A real cool Cat
Cat Deeley is the girl who broke the mould of children’s TV presenter to become one of the biggest stars in the US. On the surface, she is the sort of woman you might assume it would be hard to warm to: still girlishly pretty at 40, ridiculously successful (she has a Bafta as well as five Emmy nominations), with handsome Hollywood actors among her former flames (including Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston and True Blood’s Michael McMillian) and a figure that has barely changed an inch (‘well, maybe two’) since her modelling days 20 years ago. On a rainy day in London, Cat is drinking tea and talking about the likely lads who kick-started her TV career in 1998, Ant and Dec, with whom she hosted SMTV Live and CD:UK for seven years, and the unlikely man – Irish comedian and presenter Patrick Kielty – she married five years ago after an 11-month romance (they have a son, Milo, one).
In reality, it takes a matter of minutes to feel comfortable in Cat’s company. She is disarmingly funny and easygoing, chatting openly about everything from the insomnia that has plagued her for more than a decade to hilarious horror stories of presenting live – including a drunken Slash from Guns N’ Roses blithely swearing and talking about groupies on a kids’ TV show and having her first migraine live on the Emmy-award-winning So You Think You Can Dance (think The X Factor meets Strictly Come Dancing), the US show she has fronted for the past 11 years.
‘ That was the worst experience ever,’ she says. ‘I had no idea what was happening, which was the scariest part. I got tunnel vision halfway through the show and my head felt like it was exploding. But what can you do? You are live in front of millions. You push through on adrenalin and then collapse when the show is over.’
She still has migraines but, she says, ‘it’s about recognising the warning signs’.
As for Ant and Dec, Cat was the villain of the recent Saturday Night Takeaway whodunit spoof, ‘Who Stole the Crown Jewels’ (‘It was me!” she laughs). The celebrity-packed skits, which kicked off last year with ‘Who Shot Simon Cowell’ (it was Pudsey the dog), have proved to be one of the most popular segments in the TV show that saw them pick up their 16th National Television Awards gong in a row for best presenters in January.
When Cat, Ant and Dec get together for a rare beer in London, none of them can quite believe how their lives have turned out. They are at the top of their game, multimillionaires and viewed as gamechangers in their industry – Ant and Dec for ruling British TV and Cat for cracking the US. ‘No one,’ she says, ‘would have ever dreamed back in the 1990s that any of us would be around for more than a few years.’ She is not wrong.
When they met in 1998, Ant and Dec were working- class former child actors from Byker Grove, and Cat was a model turned MTV presenter who wanted to shake up Saturday morning children’s TV.
The idea for SMTV – a hugely popular children’s TV show in the vein of Tiswas – came from Ant and Dec, who originally conceived it as a one-hour show. ITV gave them the green light, but said the show had to run for three hours.
‘When SMTV started none of us knew what we were doing,’ says Cat. ‘I got the job because in the arrogance of my youth I turned up for an interview in a ripped T-shirt and cowboy boots and I looked like the girl in a cartoon the artist Jamie Hewlett had done as a concept poster.
‘When Ant, Dec and I see each other now – which is not very often because we are on opposite sides of the Atlantic – we laugh about what we used to be like. None of us has had the balls to rewatch the first episodes of SMTV because they were so bad – we were like pilots flying a plane with absolutely no training. Somehow we just got away with it because the energy was great and there was nothing else like it on TV. When things went wrong, we thought on our feet. Doing Saturday Night Takeaway has been brilliant. It’s like being back with your best mates from school, an absolute joy.
‘My favourite TV moment ever happened back then when Prince came on CD:UK [the celebrity-packed chart show]. It was when he’d changed his name to a symbol and my job was to get him to pronounce what he was now called. I grew up with his posters on my wall. At the end of the interview I told him I wanted to tell my mum I’d met him but didn’t know what to call him now. He looked at me, smiled and said, “A new friend.”’
But like Ant and Dec, Cat was never anyone’s fool. She has succeeded as a presenter and ➤
➤ starred in shows from the cult comedy Deadbeat to The Simpsons. Steve Jones, Fearne Cotton and Cheryl all tried and failed the US test but Cat, who took over on So You Think You Can Dance after the original presenter Lauren Sánchez became pregnant and opted not to return, became part of the success of the Emmy-winning show and has recently signed a contract to front its 14th season.
The difference with Cat (as with James Corden and Piers Morgan) is that she operates on a different level: she is less about superficial personality and more about strength of character. She has produced her own shows (including Royally Mad for BBC America, in which she took a group of US royal fans to London) and proved she was not just all about the glitter by starring on NBC’s The Tonight Show and covering Kate and William’s wedding for CNN in 2011. There is about her, as there is with James and Piers (both are friends), the ‘have-a-go’ spirit that Americans so prize. ‘I’ve always believed you should go for things and if you fail, then it’s a noble failure,’ she says. ‘If you don’t try, you’ve done nothing.’
With zero celebrity connections (her father Howard, a car designer, and her mother Janet brought up Cat and her younger brother Max in a quiet English suburb), Catherine Elizabeth Deeley was 14 when she entered a modelling competition. By 16 she had abbreviated her name to Cat so she would be ‘more memorable’ as a model and in 1997 sent an audition tape to MTV, which offered her a job as a presenter.
Most of her life has been about changing people’s perceptions of her. On entering a room of strangers, she gives herself ‘exactly three and a half minutes’ to alter the way people think about her. ‘In my 20s, I would see people look at me and I would know the word “bimbo” was going round in their heads. It’s up to me to challenge that perception by showing exactly who I am and never being fake. People can spot a fake a mile off. You have to be yourself.’
