MOTOR MOUTH
The Pope. Cowell. His love of Wexford GAA. Going to Confession. And why he’s taking on Top Gear, with a little help from The Stig. Meet Dermot O’Leary, TV’s new...
Would Seán Dermot Fintan O’Leary accept an award from the Queen? ‘Yes!’
Dermot O’Leary studies the small, sparse room in which he is to be interviewed and promptly decides that it would be better suited to debriefing a Cold War double agent. For someone routinely assumed to possess a vanilla personality, O’Leary has opinions to burn and a quiet charisma that suggests you listen to them.
This, after all, is a man who now counts The Stig as a workmate (‘a quiet chap’), remains on texting terms with Simon Cowell (‘an absolute hoot’) and has hugged Michael Jackson (‘he had a really muscly back’).
He can also drive a primetime TV show as coolly as Steve McQueen in a car chase.
His eight years in front of the X Factor cameras established O’Leary as a top-drawer television presenter. He discounts Ant & Dec as direct competition as ‘there are 100% more of them and they are my mates’.
Now O’Leary is returning to our front rooms with two big shows, ITV’s prestigious National Television Awards and BBC1’s new Saturday-night game show, The Getaway Car. ‘It’s Total Wipeout behind the wheel of a car meets elements of Gogglebox,’ says O’Leary.
On a grey afternoon in a grim pocket of west London, O’Leary prepares to share his anything-but-beige beliefs on the Royal Family’s need for an update, The X Factor’s recent faux pas, the BBC, the Pope, Arsenal, love, money, marriage and more.
In the flesh, O’Leary speaks roughly 25% faster than in front of the camera – he sounds like a chainsaw running through a dictionary. Here, for instance, is what he makes of Prince Harry: ‘Harry has got his head screwed on his shoulders. He’s a lovely guy, very easy-going. He gets what a 21stcentury Royal Family has to be like. My wife is Norwegian, we go to Norway a lot, and the Royal Family there go skiing and people see them hanging out. So yes, it is important for them to engage and be as normal as possible.’ O’Leary, 42, spent time with the fifth in line to the throne at Goodwood Aerodrome in West Sussex on the afternoon of the Prince’s 31st birthday last September while filming the documentary Battle Of Britain: Return Of The Spitfires.
‘I am from old Irish stock,’ continues Seán Dermot Fintan O’Leary Jnr. ‘So the Royal Family shouldn’t be my thing. ‘I’m very proud of my Irish roots and follow the fortunes of Wexford in the Gaelic Games’ in Camden.
‘But you get to a certain age where you think, “They didn’t ask for it.” There is an incredible weight of tradition and responsibility on their shoulders, and I think they get that. I inquire if the Colchester Essex raised Irishman would accept an honour from the Queen should the offer arise, and his reply is like lightning.
‘Absolutely. I have obviously thought about it, can’t you tell? Not that I think I am going to get one but, yes.’
Returning to the X Factor, he begins folding his forearms on the table before him, ‘When I left, I still wanted to do an early evening, fun primetime show, and this is a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously. After doing a show which does take itself quite seriously. So there are no tears this time, thank Christ.
‘I had done eight years and hadn’t signed my contract,’ O’Leary says of his departure from the talent contest. ‘It just felt like the right time to go. I lived for the live shows, and even in those there were a couple of weekends where I didn’t feel like I was enjoying
‘I’m a huge fan of the Pope. Francisco is brilliant. Even atheist mates of mine say he’s doing the right thing’
it as much as I used to. O’Leary claims not to have seen the various foul-ups made by his X Factor successors, Olly Murs and Caroline Flack, as the live fiascos unfurled last season.
But you sense that he has since viewed the blunders and, in a way, shared his fellow professionals’ pain. ‘I didn’t watch it because I was away for two months,’ he says, maintaining serious eye contact. ‘But I don’t think they did nearly as bad a job as everyone said they did. I think it helped that there were two of them.
‘I also think Caroline did a great job, I really do. She did a lot of the heavy lifting. She is the experienced one out of the two and she really helped him out.’
Presumably, O’Leary was flattered when Twitter was aflame with demands for his immediate return to the show.‘It is flattering to be missed,’ he demurs, modestly. ‘And like any job, if you do something for eight years and then leave and no one talks about you, that’d be worrying.
And has O’Leary been in touch with Simon Cowell since he left?
‘No,’ he says. ‘We have never really had that kind of relationship. I mean, I haven’t spoken to some of my best friends for six months. Simon and I have always had a very professional relationship.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I love his company – we have dinner and he is an absolute hoot. But from a work perspective we always kept it pretty distant, so you get a text every now and again.
‘I got in touch around the time his mother died and wrote him a letter. We’d met her several times and she was a lovely lady.’
Asked whether he would call Cowell for career advice, he smiles tightly and replies slowly: ‘I would like to think if I needed to I could, but there are other people I would probably turn to before Simon.’ Like Louis Walsh? ‘Yes, like Louis,’ he deadpans, before raucous laughter reverberates around the room.
