Everything you need to know about Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty
Patrick Kielty and Cat Deeley at the Ifta red carpet earlier this month.Kielty has been confirmed as thee next host of the Late Late Show. Picture: Damien Eagers/PA Wire
The new face of Friday night, Patrick Kielty is set to make his Late Late Show debut this evening.
The stand-up comedian and TV personality from Dundrum, Co Down, takes over from Ryan Tubridy who had been at the helm of the chat show for 14 years.
For Kielty, Friday night will be a special moment. Speaking to the about the Late Late, he said: "To go from sitting on the sofa beside my mum and dad watching The Late Late Show to one of the first TV appearances that I ever had, with Gay bringing me out… that was special.”
With the Late Late Show returning to our screens tonight, here’s everything we know about Kielty and his wife and fellow TV personality, Cat Deeley.
Kielty grew up in Down during the Troubles. His father, Jack Kielty, who was a building contractor, was shot dead by a loyalist parliamentary group in 1988 when he was 44 and Kielty was just 16.
During an interview on the last year, Kielty opened up about his father’s murder, which happened on his brother’s 18th birthday. According to Kielty, his father was a chairman of the local Gaelic club and a “prominent Catholic in the area”.
“Everybody said they were sorry, everybody hugged us but nobody said they couldn't believe it,” he said. “That is how things were up there, that was the normality of it.”
In 2002, Kielty met his future wife, Cat Deeley while the pair were working on the TV Show, . While they both had partners at the time, they became friends and kept in touch until one big romantic gesture changed everything.
While Deeley was in the States and he was having a couple of pints in his local, Kielty texted her a happy birthday message. When she replied, he called her.
“I call her and ask her what she’s doing for the birthday,” he told the Tommy Tiernan Show earlier this year. “She says, ‘I’m am having a lunch tomorrow in the Beverly Hills Hotel and it’s a shame you’re not around.’ So I said, ‘I’ll be there, so’. But she said, ‘Good night, you’re p*ssed’.”
But he stuck to his promise and headed to the airport. “I walked in [to the hotel] and she fell off the chair and we’ve been together ever since,” he said.
Cat Deeley (46) is an English TV host who is best known for presenting So You Think You Can Dance in the States and Stars In Their Eyes. She started out as a model before moving on to presenting. Her career on TV dates back to 1997 when she co-presented the MTV show Hitlist UK before she started hosting the children’s show SMTV Live alongside beloved duo Ant and Dec in 1998.
After a long list of hosting gigs including The Record of the Year, Fame Academy (where she met Kielty), and the Brit Awards, Deeley began hosting the American reality show So You Think You Can Dance in 2006 and in 2010, she also hosted the UK version.
Following the big romantic gesture, Kielty and Deeley married in an intimate ceremony in Rome in 2012, nine months after they started dating. In an interview with Closer, Deeley said that her then-fiancé was more involved in the wedding planning than she was. She told the magazine: “Patrick went and tried the food and did all that, I never even saw the place where I got married before I got married, that’s how uninvolved I was.”
Deeley has spoken about their relationship in various interviews in the past and in one, she revealed that the pair couldn’t agree on a name for their firstborn.
Speaking to Jimmy Kimmell, she said it took a long time for them to agree on a name for their son Milo and joked that she thought her husband would file for divorce.
The pair now have two sons together — Milo who is seven and James who is five.
Kielty is an award-winning stand-up comedian and has plenty of presenting gigs under his belt too.
The 52-year-old has hosted Last Chance Lottery for Channel 4 as well as his own BBC chat show, Patrick Kielty Almost Live. The father of two also has a radio talk show on BBC 5Live.
Kielty started his stand-up career as host of comedy club The Empire Laughs Back in Belfast which was established in 1992. His professional career began the year prior after visiting Dublin stand-up club, the Gasworks while he was studying psychology at Queen’s University Belfast. Since then he has presented a number of shows, including the original Love Island.
Kielty has also worked on documentaries and films. Released in 2018, his Bafta-nominated documentary My Dad, The Peace Deal and Me also saw Kielty named UK documentary host of the year at the 2018 Grierson Awards. In 2021, he released Patrick Kielty:100 Years of Union which won an RTS award for best presenter.
Last year his first feature film, Ballywalter, which was shot at the Ards Peninsula and Belfast, was released. It marked his screen acting debut. In the film, the comedian played the role of Shane alongside Ifta-nominated Seána Kerslake.
