Shane’s missing Nando’s but manfully seeing the funny side

The handsome, effervescent 32-year-old funnyman is now hugely popular, especially online, with his various intricately realised sketches as alter egos including the basically useless but ever bombastic football agent with a paunch and faint handlebar moustache, Keith Cruise, once signed with Taumonagh FC to enter the Tayto Spring Onion and Coriander League who acquired a Golden Boot from the West Belfast Special Brew premiership back in the day, training up his wannabe footballers to run like two men and a wee lad - ‘extra cardio for the wee fat ones’ - while replenishing themselves with Vitazade and cream buns at half-time; his posho north Down pseudo-estate agent persona Mike McGoldrick poking fun at culchies starting out at Queen’s for all being related, never having heard of the internet and chaining up livestock wherever they go while he schmoozes with Rory McIlroy in Deane’s or Ollie’s nightclub with champers, or slags The Jackal Carl Frampton about the likelihood of him being kneecapped if her walked through Tiger’s Bay in his designer suit with cufflinks and over-poncified quiff; and the surprisingly astute rapper MC Beezer whose comic songs like ‘I Woke Up in Limavady’ - quickly segueing to ‘I woke up in Maghabbery’ after too much swallin’ spark with Eminem-style attitude and a relentless tide of wit and rhyme schemes that display real writing talent in addition to superb delivery - Belfast is a place of ‘sodas and five lighters for a pound’ and if Beezer ran Stormont ‘everything would be sweet...Everyone on their knees would be back on their feet....some bad people stole 500 million quid. No giving your family a free boiler to heat an empty barn’ (referring, of course, to the RHI scandal). Beezer doesn’t dig the DUP or the Sinn Fein, representing a younger generation who grew up in a post-conflict society and want to make it new.

Todd has had sold out gigs at the Ulster Hall and the Waterfront, has played numerous festivals including the Edinburgh Fringe, done numerous shows for BBC Northern Ireland and keeps his fans constantly entertained with his podcasts, sketches and comedy songs.

It’s been a meteoric journey for the guy who claims he was bullied at school for having big teeth and ears, and jokes that it was his arrival as a baby that kickstarted his parents’ divorce (doubtful). He has even taken his comedy Stateside - trying to valiantly explain Brexit to Americans or send up the impossibility of people on the that side of the Atlantic understanding the flat, scabrous tones of Northern Irish dialect, to the point where asking for a cup of tea in Starbucks almost becomes an international effort of semaphore.

So how has this seemingly happy-go-lucky joker been finding life under lockdown?

“I’m trying - trying! - to work as normally as possible getting comedy stuff online and writing standup.”

So he isn’t going stir crazy, developing serious cabin fever or ready to kill those he loves?

“No, actually, for me being self-employed, I’m kind if used to being at home and just working away. I was able to build a new routine fairly quickly. Honestly, it’s not too bad. But I miss Nando’s. That’s the main thing.”

I wonder who in his life makes him laugh the most.

“Probably myself when I watch my videos back. I often find myself standing up afterwards just to deliver a round of applause. Also my friend Dave Elliott, another standup from Rathcoole. He’s excellent.”

The proudest moment of his career so far, he confides, has to be being recognised in Victoria Square by the person at the till and being given a 5p plastic bag for free in recognition of his celebrity.

“But my happiest achievement to date, was the first time I started shaving the sides of my head and let it go longer on top. When the barber showed me the cut in the mirror that first time, I was like, right, this is what it is all about.”

An only child, one of his shows was entitled Lonely Child. But in fact he was quite social. “I wouldn’t say I was popular, but I did have friends, and I think I had the last laugh, because not many people get recognised in Victoria Square like that.”

Shane Todd’s Little People In Lockdown, is his latest show on BBC Radio Ulster, one of a long line now with the station, and will see the star interview a variety of young people who have been finding novel ways to pass the time mid-pandemic.

“Some of the kids have been absolutely loving it. Some were finding it frustrating. You know, chatting to kids, I really enjoy that because it’s more my intellectual wave length. A few were doing arts, crafts, getting into cooking for their parents, baking, dying their hair blue or doing stuff on Zoom. You know, kids are funny. I didn’t have to work hard to bring that out.” For the show he met two brothers who were passing the time playing trad music. “They were great, fully accomplished musicians. I also met a girl who wants to be a comedian, a shame for me because the less competition the better, and another girl who chats to me about how her mother was hospitalised with coronavirus but thankfully recovered.”

The funnyman will be back touring in February at the Waterfront when hopefully lockdown will be ancient history.

Little People In Lockdown, June 20, BBC Radio Ulster at 10.30am.