The reclusive life of Peter Kay: Why, despite his many millions, the now super-slim comic would rather be at home with his family and Mork & Mindy videos than living like the megastar he is
On the first night of this mammoth comeback tour – which began in December 2022 and will run until February 2026 – Peter Kay broke down in tears.
Visibly moved by a lengthy standing ovation from the crowd in Manchester he said: 'Oh Jesus, look at me, I mean what's that all about?
'How am I supposed to do bloody comedy now? Lovely Manchester, you made me cry. Where did it come from, all that emotion?'
Where indeed? After 11 years out of the spotlight for 'unforeseen family' reasons which he chose to keep private – and against all odds managed to do just that – it looked that night as if Kay might have doubted the true extent of his popularity.
Yet as much as he is loved, the critics have been divided. He's not the man he used to be, some say. The jokes are almost all old, his voice is weaker, and he is, for the first time, including more risqué material, away from the gentle whimsy and warm nostalgia of his working-class Bolton childhood, which made him one of the UK's greatest ever comedians.
'Plenty of people left early, not waiting for the encore... wish we'd joined them,' said one disappointed audience member this month.
A noticeably slimmer comedian Peter Kay in a rare sighting in London this week. The star has lost an enormous amount of weight during the two years his tour has been on
Physically, he is changed, too. On a rare sighting in London this week, it was clear that Kay, 51, had lost an enormous amount of weight during the two years that the tour has been running. He was trimmer when it started, but is near-unrecognisable now. Nothing was explained, or even mentioned, of course.
Tickets for Peter Kay: Live have sold in unprecedented volume. By the time the tour concludes, it will have broken (his own) record for the biggest-selling stand-up show of all time.
Not that he needs the cash; financial records quietly filed on December 28 show that he has £25.8 million in equity in one company and £11.5 million in another.
He is, according to a number of Rich Lists, the most successful funnyman in Britain – way ahead of even Ricky Gervais or Michael McIntyre.
Yet curiously, there's nobody who lives more modestly than this intensely private man.
Locals in Bolton, where he still lives, use the word 'reclusive' to describe him.
One neighbour said this week: 'It's sad but we never see him. You see his wife going out and about in her car and sometimes her sons. But you never see Peter – he just stays in the house. I think I have seen him once in four or five years.'
Another said: 'He's a bit of a recluse these days. He just seems to stay inside his house. There's cameras everywhere and the security gate is always closed.'
Worth around £900,000, Kay's home in Bolton is a simple property, screened from the road by trees and a high fence. He and his wife don't drive new cars and there is no apparent ostentation.
Neighbours say that they've lived there for around 15 years and in the early days did a lot on the house.
Kay with his wife Susan. He met the former Boots worker as a teenager before finding fame and they married in 2001.
Inside the home is Kay's extensive collection of video tapes of old shows, such as Mork & Mindy, and the Christmas special editions of the Radio Times and TV Times, which he has collected since he was seven.
Plus, of course, all the TV theme tunes he taped from the TV, and which form part of his act.
His neighbours describe him a great ambassador for Bolton, and 'proud of his roots'.
He undertakes community fundraisers: in 2017 he performed at the Blackpool Opera House in aid of the Polly Haydock Appeal – a cancer treatment fund which aimed to send a mother from Bolton to Germany for pioneering immunotherapy treatment. Sadly she died a few months later.
The following year he hosted a charity screening of his show Car Share to raise money for The Lily Foundation, which helps children with mitochondrial disease.
In an interview in 2009, he explained: 'I like to be low-profile and keep my head down. I still go up to the Co-op Late Shop for a bottle of Tizer. Staying in Bolton has been hugely important for me. Every street is a memory or a story for me. This is my home.'
He said: 'Sometimes your work can become your life and real life can take a back seat but, for me, it's the other way round; where I live and my family are my life.'
The family home where the Kays live with sons Charlie, 20, and Finley, 18, is less than ten minutes' drive from the house he was raised in and which he so lovingly describes in his stand-up shows.
Wife Susan is his pre-fame sweetheart and they were married in 2001, just after his hit show Phoenix Nights started transmission. They met as teenagers, and she used to work in the local branch of Boots.
And it's family which really drives him. It was revealed in 2011 that a helicopter was booked to bring him home every night to Bolton after he had performed in The Tour That Didn't Tour – Tour, whisking him home from London, Newcastle and Birmingham so that he could do the school run in the morning.
Tickets for Peter Kay: Live have sold in unprecedented volume. By the time the tour concludes, it will have broken (his own) record for the biggest-selling stand-up show of all time
'Being a dad is just brilliant and fantastic. You can't put it into words what it's like. I've met so many older actors and comedians who've told me they wished they'd spent as much time with their kids as they did chasing the money,' he once said.
'I didn't want to be away for weeks on end. I would have regretted being stuck in London on the phone to my family every night saying, 'I'll be home soon'. That would have outweighed any joy I had doing the show.'
He also said that being away for even four nights would be 'torture.'
