‘Edinburgh is a brilliant place to test the live material’

Nobody can accuse acclaimed Offaly comedian Neil Delamere of resting on his laurels.

By the time his new show Controlled Substance comes to the Tullamore Court Hotel on February 22, he will have been on the road for the best part of four months. The show is fired with the material he prepared for and refined at a 25 night run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.

“From around October/November to April it’s live gigs,” the Edenderry born comic says.

“Edinburgh is a brilliant place to test the material because the audiences could be anyone, and if it works in Edinburgh, it will work for anybody”.

But all the time there’s lots of other stuff going on, and as Neil does an impromptu inventory of his radio and TV commitments, it’s difficult to keep pace with the mesmerising list of current, recent and impending projects happening both sides of the Irish Sea, many of them for the BBC.

Earlier this year, he gave up his Sunday morning show on Today FM after three years; he’s now notched up a couple of seasons on BBC NI’s hugely popular ‘The Blame Game’; he is a regular panellist on Radio Scotland’s ‘Breaking the News’, including a transitioning-to-TV version of that show; he’s been on Radio 4’s ‘News Quiz’ and has just been involved in filming of a 5-episode second series of the BBCNI mockumentary ‘Soft Border Patrol’ which is due to be broadcast around the time when Brexit happens

Married since 2014, but guarded about his private life, Neil lives in Dublin. During his downtime he plays indoor soccer. He also loves walking, even more so when he has a dog to take with him.

“We foster dogs, until they get what they call ‘a forever home’ for them. We have a lurcher pup at the moment,” he says.

If he hadn’t found himself doing what he does now, Neil would probably have been living a more mundane, 9-5 existence, as after emerging from St Mary’s Secondary School in Edenderry, he headed to DCU to study computer applications – essentially programming.

While Edenderry didn’t have an arts centre, the school did, however, stage musicals.

“But when I was 15 or 16 I wasn’t into it: I didn’t want to get up on stage and sing and dance and do any of that sort of stuff,” he says.

That said, after becoming a student in Dublin and becoming more exposed to theatre, he found his interests veering more in that direction and after just one year out in the world of programming, he went into entertainment. Rarely nervous now before a performance, he does, nonetheless remember how it felt to be nervous and when he encounters up and coming comics, he tries to encourage them and if they ask for it, give his take on how best to weather the nerves.

Very much a Midlander, Neil even makes fun of the irony of having a Norman surname that means “from the sea”, while having roots in the most inland county of Ireland.

“There are more Delameres in Westmeath than in any other county,” he says.

While the roots may lie deep in Westmeath, Neil’s parents, John and Kay, had very pragmatic reasons for choosing to make Edenderry their home: “My father worked with Bord na Móna, and they picked a place that was more or less equidistant from many of Bord na Móna’s facilities such as Mount Lucas, Lullymore, Derrygreenagh,” he says.

Kay, who had to give up her job at Dublin Corporation due to the marriage bar, and John both still live in Edenderry, but Neil’s two brothers and his sister, like himself, have moved away.

Without prompting, he says that as the youngest he did get spoilt and somewhat indulged, and adds that when he and his siblings get together for dinners or gatherings, they do have the craic.

“No-one is allowed to be too above themselves!” the Edenderry man jokes.