Patrick Kielty HELP Tour at The Lowry Review
Patrick Kielty HELP Tour
The Lowry, Manchester
28 October 2015
Reviewed by Karen Crielly
Last night we went to The Lowry Theatre to see Patrick Kielty perform his show HELP… Getting to the Lowry is quite simple no matter what direction you are coming from and with its multi-storey car park there is no problem with parking. There are plenty of places to eat or drink and if you validate your parking ticket you get 4 hours free.
The Quays Theatre, this is lovely venue, it has a very industrial feel with its brick red girders and steel panels, The show started at 8pm with support act Steve Bugeja taking to the stage, this young comedian has won the BBC Radio 2 NCA in 2014, and this year had his first solo show at the Edinburgh Festival. He had a 25 minute set before the main show and I found him a bit tedious and not particularly funny. His delivery for me was stilted and full of erms and ums, now on the other hand my son thought him hilarious, guess it is an age thing… I found his material was pretty much just rambling on about life and in typical stand up fashion picked on the front row.
Patrick took the stage at around 9pm and it was to a pretty lukewarm reception from a roughly ¾ full auditorium, now I’m not sure there could have been a worse night to have his show as both Manchester United and City were playing at home.
He started the show by explaining why it was called the HELP Tour and this was that there was no show or material because he was too HAPPY. Strange concept I grant you and it did take most of us in the audience a little while to warm up to the idea. He talked about how his marriage to Cat Deeley was doomed to end in divorce according to all sorts of UK and US statistics. It actually was really funny because as he talked though the scenarios that statistical analysis has come up with and then compared his own personal life living with Cat the more you had to agree he was probably right lol. There were lots of laughs as he talked about living and growing up in a small village, how he and Cat got together. One hilarious moment was when someone returned from the toilet and Paddy recapped the whole show to that point in about 2 minutes, pure brilliance. Paddy then went on to tell us about how after a night in the pub drinking with an old timer from his home town, moaning how his marriage was doomed to end in divorce the man sent Cat a wee book called “Don’ts for Wives” published in 1913 and some of the quotes were hilarious and so cringe worthy in today’s world that they raised a lot of laughs and more than a few eyebrows. He ended his show with some audience participation in the guise of “Do’s for Paddy” audience members were invited to suggest some modern day equivalents which were being included in his own book of Do’s. Each venue has one winning quote entered into his book. As the slips were handed onto the stage he read most of the out some were ironic, some funny, some ironic, and others not worthy of the effort to read out. The quote of the night was “If you are looking for Sympathy you’ll find it between S**t and Syphilis in the dictionary..” I laughed hard and long this evening as Paddy walked us through his early growing up and how he managed to marry above his weight..
Highly recommended.
Rating: 5/5 
Patrick Kielty is currently on tour with HELP, for more information and details of tour dates visit www.patrickkielty.com.
For other shows at The Lowry visit www.thelowry.com.
The Lowry, Pier 8, Salford Quays, Manchester, M50 3AZ | 0843 208 6000
