In Interviews

Follow this topic

Bookmark

Record learning outcomes

Peter Kelly meets the needs of patients in a south London pharmacy by day but by night, he’s entertaining pub-goers with his own brand of comedy. The pharmacist and stand-up comic talks to Neil Trainis…

A pharmacist who doubles up as a stand-up comedian is a rare breed. After all, one vocation is about laughter, the other is certainly not.

So, I’m naturally intrigued to interview Peter Kelly, who furnishes patients with health advice and medicines in the pharmacy in Clapham where he works during the day and fires off gags in function rooms at the back of pubs and clubs in London in the evening.

What strikes you about Peter is his charisma and confidence. He is in his early 40s and speaks eloquently in an Irish accent that seems to have hardly been diluted during the years he has spent in London and Brighton before that where he studied pharmacy.

No matter what the topic of conversation is, he can hold his own and put across an intelligently constructed, persuasive argument. Hence, he’s a regular columnist for this magazine.

His ability to articulate himself clearly would make him an effective ambassador for community pharmacy, representing all those hardworking introverts on the sector’s frontline.

This is, of course, tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps Community Pharmacy England could deploy him in contractual talks as their secret weapon, distracting government officials with the odd one-liner.

Peter enjoys being a pharmacist but I sense he gets more fulfilment from being a comedian, even though the comedy arena can be an unforgiving place for a comic looking to make a name for themselves.

“I’m very happy I did pharmacy. But doing something creative, it’s half, if not more, the enjoyment,” he says. “I don’t gamble, I don’t go to the bookies and bet on things but gambling is huge. We love to gamble.

“I think that pursuing something creative, half the fun of it is the gamble because you’re putting in a lot of time and a lot of effort and there’s absolutely no guarantee it’s going to go anywhere.

“No matter who you are, there’s someone more talented than you who has tried and failed. The more you get into it, the more you realise that old saying about lucky breaks and all that.”

Peter grew up in County Longford where his father, Peter Kelly senior, was a Fianna Fáil politician between 2002 and 2011 before his death from cancer at 74 in 2019.

Just like pharmacy, politics is a serious business, and his father’s political career adds to the intrigue of why Peter junior opted for comedy having invested much time training to be a pharmacist. He says comedy enticed him from a young age.

Journey of self-discovery

“For stand-up, Ireland’s always had loads of great comedians, Tommy Tiernan, Des Bishop, Dara Ó Briain,” he says. “And I always loved Chris Rock. He was one of my favourites. I like his preacher style, I like the way he walks across the stage.

“I watched a lot of Billy Connolly when I was young. My dad used to love this guy called Brendan Grace. There was always comedy, people were always telling jokes. I just always thought I could do it.”

Peter’s primary motivation for playing the comedy circuit is not money. He does many of his gigs for free. Comedy, he insists, “is a learning pursuit.” It challenges him to think creatively, to evolve, to develop his skills on stage. It takes him on a journey of self-discovery.

“I’ve always had the impulse to do comedy. I remember before I did comedy, if I went to a play or something, I would enjoy it but I wanted to be up there, I wanted to be doing it.

“Comedy is a learning pursuit. It looks natural and that’s the illusion. It’s like magic. You look at it and you think that person is very funny and very confident. But they’re not.

“They’ve learnt how to do that, so in many ways, it’s like learning magic. It’s the learning part of it that I find very alluring. But it doesn’t last. You come up with a new joke that you haven’t used before and for a little while, it’s so exciting to do.

“And then, after a while, it’s like ‘I need a new trick.’ Maybe that’s like being a magician. You need a new trick because the magic starts to wear off.”

The buzz of gigging alongside well-known comics is also a big draw for Peter. “In recent times, I’ve gigged with Kevin Bridges, Joel Dommett and I’ve got gigs coming up with Reg D. Hunter, Sara Pascoe, Geoff Norcott, Marcus Brigstocke. So, I’ve been gigging with a lot of people who are well known in comedy.

“And it can be quite surreal because I’m still a fan and I get to watch them. I get to see a lot of great comedy for free, which is brilliant. I’ve been doing comedy for seven years. People say it’s 10 to 15 years before you become famous.”

Genetic predisposition to entertaining

Peter suggests he has “some genetic predisposition” to entertaining and public speaking. His uncle was an actor and Peter considered acting before being tempted into comedy.

When he was about 30, he took weekend acting classes at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) but working in the pharmacy meant he struggled to find time to learn his lines.

And, as he pointedly says, acting is expensive. “You can spend all that money and train up as an actor and still go nowhere. With comedy, you’re gambling your time but acting, it’s money.”

