Neil Delamere, stand-up comedian and star of The Panel, goes back to his Viking roots with a new TV show. Donal O’Donoghue meets the Thor of the Midlands.
"I wanted to see whether there was any Viking in me", says Neil Delamere. With that, the mild-mannered comedian grabs hold of a broadsword and waves it about like a toothpick. OK, so it’s only a prop, but for a moment I’m looking for the exit – a comic with a sword is no laughing matter.
But it’s all part of Delamere’s latest TV show, The Only Viking in the Village, in which he not only gets to dress like a Viking but also to drink, think and fight like one. He liked the fighting best. "If you give any sort of red-blooded male a sword, some chainmail and a helmet you get ridiculously competitive", he says. "The bloodlust definitely came down on me. I wanted to take my opponent out."
On paper, The Only Viking in the Village sounds like a hybrid of the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? and Kirk Douglas’s swords and longboats film, The Vikings. But that’s not the full picture. Hoping to educate as well as entertain, the two-part RTÉ series debunks myths and misconceptions (no horns on helmets, not all bloodthirsty marauders) and drops its avuncular host into the heart of Viking re-enactment Denmark.
There, Delamere attempts to swim a river wearing two and half stone of chainmail, has an arrow fired at an apple on his head ("they didn’t tell me that they were going to do that!") and runs the oars of a longboat ("just like Kirk Douglas"). As part of his less arduous research, Delamare went to see the Hollywood bubblegum blockbuster, Thor, with his 15-year-old cousin. "Thor was class", he says of the 3-D movie with eight-legged horses.
He also did the Viking Splash tour – "I took everybody’s horned helmet off them" – but on the more serious side, he consulted hefty tomes of Norse history and mythology, including Magnus Magnusson’s scholarly works. His research left him with an admiration for the Vikings’ pragmatism and an ache for the greatest tragedy in Irish conservation history, the destruction of Wood Quay.
You may have guessed that Delamere is a bit of a history buff – if he got the opportunity to go back to college that would be his preferred subject – and his latest TV show was really born from a stand-up show about Vikings, which he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe many moons ago. "That was massively successful", he says with a big laugh. "The people who came were very interested but not that many people came."
His research for that live show unearthed some unexpected facts: like Ireland’s first coins were minted by the Vikings ("we were still using cattle at that point") or that they gave us words as 'ugly' and 'freckle'. "Did you know that Loki (the Norse god) once tied his testicles to a goat for a laugh?" he says. Er, not really. Has Delamere ever had to go to such measures to generate an audience reaction? "I have done some tough gigs in my time but nothing that extreme", he says. "There’s no subject that should be off-limits. It’s all about context and it’s all about whether you can defend it and your intention and your motivation and why you’re doing it."
Delamere hails from Edenderry, studied computer applications at Dublin City University and worked as a software developer. He cut his comedy teeth at a brief gig at Dublin’s International Bar ("where most Irish comedy in this country is minted") and then won the RTÉ Young Comedian award in 2001. "I’m still the reigning champion", he says, "because there haven’t been any competitions since."
But that win was a watershed. With his winnings, he decided to swap the worlds of start-up for stand-up. "Did I jump without a parachute?" he asks. "I did have one but I don’t think that it was fully open. It was more like Mary Poppins’s umbrella."
He has played in some unlikely places, but nominates Mountjoy Prison as the most unusual. On the flipside, he also played at a police station in England. Right now, Delamere is ad-libbing his way through a national tour of his latest show, Restructuring. The previous night was Athlone, the next stop was NUI Maynooth, then a brief side-trip to record The Blame Game at BBC Belfast, before a brace of gigs at the weekend. He’d love to do another TV show akin to the Vikings one. "No, not the Normans", he says to my suggestion. "I’d love to do Cú Chulainn. Investigate the Táin Bó Cúailnge and go round Ireland to talk about the myth and what it represents."
Hmm – I see an Offaly man in tights waving a spear.
Donal O'Donoghue
* Neil Delamere’s DVD Implement of Divilment (Universal Pictures) is now available.