Kay's only material indulgence is a house in Ireland, where his mother is from. Bought in 2005, the holiday home is close to Lough Derg, a freshwater lake in the Shannon River Basin, which has shores in counties Clare, Galway and Tipperary.
He said in 2017: 'We used to come over a lot and see the family and drive around so I said why don't we get a house. We give Christmas a miss because the house is freezing.' A curious statement as a man of his wealth could most certainly afford to heat it.
Peter's father, Michael, was an engineer and his mother, Deirdre, a housewife, originally from County Tyrone. There was no showbusiness in his family.
Born on July 2, 1973, Peter was educated by nuns at his local Catholic school, Mount St Joseph, but was not a success academically, gaining a sole O-level in art.
His parents divorced, amicably, and he appears to have been fairly popular at school. He got onto a BA course in Drama, Theatre Studies and English Literature after fibbing about his qualifications, and then went to the Adelphi College in Salford, where he studied for an HND in media performance.
It was here that he tried stand-up for the first time – and loved it.
David Perkins, the manager of the Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester, still remembers his first gig. 'He just blew me away. I knew he'd be massive. Acts couldn't follow him. He was just too funny.'
Over the four years from 1996 to 2000 he worked incessantly, playing 500 clubs. To make ends meet he took jobs as a mobile disc jockey, cinema usher, loo-roll packer, shelf-stacker at Spar, in a cash & carry, video shop and Mecca Bingo bar.
Kay has said more than once that the experience left him spending his life waiting for a 'tap on the shoulder' to let him know that his time in the spotlight is up.
'You do feel you're not entitled to it,' he said in an interview, adding with a typical flourish that he sometimes imagines he will be told: 'Come back to Netto and stack boxes.'
The comic enjoyed years of stadium standup success... but then abruptly cancelled his tour in 2017, leaving fans baffled and concerned
His first break on television was in The Services – set in a service station outside Bolton – for Channel 4. It was followed by the spoof documentary series That Peter Kay Thing, and then the highly successful Phoenix Nights, in which Kay played wheelchair-bound Brian Potter, owner of The Phoenix Club in Bolton.
Phoenix Nights was followed by the spin-off Max & Paddy's Road To Nowhere, about the club's bouncers. His co-star was his old school friend, Paddy McGuinness. Kay co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in the show, and there were mutterings that he was controlling and demanding.
One-time friend and collaborator, Dave Spikey, told in 2010 how they fell out when Kay took all the credit for writing Phoenix Nights. Yet the comedy was instantly beloved.
Kevin Lygo, now in charge at ITV, hailed him as the new Ronnie Barker, saying: 'He's not in the tradition of the modern comedian at all. He doesn't really tell jokes as such. His comedy is observational in the best sense, sweet and honest.'
Certainly his successes in these years were nothing less than phenomenal. His tours were the most successful in UK comic history, his book sold more than any other hardback autobiography.
Continued sales of his DVDs – which have sold more than ten million copies – and another tour in 2010 helped to keep the money pouring in. He also started to enjoy the friendship of some of his heroes, chat-show host Michael Parkinson and comedian Billy Connolly. Even Ronnie Barker was happy to exchange letters.
Kay sent him a nail file in a Soreen malt loaf – a reference to Barker's role as convict Fletcher in Porridge. Barker wrote back in character, and Kay was utterly thrilled.
Yet he didn't capitalise on his success as much as he could have. He said in 2011: 'I've never been led by money. If I had been doing things for the money, I'd have done five tours by now. I didn't tour for seven years because I wanted to wait until the children were older.'
Then in 2017, a tour was abruptly cancelled, leaving everyone baffled and concerned. A statement released to X, formerly Twitter, read: 'Due to unforeseen family circumstances, I deeply regret that I am having to cancel all of my upcoming work projects.
'This, unfortunately, includes my upcoming stand-up tour, Dance For Life shows and any outstanding live work commitments. My sincerest apologies. This decision has not been taken lightly, and I'm sure you'll understand my family must always come first.'
He returned with a second series of Car Share, for which he won two Baftas, and there were plans for another tour, which were nixed by the pandemic. And now, with his children grown up, he is coming back with the longest tour of his career.
His set doesn't really address any of the events in his life – like fatherhood and family life – but goes back over the familiar ground of TV adverts and mis-heard song lyrics – and talks about shopping from catalogues rather than Amazon.
The closest he gets to revealing anything personal comes in a section where he talks about his experience of an operation for kidney stones, and his amazement when the anaesthetist asks for a selfie. The finale is a conversation with his grandmother at the end of her life, replayed over a slideshow from his family album. She died recently aged 96.
Some hard-hearted audience members have criticised this as 'bizarre' and 'not funny at all'. Others complained that he seems to be stuck retelling gags and revisiting riffs about adverts. 'He was a comic genius. but I'd heard all the jokes before,' said one.
But for many fans, it's exactly what they want. 'It has a familiar feel to it,' says one. 'But that's why I wanted to see him.'
