Patrick Kielty found himself where few Irish comedians have found themselves before; late last year, he was embroiled in an 'Are-they-aren't-they?' scenario with his Fame Academy copresenter Cat Deeley, when she was spotted leaving his home at 4.30am. True to form, Kielty responded to the claims with an emphatic 'I wish!'

"I did mean that!" he laughs. "Whenever you want to write a story, 4.30 can be a normal hour, or it can be 'all night'. She was in my house 'all night'? Yeah right. When the photos came out the lads rang me up and said, (incredulous tone) 'Are you shagging Cat Deeley?' I mean, I f**king wish!

"That was a bit embarrassing, " he adds with a wry smile.

"Terrible, even."

To further add to Kielty's woes, he found himself at the centre of several stories concerning his on-screen chemistry with his Celebrity Love Island co-presenter Kelly Brook.

This time round, however, the reported chemistry was far from sizzling. For his part, Kielty wasn't surprised that his on-screen rapport with Brook threatened to eclipse the antics between the actual contestants on the show.

"One of the problems was that the celebs were brought down [to Fiji] at the last minute so that stuff wouldn't happen in the hotel, " he explains. "I did the 36-hour trip to Fiji, and for five days I wasn't sure if I was punched or bored. So, for the first week you've a dozen celebs lying on sun loungers doing nothing apart from sleeping. Then you have a pool of 14 journalists down in Fiji with an editor screaming, 'I need a story'. I'm not saying that the stories were made up, but it got more attention than it deserved."

It had been intimated that Brook . . . billed also as 'consulting producer' for the show . . . was floundering on-screen due to Kielty's wholly natural, 'fly-by-seat' style of presenting.

"Most shows I've done have been live, and she didn't have that many flying hours by comparison so that was no surprise, " he muses. "Did it look like we were having an off screen romance? Definitely not! In terms of on-screen chemistry, it didn't work; she'll tell you that and I'll tell you that. The fact her boyfriend [actor Billy Zane] was sitting nearby watching the TV monitor with a pair of earphones didn't help.

"He came to work with her every day 'cos they're so in love, " he sighs. "How much chemistry can you have with someone when their boyfriend is in earshot? Things might have been different if Billy had actually had a lie-inf" Paradoxically, both Kielty and Brook got along famously once the cameras stopped rolling.

"We were in adjoining rooms at the hotel, and our dressing rooms were beside each other, so we'd hang out during the day, " he states. "Put it this way, I know people I get on with that I couldn't work with, and that's before you start bringing Hollywood boyfriends into the equation."

With Denise Van Outen being mooted for a presenting role on the next series of Celebrity Love Island, Kielty is hoping to reprise his role as master of ceremonies in Fiji later this year.

"Denise is very good, " he concedes. "It's over a month on an island in Fiji sunning yourselff To be honest I'd do it with Mary Harney if she was up for it. At the moment I don't mean to sound selfish, but I don't care who I'm doing it with as long as I'm doing it!"

If anything, the episode was further proof to the boys back home in Dundrum, Co Down that Patrick has indeed been living the dream since moving to London.

"London is one of those places you can be single in for a long time, " he muses. "The average age of single people is three to four years higher than here. Sometimes I think, 'I'm 35, I should have two kids on the go by now!' My brother's got three kids and an Audi estate and I'm like, 'That's really nice.' He's a year older than me.

"Still, all my mates who are married think I'm living the dream, " he continues. "I think that people box you off;

you're either a playboy or yearning for love and not getting it. It's not really like that. I meet a lot of people and when the right thing comes along you know it's the right thing. I'll joke about it all, all the birds I'm shagging, but jokes they are. But occasionally, the planets collide and Kielty gets some action!"

His thoughts on the dating game have clearly made their way into his new stand-up show, entitled No Woman No Cry.

Upon his return from Fiji, Patrick immediately set to work writing material for his first stand-up show in years.

"I think the best bit of advice I got was from Eoin O'Neill, who said to always lean on the leg that shakes the most and write your own material, " he smiles. "I think that for me, you have to write about where you are and where you're fromf what you're experiencing.