However, Peter enjoyed his experience at RADA which offered 10-week classes to people from a greater array of backgrounds in an attempt to shake off its reputation for catering only to the privileged.

“When I was a teenager, the idea of going to RADA seemed like an impossible dream, like something that was not open to somebody with my background.

“It was the first time they ever did it, but they did a weekend course. It was 10 weeks, every Saturday. Institutions like RADA started to become a little less exclusive.”

Before RADA, he did an acting course for beginners with City Academy which, as Peter remembers, was “a tester” to determine if students were ready for drama school, which was not for the faint-hearted.

“There are people who apply to go to drama school and after a few weeks, they realise it’s not for them because some of it can be a bit ‘out there,’” he says.

“They do weird stuff, like telling you to pretend to be an animal and you spend two or three hours crawling on the ground, pretending you’re a cow. You have to be shameless. If you can’t crawl around on the floor pretending to be a cow, you can’t do Shakespeare.”

The performing bug grabbed Peter from a young age. “I didn’t think I had a chance of getting into these places because I hadn’t done any acting. All I’d done was dream about it,” he says, chuckling.

“All I did was act in my mind. There was nowhere to act. I was from a small town. There was a musical society but I couldn’t sing. There was no acting society.”

Pursuing something creative

There are numerous stories detailing how acting helped actors ‘escape.’ Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek, once said acting allowed him to escape from traumatic childhood memories of his violent father.

It sounds like Peter was looking for a way out of the pressure cooker environment of pharmacy although, as an employee pharmacist, he says life is much harder for pharmacy owners.

“I was looking for a way out before I was in. The reason I picked pharmacy in the end was because I thought pharmacy was an easier one to get in and get out of.

“There was an element of wanting to pursue something creative but my parents were going to pay for me to go to university. They weren’t going to pay for me to try and become an actor.

“If you pay for your child to do pharmacy, it’s four to five years, then they will earn enough money to support themselves. If you add up all the time I’ve been doing acting and comedy, it’s about 10 years and it still doesn’t pay for itself. I still couldn’t live off comedy.”

I once saw Peter perform at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green. Until then, I knew him as a pharmacist and nothing else. We used to record podcasts together in his pharmacy’s consultation room and talked about issues in pharmacy.

At the Backyard club, I was taken aback, not only by how funny he was, but how relaxed he was on stage, how he looked every inch a professional comedian who had been making audiences laugh for decades.

Making a living from comedy

Peter says there’s “a chance” he’ll be able to make a living from comedy. “I work four days a week in the pharmacy now and I think I’ll easily get to a position where I can work two or three days in the pharmacy.

“But a lot of the problem with comedy is it’s a weekend profession. There’s a lot of paid work on a Friday and Saturday night but Monday to Thursday, there’s far less paid jobs going.

“A lot of comedians might have a radio show or they might work in television. But if I want to survive, I’d rather work in a pharmacy for a couple of days a week rather than work in television or radio which is pretty boring.

“There’s a lot of waiting around, it’s not very secure, a contract might last a couple of years, then you might not get anything.”

He sniggers at the thought he would “have to deal with more difficult people” in television and radio than in pharmacy. “I think there’s a lot more egos,” he ponders.

By way of advice for any budding comics, Peter says it takes a lot of time to reach the top rung of the comedy ladder, particularly if you want to rub shoulders with Ricky Gervais or Frank Skinner.

“You have to practice and come up with new material. It’s very slow. I would say a good barometer is it’ll take you four years to come with five minutes on stage, six years to come up with 20 minutes and 10 years to come up with an hour. That’s industry standard and even doing that you could be a bit anonymous.”

Peter comes out with the wonderful line ‘one viral video could change everything’ when I ask him how far he is away from that top rung. He is also acutely aware that social media can propel even the most obscure individuals to fame and fortune.

“Anything’s possible. That’s part of the fun of it. Look at comedian Paul Smith from Liverpool. Paul Smith wasn’t on TV, he wasn’t going to the Edinburgh Fringe and getting nominated.

“He was in a comedy club in Liverpool, MCing every night, and they were putting it online and he’s probably the biggest comedian in the country now. He does arenas. He’s massive.

“I don’t think he’s ever been on television. I think what’s different now is it happens online rather than on TV. It’s probably the same with music now, but when we were growing up, there would be big acts and your parents and grandparents might never have heard of them.

“Oasis were huge and now they’re back. But Oasis are being talked about on the news and they’re in mainstream television and all that. So, even if you don’t like them, you’re aware of them. But with social media, people can be massive and nobody knows who they are.”

