`I never started touring until I did TV, and I found that, generally, you sell out on the profile of TV - and I think I like selling out on the profile of TV simply because of the type of TV I do," says Patrick Kielty. "When people come to the show they don't expect you to have as much to say and maybe to be slightly subversive in a few bits and pieces. I love sucking people in on the innocence thing and hitting them over the head. I'm not saying it's any intergalactic mega-satire I'm hitting them with, but it's `Come in. I'm the man who does The Lottery Show. I bet you didn't think I'd say that did you?' I quite enjoy that."
The Northern comedian attempts - and for the most part manages - to straddle the fence between mainstream television and harder-hitting live stand-up shows. "I think in stand-up you can still have an edge and in television still do stuff that is more mainstream," he says. "From my point of view I'm happy to use stand-up as my release valve for the edgier stuff I want to say. I think if you look at mainstream TV and stuff like the Big Breakfast - Johnny and Denise aren't saying anything controversial. They don't because you can't.
"I'm very happy there's two things in my life - one is TV that you host and you do that one way and the other is stand-up and you do that in another way. And the notion of bringing both of those together means you're neither one nor the other, and effectively you're in a state of limbo. So you categorise things. It's not about blanding yourself down and it's not about dumbing down. And it's not about high-browing up to do comedy. It's just very much a case of that's what has to be done there and that's what you do there. That's been going on for years, it's no big revelation. You see Jim Davidson live - offensive and racist and there'll be a lot of swearing in it - and you watch him on Big Break or the Generation Game, which gets 10 million viewers, and he's just a cheeky chap. It's the nature of TV."
Patrick Kielty is a performer who has thought about all this and worked out where he stands in entertainment. From Dundrum, Co Down, and still only in his 20s, he had found success as a mainstream TV host on shows including PK Tonight for BBC Northern Ireland, After The Break on BBC 1, Channel 4's Last Chance Lottery and the high-profile UK National Lottery Show on BBC 1, co-hosting with Anthea Turner. But the charming, blond and boyish young man who made his name as resident MC at Belfast's Empire Club, doing topical comedy which targeted both sides in the North, finds no contradiction in balancing the two sides of his career. "I learned a few years ago there's nothing to fear in mainstream and in fact it's not a bad place to be." He has come a long way from the 17-year-old schoolboy whose father was shot dead by loyalist gunmen at the age of 45, simply because he was a Catholic. It's a subject that may have informed his political satire, but it is also something he rarely talks about - he has walked out of interviews when the subject was mentioned. Recently he spoke on the Late Late Show about the release of a man allegedly involved in his father's murder. "The reason I don't like talking about it is - there are 3,000 other families in the North who are in exactly the same position as me and I don't really think that I should be holding myself up and saying: `Listen to me' . . .
"We all know people are going to be released early. Everybody says there is a price for peace, but I find that everyone names their own price for peace - therefore the unionists say: `There is a price and this is our price and we can't go beyond this'; and the nationalists say: `It's a price and we can't go beyond this.' And I think the price of peace is about that much" (he gestures a small amount) "further than everyone's so-called price. And I think it's up to people and the families like me: if we're prepared to go the extra bit and to put up with something like that, then I just hope everyone else is prepared to go that wee bit harder and make it work."
His stand-up show - which he performed recently to 6,000 people over three nights at Belfast's Waterfront, and found an audience ranging from Billy Hutchinson to Mo Mowlam to Martin McGuinness - is certainly a surprise for anyone expecting his chirpy television persona. The presentation style is not dissimilar, but as well as political material he also deals with standard stand-up subjects from Clinton to Viagra to David Beckham. And obviously, without the restraining siphon of TV, his language and jokes can be more risque.
Adapting to TV has had its surprises for him - such as when he did some material he considered very mild about the royals and Camilla Parker Bowles and the BBC got a raft of complaints.
"I was told `You're in big trouble here'. They said: `You know, unless you pull back on this you're going to be seen as an aggressive young Irish man that has no place on British TV'. You actually think to yourself: `Now hold on a minute, I come from a background that you're telling gags about a very - not dangerous, but edgy - situation in Northern Ireland. And so effectively whenever I was doing gags like that I was thinking `Come on!' I wouldn't even tell those to my granny, she wouldn't even think they were funny!"
It was an education and a realisation. "It's not a blanding down, but there is an element in middle England that makes middle England tick and if you go too far down that road, this is a decision you have to make. If you want to play BBC 1, you can't offend those people because they make up a vast majority of the country. So you must decide yourself, do you want to continue to be a BBC 2/Channel 4 act and play to a million and half people, or do you want to play to 10 million people and go for it? That's the decision you have to make and it's that tabloid thing. It's almost that in the UK, to play that kind of show it has to be tabloid without offence."
Patrick Kielty's show at the Olympia, Dublin, on Wednesday is sold out and he is now performing for a second night in Dublin, on Tuesday