Neil Delamere - ‘It’s a huge buzz’ says quiz-mad comic of bringing new tour Achilles Neil to Belfast’s SSE Arena and beyond

HE’S already renowned for his quick-witted stand-up comedy, but now Co Offaly-born comic Neil Delamere is building an equally impressive reputation for his wit as a TV quizzer.

A regular panellist on BBC Northern Ireland’s long-running topical quiz vehicle The Blame Game and having already triumphed on Celebrity Mastermind last year, where the Edenderry man’s specialist subject was The Vikings, last week saw Delamere racking up an impressive succession of correct general knowledge answers against Chaser Darragh ‘The Menace’ Ennis to help his team walk away with £120k for charities on ITV’s Celebrity Beat The Chasers.

Given his regular contributions to Dictionary Corner on Countdown and the fact he will soon be seen on high-brow BBC Two quiz QI, you might be forgiven for wondering if Dublin-based Delamere is attempting to transition from comedian to gameshow journeyman.

However, having recently kicked off his latest stand-up tour, Achilles Neil - which includes stops at Belfast’s SSE Arena on February 15 and The Millennium Forum in Derry on February 28, plus a slew of other Irish and British dates - stand-up comedy is still most definitely at the forefront of his mind.

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“The last tour ended on October 5 and then the new tour started on November 5 or something like that, so it has been quite a tight turnaround,” explains the comedian of how his previous live tour, Neil By Mouth - which saw him making his debut on Live At The Apollo - has dovetailed with Achilles Neil, necessitating some feats of mental gymnastics.

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“You’d be trying to write continually as you go, you know? So it’s weird - you have to kind of set aside time to do gigs to try out the new stuff, which means emptying the old show out of your head.

“But then you have to re-learn the old stuff in order to finish the tour, then dump it again and go back to the new stuff for the new tour.

“So it can be quite a fraught time of year - but I actually enjoy it, because that’s the exciting time as well: you’re still finding your way around the new stuff and seeing which ways of delivering the ‘payload’ work best.

“Once you’re 20 or 30 per cent into the new tour, it’s all in your head and ready to go.”

The comedian’s upcoming visit to Belfast’s SSE Arena has become an annual fixture on his live tour, and one that he likes to build up to gradually - hence recent dates in smaller venues in Newry, Strabane and Portaferry.

“Imagine finding out if something works or not in front of 4,500 or 5000 people,” says Delamere, who was also a recent guest on literature-themed BBC Two show Between The Covers alongside Trevor McDonald, Jo Brand and Gemma Whelan.

“I mean, you want to know if it works before you go into a room that big.”

However, one of the reason’s the comic keeps returning to Belfast’s largest venue is that it actually feels much ‘smaller’ to perform in than its capacity might suggest.

“It’s just a massive wall of sound coming back at you,” says Delamere of getting laughs at the SSE.

“So it‘s a huge buzz, but it’s also just the right size of venue: anything beyond that and you lose chatting to the front row.”

Indeed, anyone who has seen the Blame Game man live before will know that one of the highlights of his gigs is often when he focuses his attention on the front row.

Playing the SSE is just like a massive wall of sound coming back at you, so it’s a huge buzz - but you can also still chat to the front row

—  Neil Delamere

It’s at this point that Delamere’s quick wit comes into its own, as he pans for comedy gold while asking patrons about their professions.

“A lot of the time you’ll get ‘I’m an accountant' or ‘I’m a sales rep', which is fine and very straightforward,” explains the comic, who also co-hosts the ‘weird facts’-based podcast Why Would You Tell Me That? with his Today FM DJ pal Dave Moore.

“But sometimes it’ll be ‘I’m a beekeeper,' or ‘I have a company that designs manhole covers’, and then you’ll get two or three minutes out of each.

“It’s brilliant, because it makes every gig unique. No-one’s ever going to come up to you and go, ‘Oh, is that the gig you told X, Y and Z jokes?’. They will come up to you afterwards and go, ‘Jesus, the man with the manhole covers - that was mad, wasn’t it?‘.

“I had a very eclectic group of people in the front row at the Portico of Ards the other week. I had an ex-Police Ombudsman, I had a guy who designed manhole covers, and I had the artist [Kathryn Warden] who did Arlene Foster’s painting.

“Honestly, I would kill to have these kind of people at every one of my gigs.

He adds: “There was a guy recently who was training to be a paramedic. I always ask paramedics have they ever taken anything out of anybody’s bottom, because it’s always mad stuff.

“I started talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and he goes, ‘I have a tattoo of all of them on my arm’.

“I told him, ‘If you ever did have to take anything of anybody’s bum, it would look like they were returning to the sewers’.

“Like, that’s never going to happen in any other gig, you know? It was everything I like: it was fun, it was playful and he was not the target of it, he was part of it. And we’re never going to get that. It’s in the moment and then it’s gone.”

I had a very eclectic group of people in the front row at the Portico of Ards the other week. I had an ex-Police Ombudsman, I had a guy who designed manhole covers, and I had the artist who did Arlene Foster’s painting

—  Neil Delamere

Of course, Delamere also has plenty of pre-written material to hand for each tour as well.

“Rest assured, if everybody in the front row has a normal job that I can’t do anything with, I have a script in my back pocket.

“You’ll be getting a good show that’s been tried many times.”

Apparently, Achilles Neil will find the comedian examining “the altogether too frequent weaknesses that make us human”, plus some of the more interesting showbizzy stuff he’s been up to over the past year and a bit.

“I was asked to do a day in Dublin Zoo as a zookeeper for RTÉ working with the tigers, which was absolutely amazing," he reveals.

“Also, Colin Murphy and myself did High Road, Low Road for RTÉ, which is a show where two presenters both travel to the same place, but you flip a coin to decide who gets a luxury experience and who gets the budget hostel accommodation.

“I can’t give away who got what, but the abuse that we gave each other was fairly intense, shall we say.”

Achilles Neil: December 29, January 3&4, Market Place Theatre, Armagh / January 24, Theatre at The Mill, Newtownabbey / February 7, Killyhevlin Hotel, Enniskillen / February 14, Strule Theatre, Omagh / February 15, SSE Arena, Belfast / February 27, Burnavon Theatre, Cookstown / February 28, Millennium Forum, Derry. See neildelamere.com for full tour dates and tickets