The True History of the Kelly Gang

When Gerry Kelly’s TV chat show was axed after 17 years back in 2005, the veteran broadcaster said he felt compelled to document his time working on UTV’s flagship progamme. Initially, Kelly was reluctant to write a straightforward autobiography but, as he got deeper into the project, he decided to reveal all about his alcoholic father.

“I wanted to mark the end of an era, because the book focuses mainly on the television years rather than my personal life. I didn’t want it to be an autobiography. However, my father’s alcohol problem had a huge effect on me,” he says. “I never spoke about it before. This is the first time I’ve mentioned it, outside of our family circles and friends who knew this story. But I felt I had to mention it because I suppose it formed me in many ways.”
As a young child, Kelly’s family shielded him from his father’s drinking. It wasn’t until he became a teenager that he eventually started to ask questions about his father’s illness. Soon afterwards, Gerry’s father walked out on his family and never returned.
“To be honest from the day he left home in my mind he’s dead. I said that all my life. I remember going to the doctor in my early 20s for a medical and he said to me, ‘Any history of cancer in the family?’ And then he said, ‘Is your father alive?’ And I said, ‘No’, and he then asked what he died of. And I said he died in a car accident.”
The normally affable Kelly is clearly still emotionally wounded by his father’s departure. Did he ever manage to patch up his relationship with his dad?
He shakes his head: “I would never reconcile with him. I always said that if he knocked on my door and said, ‘I’m your dad,’ I would have shut the door on him. I often thought that if my mother could forgive him then maybe I should have too – but that opportunity never arose. He never came back. It wasn’t the alcohol, it was the fact that he left home and never looked back.”
Like many children of alcoholic parents, Kelly abstained from drinking until he was in his mid-20s.
“I wouldn’t take a drink. I was probably about 24 or 25 before I touched one. I think that was a reaction to my father,” he admits.
But the broadcaster made up for lost time, on the booze front, when he took up the mantle of hosting The Kelly Show.
“This hotel saw many a night,” laughs Kelly, pointing to the upstairs bar in the Europa Hotel in Belfast. “We’d be asked to move because people were getting up for breakfast and so on!”
Gerry discusses in his memoir some of the controversies that dogged the show, most notably the libel case with the legendarily private Van Morrison and the dramatic fall out with Daniel O’Donnell’s mother, which meant that two of Ulster’s most famous sons refused to appear on his show.
O’Donnell boycotted it after the comedian Bobby Christie told a sex gag that namechecked the singer’s mother. But while Kelly eventually managed to build bridges with O’Donnell’s mother, he still hasn’t managed to repair the damage with Van caused by an interview with the singer Linda Gail Lewis. Apparently, UTV had to settle the matter by paying an undisclosed sum to avoid a messy legal battle.
Gerry is currently presenting a radio show, but he makes no secret of the fact that he’d love to go back to television. He’s still clearly riled over the axing of The Kelly Show.
“It hits a raw nerve. When the show was axed I thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ I was angry at the start. I was informed about the axing when we still had three months to run and I was thinking, ‘Let’s just pull it now. If you’re going to pull it, pull it now. Why wait till Christmas?’
“I didn’t want to go back to the team and work with them for three months, knowing it was all going to come to an end,” he says. But good sense prevailed. “We decided to go ahead and do it and we felt we’d just give it a decent burial. And that’s what we did.”

Gerry Kelly’s book is entitled Kelly: A Memoir and is published by Gill & MacMillan