Nuala McKeever | |
---|---|
Born | 1964 (age 59–60) |
Alma mater | Queen's University Belfast |
Occupation | Comic actress |
Partner | Mike Moloney (? - 2013) |
Nuala McKeever (born 1964) is an actress from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
McKeever grew up in the west of the city and graduated from Queen's University Belfast with a degree in languages.[ citation needed ]
After graduating from university, McKeever worked at BBC Northern Ireland for eight years, initially as a secretary before becoming a researcher.[ citation needed ]
One of the first projects she worked on after quitting her research job was The Wilsons, for BBC Radio Ulster.[ clarification needed ]
This was followed by an appearance in Two Ceasefires and a Wedding (1995), a short film made for the BBC by the Northern Irish comedy group Hole in the Wall Gang. [1] The resulting comedy television series Give My Head Peace made McKeever a household name in Northern Ireland. She played the character "Emer" for two series. [2]
After leaving Give My Head Peace, she was hired by UTV. Here she wrote and produced McKeever, a sketch show.
Her first play, Out of The Box, directed by Andrea Montgomery, premiered at the Belfast Festival at Queen's in October 2005, and subsequently was performed at the Riverside Theatre, Coleraine at the University of Ulster and at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in April 2006. [3] The play toured across Ireland before closing with a week as the first production in the new Grand Opera House Studio in Belfast in December 2006.
Subsequently, McKeever and Montgomery produced It's Not All Rain & Potatoes, [4] a sketch comedy about Ireland for Terra Nova Productions, and Is It Me?, [5] a sitcom for BBC Northern Ireland.
Her long-term partner Australian-born Mike Moloney died at his north Belfast home in April 2013. [6]
In 2014 she came out as a lesbian in her newspaper column. [7]
On 25 May 2020 she was presenting BBC Radio Ulster and without her knowledge that her microphone had been left on she said regarding Prime Minister Johnson's top aid Dominic Cummings “I was thinking he was such a dick I had written his name down as Richard Cummings” [8] which was broadcast over the airwaves, The BBC told the Belfast Telegraph “the comments were not intended for broadcast and should not have been… We very much regret what happened and the upset caused.”
McKeever has been a vegetarian since she was 16. [9]
Belfast is the capital city and principal port of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan and connected to the open sea through Belfast Lough and the North Channel. It is the second-largest city on the island of Ireland, with an estimated population of 348,005 in 2022, and a metropolitan area population of 671,559.
The Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) was an Ulster loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland. It was formed by Billy Wright in 1996 when he and his unit split from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) after breaking its ceasefire. Most of its members came from the UVF's Mid-Ulster Brigade, which Wright had commanded. In a two-year period from August 1996, the LVF waged a paramilitary campaign in opposition to Irish republicanism and the Northern Ireland peace process. During this time it killed at least 14 people in gun and bomb attacks, almost all of them Catholic civilians killed at random. The LVF called off its campaign in August 1998 and decommissioned some of its weapons, but in the early 2000s a loyalist feud led to several killings. Since then, the LVF has been largely inactive, but its members are believed to have been involved in rioting and organized crime. In 2015, the security forces stated that the LVF "exists only as a criminal group" in Mid-Ulster and Antrim.
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Give My Head Peace is a satirical television comedy series on BBC Northern Ireland that pokes fun at political parties, paramilitary groups and the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland. The programme is written by Tim McGarry, Damon Quinn and Michael McDowell, also known as "The Hole in the Wall Gang", who also perform as the characters. Episodes are recorded in front of a live studio audience at the BBC Blackstaff Studio A in Belfast.
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