I SWORE BLIND I’D NEVER DO TV AGAIN
Celeb Dermot’s debut on Cilla show
ROOM To Improve star Dermot Bannon has revealed he vowed he would never work in telly after appearing on Blind Date.
The celebrity architect was just 20 when he was selected to go on the popular show in 1994, hosted by the late Cilla Black.
Dermot opened up about how he ended up looking for a date in front of 18 million people – and he said the experience turned him off.
Speaking at the launch of RTE’S Let’s Get Together launch yesterday, Dermot said: “I was in college in England and all the people who appeared on the show were students.
“Producers used to arrive in the student’s union and set up these big tables for auditions. I think I stood out because I was Irish.
“There was an Irish guy a couple of years ahead of me and he got on it as well. I just went along with it; it was all a bit of craic.
“Every time there was an audition, or they brought you in, they said they would give us a few drinks.
“I was 20 years old, so that was 30 years ago.” Dermot revealed he almost didn’t go on in the end. He said: “It was a big deal. They brought us out on stage, and I nearly bottled. It was only then that I realised the enormity of what I was doing.
“They had stand-bys just in case. I was one of the three guys, but I didn’t get picked. I thought I would do this for a bit of craic. I wanted to do it to see what it would be like on television and be backstage.
“When I came off, I said, ‘Thank God, now I will never work in television.’”
But Dermot gushed over meeting Cilla Black, saying she was the only person he ever met who was able to “disarm” someone.
He said: “I met her and I had a photograph taken with her. They have a green room, and she came up and hung around after the show. She came out on set, and she was unbelievable.
“That was my first time dealing with a TV pro. She made me laugh, she made me smile and she put me at ease. That’s the first time you meet her, when she walks on to the set.
“You don’t meet her backstage. I’ve never seen anyone disarm people and put them at ease like her. She had an amazing warmth. I don’t think I’ve
met anyone as warm as her since then. She was brilliant.”
Room To Improve has been a hit with viewers since its return to our screens on January 7, with Sunday’s episode watched by almost 600,000 viewers.
RESPONSIBILITY
In the Sunday Independent it was revealed the Dubliner received a private briefing from Housing Minister Darragh O’brien’s department about a government grant which was repeatedly referenced on the show.
Dermot said: “Architects and people in the industry would meet with people in the Department of Housing regularly enough and I have met with the Department of Housing before on other topics. They are the department. They are there to help. The producers rang and said they would be looking at these grants, is there any way we can find out a bit more about it. They were brand new. We only found out about them.
“We didn’t know what would get a grant and what wouldn’t get a grant so they just said ‘yeah we can do a Zoom call with Dermot and Claire’ so we did.
“Then they fired us on to the local authorities. The local authorities handled all the grants so we were told what we needed to qualify. I didn’t see the big deal. It was at the very beginning of the grants. We are talking about it on camera – we need to be informed.
“We need to know what we are talking about. You get 52 minutes and we might get a minute to talk about the grant, we have to be concise.
“We have a responsibility when we’re talking about something to know what we are talking about because people watch the show and a lot of people take information from a TV show so we have to be correct in what we are doing.
“We got a briefing to say what the grants were all about. We didn’t even know you had to go through the local authority. That’s how little we knew.”
Dermot also explained his absence from The Late Late Show with new host Patrick Kielty.
But Dermot said he’s looking forward to being on it soon.
He said: “Normally I would do The Late Late Show to talk about an upcoming show I’m working on. The Late Late Show started too late for us this year.”
Other RTE star’s to appear at the broadcaster’s Let’s Get Together Launch yesterday included Dancing With The Stars judges Brian Redmond and Arthur Gourounlian.
Also there were Operation Transformation host Kathryn Thomas and Room To Improve’s Claire Irwin.
People watch the show and a lot of people take info from a TV show
DERMOT BANNON ON GOVERNMENT GRANT