But the truth is that Cat’s likeability has less to do with what she says and a whole lot more to do with what she does. After more than a decade of life in Los Angeles (she lives on the same boulevard as Tom Cruise and Will Smith) she is resolutely Botox-free: ‘My face moves!’ When she first moved to the US in 2006, Cat says, she came under fire for not being physically perfect. ‘ There were comments on social media about my nose. It has a bit of a bend in it and there were people saying, “She needs to get her nose fixed.” I remember feeling quite taken aback; I’d always thought my nose was perfectly acceptable. But then you suddenly think, “Oh no. Is it awful? Do I need to do something?” I completely get how that pressure can overtake you. But ultimately I was never going to do anything because this is who I am.’ We move on to talk about another decision she made that stunned her fans. When she began dating Patrick Kielty in 2012, much was made of the fact that the comedian, TV presenter and radio host wasn’t quite what was expected for a girl like Cat – particularly given that her previous boyfriends had all been of the tall, dark, handsome variety. She raises an eyebrow. ‘I always used to go for the same chocolate in the box and then I went for the strawberry cream and decided I liked it.’ She pauses. ‘And the thing I love about Patrick is that he’d say I was the lucky one. And he’s right. I am. You can’t ever guarantee you are going to find the right person. I’m just very lucky it happened to me.’ They have been married for five years and live between Los Angeles, Belfast and London. Cat begins by telling me that globetrotting with a one-year- old really isn’t all that difficult. ‘We move around when we work,’ she says. ‘When we’re in LA and I’m working on So You Think You Can Dance, Patrick records interviews for Radio 2 [he also does stand-up comedy and presents TV shows such as Love Island] and then I’ll fly over to London or we’ll spend a few weeks in Belfast. You can complain about it or you can make it work. We make it work.’
I sense that Cat is increasingly homesick. ‘I do miss it,’ she says. ‘I miss my family more now that we have Milo. It’s the same with Patrick’s family.
‘We love hanging out as much as we can. I like to think that home is wherever we are, but I do feel more of a pull back these days. I love the LA lifestyle but I’m happy to come back, too.’
It is clear that Cat is part and parcel of LA life – she regularly hangs out with the MacFarlanes ( Family Guy creator and star Seth MacFarlane is a neighbour) and occasionally sees the Brit Pack (‘I’m really happy for James Corden. He has done so well and it’s always lovely to see each other, but in LA everyone works pretty hard’) – but she could never quite completely live the all-American life. ‘I point-blank refused to have a baby shower,’ she says. ‘A lot of my friends wanted to arrange one for me but I didn’t want a party for my baby before I’d actually had him. I wanted to wait till my baby arrived and then do the celebrating.’
I say her life sounds completely exhausting and she bursts out laughing. ‘It bloody well is,’ she says. ‘I’m permanently knackered. It was OK before we had Milo but it gets harder. When I was breastfeeding I got stuck on a flight in a blizzard. I didn’t have my breast pump and by the time I arrived in London I was in agony. I thought I was going to burst.
‘I try to keep Milo on a schedule. I can’t do Gina Ford because I wouldn’t want someone
I used to be ambitious but so much of that has gone since I became a mum
telling me what time to eat a piece of toast – that’s too full- on. But our lives are one huge spreadsheet. The one rule is that we both put all our appointments into the iCal and then we work it out from there. Patrick is always forgetting, which drives me mad.’
The pair do, however, have help from Cat’s cousin (who is currently on Milo duty).
She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I love doing So You Think You Can Dance – we are like family – but I used to be more ambitious and so much of that has gone since I became a mum. I used to always be happy to hear about new opportunities, but now I’m much more chilled.
‘I’d like to pen a novel because I love writing – that is my secret ambition. I wonder what I did with all the time I used to have – perhaps I could have solved the world economic crisis. I’m now ruled by different time zones.’
Cat says she sleeps just four hours a night. ‘I suffer from chronic insomnia. On a very good night I may possibly sleep for eight hours. I have tried everything: sleeping pills, Valium, so much Ambien I became immune to it, camomile, melatonin… Nothing has worked. Now I’m trying to stop obsessing and accept it. The problem is that my mind races all the time; the one thing that helps is keeping a notepad next to my bed to jot down thoughts – not terribly sexy but it makes a difference. I don’t seem to have the capacity to switch myself off.’
There is no question that her decision to marry Patrick was the best one she ever made. They have known each other since 2002 when they presented the BBC show Fame Academy together. It took them ten years to get together. ‘ There was always a little something, a little twinkle,’ she says. ‘But we were either involved with other partners or working on opposite sides of the world. We always called each other on our birthdays. Patrick was someone who could make me howl with laughter and also give me great advice.’
On the eve of her 35th birthday in 2011, Patrick called her from his local pub in Belfast. ‘It was 2am and he was at a lock-in at his local,’ she says. ‘He rang to ask me what I was doing for my birthday – I was going to a party at Seth MacFarlane’s house and then having lunch with friends the following day at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Patrick told me he’d see me at lunch. I just laughed and said, ‘Right.’ The next day I got up, went to lunch and in walked Patrick. There was a strange little moment like in the movies when everyone else just seemed to melt away. We spent the afternoon together just drinking, laughing, talking. He told me he wanted to be with me for ever.
‘He was very clear this was what he wanted, and that was what got me. I have lived a life where I’ve met lots of incredible people and been to lots of places, so it takes a lot to blow my socks off. But what did it was this man who had the confidence to say what he wanted, to fly halfway around the world to get it. No games, no pretence. He came back to my house that night, stayed for ten days and that was it.
‘If people think attractive is just George Clooney and Cindy Crawford – well, they need a wake-up call. There’s nothing more attractive than a man who absolutely knows what he wants, who will put his cards on the table, who can make you laugh. That’s the man you want to be with for the rest of your life.’
She gives a wide grin. The Cat who got the strawberry cream is clearly very happy.