"You get paid to do something that doesn't look like a lot of work, but I'm still from Dundrum, a small village underneath the Mourne mountains. There's a lot in the show about the fact I am 35, I'm single and I'm out theref The last time I was single, people were blowing whistles while dancing, so it's a bit weird.

"Plus you're Irish and living in London, and there are loads of posh girls living there. I didn't realise I was a bit of rough until I lived in London!"

Audiences can expect Kielty to pepper his stand-up shows with a smattering of religion and politics.

"When I first went to London, we were the 'bad boys' and there was this notion that if you were a comedian and spoke with a southern Irish accent, you had a couple of Oscar Wilde plays under your arm, and you were some sort of flawed literary genius. Whereas if you're from the North, the only time some people have heard that voice was when someone was telling them they have 15 minutes to get out.

It's weird to see how things have changed; now the Muslims have become the new Irish. So there's quite a bit in the show based on how Londoners love us now but have effectively made the exact same mistakes."

After amply proving his mettle on TV with a number of high-profile projects, Kielty insists that this return to standup comedy is not so much an attempt to return to his roots, but to move outside his own comfort zone.

"Stand-up as a piece of performance is something which is deeply unhinged as a concept, " he counters. "If you're stupid enough to want to stand up there in the first place, you'll be unhinged enough to do it again.

"There's a veneer of sanity that comes with TV. Because comedians have to operate within the constraints of a production on TV, audiences end up thinking, 'He seems reasonably sane.' But if you want to get up there and put yourself through the excruciating thing there must be something wrong with you.

"Going back, it wasn't so much that I needed to purge myself of TV or get back to basics, but I knew if I didn't go back to it soon I wouldn't want to go back to it. There's a level of comfort that exists when you do TV, and it's as much performance comfort as financial. The minute you get onstage, you get a buzz from doing it, and there's something about that for me that draws me back to stand-up."

Surely as an established 'name', Kielty's audience will be a more forgiving and benign lot . . . a case of preaching to the already converted, perhaps?

"It's a valid pointf most people who die on their ass die on their ass at the beginning, " he concedes. "Still, what makes you laugh when you're 15 doesn't make you laugh when you're 21 or 27. A lot of audiences seeing me wouldn't have been at my gigs before. There's a level of security in the fact of being known, but leaving it for so long means that you're wondering who your audience is."

After helming his own Patrick Kieltyf Almost Live show on BBC for seven seasons, he is a dab hand at handling those die-on-your-arse moments. One moment in particular that sticks out in the public's memory was Patrick's interview with singer Sophie Ellis Bextor.

"What did I do to her? I might have done the David Coulthard thing?" he says, pulling at his cheeks. "You can often say what you want as long as you smile afterwards. I was entertained to read that I had totally f***ed off Jimmy Nesbitt at the Iftas, though we were reading that in a bar after his play together!"

Adding the likes of Johnny Vegas and Chris Moyles to his list of drinking buddies, Kielty's extra-curricular hi-jinks have consolidated his reputation as a sort of laddish scamp.

"I was stupid enough to get drunk with a friend and we decided to go to the pope's funeral, but we went on the piss, " he recalls. "So we got pissed, bribed a policeman and jumped the queue. Obviously I'm going to hell."

At the age of 21, Kielty was arrested in the US for swimming naked with 95 other people at a boozy beach party, and a few years later was arrested for speeding in the North.

("That was particularly stupid, " he admits. ) More recently, he was arrested in Dublin for something he "didn't know was on the statute book in Dublin" . . . afterhours drinking.

"Don't get me wrong. I like me parties, but they didn't all happen in the one week!" he smiles. "Yeah, what was funny was that night in Lillie's, I wasn't actually behind the bar insisting the bar stayed open. Whenever I'm not in town, last orders at Lillie's are always at 2.55am!

"The other day someone said to me, 'Kielty, you're a serious man, '" he reveals. "I mean, do they think I'm Eddie Irvine?"

So there you have it; Patrick Kielty . . . wanted in one state.

As long as it's a state of wry and humorous contemplation, his standup audiences will no doubt be happy.