‘Oh, okay, that’s unfortunate’.

“And I would tell it in front of Irish people and hey would be like (shocked gasp), morto, ‘How’d you get out of it?’

“And, ‘God, it must have been embarrassing’, and they had a different visceral reaction to it.”

Do you have a favourite show of all the shows you have done?

“There’s probably a top three or four.

“The Appollo was amazing to do, absolutely amazing.

“It’s the perfect size of theatre because it’s big enough to get that massive wall of laughter but it’s still small enough to be kind of intimate.

“When I do Belfast, I do the SSE arena and the first time you do that and there’s this wall of noise coming back to you, that was kind of amazing.

“And then the first time I did the News Quiz on BBC Radio Four.

“That’s been around for so long and, like I say, it was in that studio that The Goons were in, that was a visceral thrill as well.

“The first time I did The Panel which was with Dara O Briain Ed Byrne, Andrew Maxwell, Colin Murphy, that was incredible.

“I was only 24.

“It was my first time on TV and I was sitting opposite these guys who had 40+ years experience between them all.

“They’re just pinch yourself moments.”

You have played to small and big rooms, do you lose something in intimacy when the venues get larger?

“The good thing is that usually you go into small venues, small rooms and you do work in progress shows and you are kind of fiddling around and you’re trying to figure out how a new show can coalesce and come together.

“I think people love that.

“People sometimes love to see where the joins are rather than this very smooth thing that goes to a big room.

“And then you get to a big room and you know that it’s smoothed out so in any cycle, you can keep both.

“The fun of the big room is the kind of showmanship of it and the fun of the small room at the start is the building, a kind of creative searching around.

“You’re panning in the comedy river for a little gold nugget.

“You’re like a fella with a big grey beard in the middle of the Rockies and dungarees and thick thermals from a John Wayne film trying to see if you can get a comedy nugget so you can go back and buy a new pickaxe from town.

“That’s basically what you’re doing.

“So on a full tour, you kind of get to experience both.”

Neil Delamere is touring the UK with his Reinventing the Neil show, he comes to Leicester Square Theatre 15 and 16 April.

For more information, click here.