The golden boy: What we can learn from the late Henry Kelly
If you’re of a certain age – by which I mean at least in your 40s – you may have memories of wasting afternoons watching the extraordinary Reg Grundy-produced Euroquiz Going for Gold. Its genius loci was an affable Irishman called Henry Kelly, a man whom you suspected of having a different brass-buttoned blazer for every day of the week.
Kelly had just turned 41 when he first asked “Who am I?” He was already a familiar face, having presented LWT’s Game for a Laugh, which regularly pulled in more than 10 million viewers, and seemed perfect for light entertainment. He was fluent, charming, almost glib, well-dressed but, vitally, as an Irishman to a British audience, classless. He golfed – of course – and it was no surprise he was a school friend of Terry Wogan’s brother. His undemanding patter was partly a career choice – Kelly owed his fame to family-friendly viewing – but there was a great deal more to him.
The life and times of Henry Kelly
Kelly had grown up in Athlone then returned to his native Dublin to be taught by the Jesuits of Belvedere College, who had educated both James Joyce and the Wogan brothers Terry and Brian. In 1964 he moved the two miles to University College Dublin to read English and history, wrote theatre reviews and obituaries for The Irish Times and was in his element in the vibrant, quick-witted sparring of competitive debate: “All hilarious nonsense, and we had such fun”, he later recalled.
It was the golden age of Irish debating, and it was a blood sport: there was “an atmosphere of vaudeville; it was theatre, but more – it was the colosseum. If they couldn’t applaud, the people wanted blood!” Kelly crowned his career by winning the Irish Times National Debating Championship in 1968. After he graduated, he joined the newspaper as a reporter, and two years later moved to Belfast as its Northern editor. It was fateful timing: the campaign for civil rights for catholics in Northern Ireland had erupted into violence, and would soar out of control unimaginably. After 16 people were killed in 1969 and 26 in 1970, the next year the total was 171, then 480.
He would come to think of his reporting on the conflict as his best work. An interview with Nationalist leader John Hume in August 1971 was skilful and, in retrospect, extraordinarily perceptive, and in 1972 he wrote a short but acute and elegant account of the disintegration of the Northern Ireland government, How Stormont Fell. In 1976, at the age of 30, he made the step across the Irish Sea and joined Radio 4’s The World Tonight as a reporter.
In 1981, London Weekend Television commissioned a Saturday evening light entertainment show called Game for a Laugh. It was essentially a series of practical jokes played on members of the public and captured on hidden cameras, proving that its victims were (mostly) good-humoured and “game for a laugh”. With a broad and unthreatening appeal now the preserve of Ant and Dec, it brought together four hosts: Jeremy Beadle, a presenter, writer and prankster who had helped create the format of the show; theatre actor Matthew Kelly; Radio 2 presenter Sarah Kennedy; and Henry Kelly.
Friends and colleagues were at a loss to understand this foray into credibility-destroying lightweight family television. But Kelly was not experimenting; he had made a conscious choice of direction, and would remain in the genre for the rest of his career. Why had he done it? He reassured people with a laugh, “There’s an awful lot less to me than meets the eye”.
Partly it was a financial decision: he had seen the earning power his friend Terry Wogan could command as a twinkly-eyed disc jockey, knew that it was far beyond the rewards of political journalism and knew, too, that Wogan was no intellectual slouch, sharp and attuned to the public mood. And Kelly liked a certain lifestyle, heavy on bonhomie, first at the bar and with a passion for betting.
Where are the hidden depths in today’s slebs?
Perhaps there was also satisfaction in the secret knowledge that being good at any medium required talent, and that he had it. I sometimes wondered, watching him glide through 25 minutes of Going for Gold, if there was a sly triumph behind the eyes: I’m good, you know, I can do this well, and so much more. I met him once, years later, at a debating competition when he was at Classic FM, and wondered all the more.
These kinds of multi-hyphenate hidden depths are harder to find in modern celebrities. We know much more about them, of course, so there is less for us to uncover. But even taking that into account, there are few on the level of Henry Kelly. These rare birds exist. Mayim Bialik has a PhD in neuroscience. Victoria Coren Mitchell has won £2 million in a career as a professional poker player. Armando Iannucci abandoned doctoral research at Oxford in religious language in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA.
There’s something attractive about celebrities who underplay their ability, the smartest people in the room who nevertheless choose the path of light entertainment. Here’s to you, then, Henry Kelly: debater, journalist, Saturday night stalwart, a man who once said of his schoolboy self, “I was good at Latin and Greek and English, and talking, and not necessarily in that order”.
• Eliot is a columnist for Morning Wire