O’Leary is a passionate soul with an analytical brain and a sharp wit and, good heavens, he likes to chat.
When I wonder if his wife, the television producer Dee Koppang, ever critiques O’Leary’s TV appearances, he says: ‘She’ll let me know when I talk too fast,’ then he inhales sharply with an audible hiss. ‘That’s the noise I get.’
The Getaway Car, in which five couples go head-to-head on a series of driving challenges and quizzes, could raise further questions in the O’Leary household, such as: is Dermot a better driver than Dee? It is here that
‘I got drunk until two in the morning the day Ireland played Italy’
‘I’m very proud of my Irish roots and follow the fortunes of Wexford in the Gaelic games in Camden’
the unflappable host of 2015’s Children In Need – parachuted in at the last minute to replace an ailing Terry Wogan – wonders aloud if he should answer, then proceeds.
‘I am probably the more dominant driver, but her thing is attrition,’ he says, speaking with due care and attention. ‘She will wear me down. “Are you sure this is the right way? No, I don’t think this is the right way either…” O’Leary, who drives a 1968 VW Karmann Ghia, ‘the motoring equivalent of a mistress – not practical or reliable’.But back to royalty, but this time pop royalty and O’Leary recalls a rather prestigious and unexpected overture in 2009 when Michael Jackson requested the presenter’s presence at the British press conference for his This Is It tour, three months before his tragic demise. ‘He got to the O2 maybe two hours late,’ O’Leary recollects. ‘They said he’d got stuck in the Blackwall Tunnel.
But he finally gets there, so I come out on stage, introduce him and he comes up and hugs me. Because he looked so thin I was really surprised that he had a really muscly back. Big, big back muscles, a dancer’s back.
‘Then he just properly ignored everything that was on the prompt for him and just said, “This is it because this is our last tour, because this is it!”
‘And halfway through he got really emotional. It was said subsequently that he was drunk, but I don’t know if he was.
O’Leary has chosen to meet today at an inauspicious office located high above the studio where he will later be photographed.
On a clear day, this eyrie offers an unparalleled view of Wormwood Scrubs prison. The room is bare but for a single desk and a pair of spindly chairs.
The famous features light up as he discusses his latest television project. ‘What’s not to enjoy about watching people arguing in a car and one couple in the end being triumphant and chasing The Stig for £10,000?’ he ponders.
The Stig, O’Leary reports, has said nothing about his former Top Gear colleagues’ punch-ups and subsequent move to Amazon. He is legendarily ‘a rather quiet chap’.
With three major motoring shows soon to be battling for pole position, O’Leary says that he became highly focused on ‘the tone’ of his programme. ‘We’re going for “warm” and “very playful”. No nastiness.’
He adds that he doesn’t feel guilty about his personal wealth, estimated to be in the region of £3 million (€4m) ‘because I work hard’.
The absence of guilt is perhaps surprising considering that O’Leary is a practising Catholic who attends Mass regularly, although chooses to avoid the ‘total weirdness’ of the Confessional box. ‘I am really bad at Confession,’ he winces, glancing fearfully to the heavens.
‘I haven’t been for ages. It is an odd premise to go and tell God what you have done wrong. I pray occasionally but I am not a big interventionist God fan. So I try not to say, “Please give me the Scalextric that I really want.”
‘And I am no evangelist. I don’t want to force my religion down anyone’s throat. I see my religion as no different to a moderate Muslim or a moderate Jew.’
Although O’Leary is not an active campaigner for the
Church, he was recently appointed patron of the London Irish Centre. He’s also a huge fan of Pope Francis. ‘Francisco is brilliant,’ he enthuses. ‘Even atheist mates of mine are saying that he’s doing the right thing. The Church should be there for social actions not some strict doctrine telling people what they should and shouldn’t be doing.’
O’Leary concludes the discussion on his faith by addressing the theological conundrum: if there is a God why is there so much suffering? ‘Here’s where we need to crack open that bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey we’ve been saving,’ he jokes. ‘This is deep stuff.’ I tell him that it is difficult to imagine Dermot O’Leary, the clean-cut autocue guru, getting profoundly drunk.
‘I’ve had a few all-nighters,’ he shrugs. ‘Although I am of the firm belief when you are on a night out that nothing good happens between 3am and 5am. If something great is going to happen it will have happened by then.
‘I got really drunk the day Ireland played Italy in the rugby,’ he admits. ‘I lost my wallet and my phone but miraculously held onto my keys. In fairness, I had started at midday and ended at two in the morning, so it was understandable.’
O’Leary is just as stoked to be back on television. ‘I’ve got the best gig in the world but also the strangest,’ he laughs, before giving his jaw a well-earned rest.
‘The time you are doing your job the best is when people don’t notice you.’
Dermot O’Leary hosts the UK’s National Television Awards on January 20 from 7.30pm on ITV. To vote, go to national tvawards.com. The Getaway Car starts on BBC1 on January 16 at 6.50pm