Peter reveals he was recently approached by a guy who was making a comedy TV show for YouTube called The Beta Squad which has 270,000 followers on X. They didn’t go with Peter in the end but it might have propelled his profile and his career to a new level.

“They have something like eight million subscribers and every TV show they do gets millions of views. I think they averaged seven million views. That’s a bigger TV show than anything on the BBC, bigger than Live at the Apollo, Strictly.”

Listening to Peter talk so enthusiastically about social media, I start to think how great it would be if all community pharmacists had their own YouTube channels and became pharmacy ‘celebrities.’

They could have the same size followings as some of these Z-list social media influencers but with content that has far more value. Pharmacy improves, and in some cases, saves lives. The problem is pharmacy is not as enticing to the masses as fashion, entertainment and travel.

Controversy to push the boundaries

One question jabs away at me as we chat; has Peter ever used controversial subjects for his comedy? The IRA, for example? And has pharmacy ever been the butt of his jokes?

“I don’t sit down and decide what I’m going to write about. If I think of something funny, I think of something funny. I definitely don’t strive to be controversial and it doesn’t appeal to me.

“The audience gives you a lot of feedback. I have jokes that I know will make people feel a bit uncomfortable and I don’t get a thrill out of that.

“When I go to Edinburgh and they do a late night show, and the show is advertised as ‘dark jokes’ or ‘offensive jokes,’ for that audience it can be a bit fun to go and do them because you know they’re not going to be uncomfortable. They’ve bought into it.

“But it’s not the pinnacle of comedy for me. I’d much rather do Friday, Saturday night, 8pm, 9pm, prime time, mainstream. That’s what I’m going for.”

Comics often describe the use of controversy as ‘pushing the boundaries.’  My mind drifts back to Peter’s mention of Reginald D Hunter, who made a joke at the Edinburgh Fringe about Israel which caused a furore. Later, he would inevitably say ‘I do push boundaries in creating humour, it's part of my job.’

Peter prefers to stay away from wars when he is on stage. “As a performer, I’m not interested in that. I grew up with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. When it comes to conflict, any conflicts, they’re highly emotive. In all conflicts, you never really get all the facts until long after the event.

“If we look at Northern Ireland, what we were being told was happening while it was happening is not what we now know happened with 30 years of hindsight. They’re not really areas I would delve into.”

Another highly emotive area is transgender which Peter has written articles about in the pharmacy press. But again, it’s a subject he steers clear of on stage.

“I’m very much on the pro (transgender) side. But I don’t have a ship in that battle. None of my family are transgender, I never had any question marks over my own sexuality or gender, so it’s not an area I have enough passion or interest in to come with something unique or interesting on.

“I once had a pro-transgender joke where I slagged off someone fictional…I made up someone who was strongly anti-transgender but also ignorant.

“I would do that joke and it would do well but I didn’t love it because it would always create a bit of tension. The audience would be like ‘well, who is he to talk about this?’”

There is something else to consider; the General Pharmaceutical Council has penalised registrants for things that have occurred in their private lives, away from the pharmacy.

Some comedians make jokes about obesity, Alzheimer's disease and other health-related issues. I wonder if Peter, with his pharmacist’s head on, would be uncomfortable using that material on stage given the potential regulatory ramifications.

“It slightly crossed my mind at the start. It’s not something I really think about now,” he says. He performs under the stage name Jack Hester, not to avoid the GPhC’s scrutiny but because his mother’s name is Hester and his father wanted to call him Jack.

And Peter is clear; when he is on stage, he is performing. He is not expressing his view about the world.

“The comedian Jimmy Carr speaks in jokes. He doesn’t say ‘I think’ or ‘this is my opinion.’ He’s very structured, it’s very obvious Jimmy Carr is telling jokes. Now, with Ricky Gervais, there’s a level of mastery where he gives you his view of the world. In his opinion, his view is as important as the jokes.

“If you’re doing that, there’s a bit of cult of personality there. I’ll give you an example where I think the GPhC might come in.

“If you said anti-vax stuff, that the Covid vaccine was dangerous, and everybody who heard you believed that you believed it, and you were also saying you were a pharmacist, then there’s a problem.

“But if you’re a pharmacist and you’re using a different name and you’re walking on stage telling a joke that’s clearly a joke, I don’t see a problem. It’s performance. Everything I’m doing, I think I could defend.”

This is a rare interview where pharmacy has not been the central subject. It feels like a refreshing change, not because pharmacy is uninteresting but because Peter is particularly interesting.

“Pharmacy is like politics. It’s always on the verge of being a disaster but it somehow keeps muddling on,” he says, without any hint of a joke.