Shane Todd

Newtownards, Holywood and an awkward eighteen-year-old at the Black Box

Todd was born on 9 June 1988 in Newtownards, County Down, and is from Holywood, the small town on the southern shore of Belfast Lough that has supplied him with material and at least one show title, Holywood To Hollywood. He was eighteen when he did his first gig, at the Black Box in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, on a night run and compered by Paul Currie with Diarmuid Corr, Neil Dougan and Gerry McBride also on the bill. His own description of himself that evening is a very awkward eighteen-year-old.

He has been working as a comic since 2008, when he was also putting sketch videos online as part of the Harlem Gun Club. The early grind included the sort of booking that teaches more than a good one: a corporate gig for a housing firm at a Northern Irish hotel that ran twenty-five minutes in complete silence. He went back to the same hotel the following week for a different company function, joked to the staff that it could not be worse than the last time, and it was.

Radio Ulster, Soft Border Patrol, and a sketch show he made himself

Broadcasting came before the big touring. Todd fronted The Shane Todd Show on BBC Radio Ulster in 2016 and has continued to present for the station. On television he played the public relations chief Laurie Lyle across the mockumentary sitcom Soft Border Patrol in 2019 and 2020, and he hosted Previously With Shane Todd for BBC Northern Ireland, an archive-trawling comedy format whose first series ran from October to November 2020.

The most self-directed piece of work is Chancers, a sketch show he wrote, performed in, co-directed and produced himself for the BBC. It arrived on iPlayer and BBC Northern Ireland in December 2024 and was built partly as a showcase for newer Northern Irish comic talent rather than a solo vehicle. Alongside that sits a character strand — Mike McGoldrick is the best known — and a run of Edinburgh Fringe appearances in 2015, 2016, 2019, 2023 and 2024.

Tea With Me, and the audience it built

The weekly Tea With Me podcast is the engine behind the ticket sales. It is a conversation show, carried on YouTube as well as audio platforms, and it has scaled up live in a way few comedy podcasts in these islands have: a sold-out Waterfront Hall in Belfast, a sold-out live episode at the SSE Arena, two further sold-out Waterfront Hall nights in 2024, and a return to the arena for another live recording.

A second podcast, We're Not F***ing Historians, ran weekly on Tuesdays with the author and director Hazel Hayes, working through Irish history from the Bronze Age forward in deliberately unqualified fashion. That series has since ended. By the time the current tour was announced in June 2025, Todd's combined social following was put at more than 870,000, with fourteen million likes on TikTok — a jump from the figure of roughly half a million he was quoting ahead of the 2024 arena shows.

Eleven hours, a Grand Opera House record, and opening for Kevin Hart

Todd has now written eleven solo hours, among them Sick Bro!, Holywood To Hollywood and Mummy in 2022. The accumulation shows in one statistic his representation leads with: he holds the record for a solo performer at Belfast's Grand Opera House, a run that reached twenty-four consecutive nights, having stood at sixteen when the 2024 arena show was being sold.

The international lift came from a support slot. He was resident opener on Kevin Hart's twenty-four-date European tour in 2022, going on ahead of Hart twenty-two times, and has shared bills with Bill Burr, Theo Von, John Mulaney and Tim Dillon. Hart's verdict on Todd's own show, still used in the marketing, is one word: dope. The British Comedy Guide's line, also recycled on posters, is storytelling mastery.

Full House, the eleventh hour, was the show that tested the ceiling. It was drawn from growing up in a large family and then raising children of his own, and it took him to the SSE Arena in Belfast on Saturday 9 November 2024 — his first time headlining the whole room alone, promoted by TSW Management — with a second arena night on 15 November. The Irish run was extended into January and February 2025, and a North American leg followed in March 2025 with club dates including The Stand in New York.

Hold Me Back: the fourth world tour

The current show was announced on 24 June 2025, with a presale on 25 June and general sale from 27 June through his own site. Todd framed the title plainly: it is called Hold Me Back because this was his longest gap between tours, and he had deliberately taken extra time to get new material ready.

It opened with a European leg starting in Lisbon and moving through Dublin, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Amsterdam and Stockholm, then ran nineteen dates across the UK and Ireland from 12 March to 24 April 2026. That stretch included his first Soho Theatre run, three nights in Soho Downstairs from 12 to 14 March, and took in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Derry, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Cardiff, Bristol and Brighton before the 3Olympia in Dublin on 17 April and Cork Opera House on 23 April. It finished at the SSE Arena in Belfast on 24 April 2026, the room he had sold out twice two years earlier.

Where he stands in September 2026

Hold Me Back has not finished. Todd plays the Dubai Comedy Festival on 16 October 2026, then Australia: the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on 25 October, The Tivoli in Brisbane on 28 October and the National Theatre in Melbourne on 31 October. Sydney and Melbourne are both sold out; Brisbane still has tickets, from twenty-nine dollars. That pattern — sold out at home and in the larger Australian rooms, with availability where the market is newest — is a fair picture of where his name currently carries.

What is notable about the trajectory is that almost none of it came through the usual British television route. There is no panel-show run and no streaming special in the record. The lift came from Radio Ulster, from a sketch show he financed and directed himself, from a podcast he has hosted weekly for years, and from standing in front of Kevin Hart's audiences twenty-two times. Asked recently to assess his own position, Todd said that if he had been shown at the start of his career what he would end up doing he would not have believed it.