It’s a shock when you leave RTE, warns Davis
FORMER RTÉ star Derek Davis has warned his high-profile colleagues that early retirement from Montrose can be a big shock.
Charlie Bird is the latest big name to bow out of the station just eight months after Anne Doyle delivered her final news bulletin.
But their former colleague, Derek Davis, has opened up about the jolt of winding down from being a household name after 35 years in RTÉ.
The former face of afternoon TV has grown accustomed to his easier pace of life four years after leaving our screens but he admitted yesterday on TV3’s Morning Show that the first few months were difficult.
He said: ‘It is a shock after 30 or 40 years when you drive out of the gates of some place which has been a large chunk of your life. It’s perhaps more important to you than you realised.’
Davis, who lives with wife Una in south Dublin, said the highest-profile faces in the national broadcaster will have the toughest time learning to adjust. He said: ‘Towards the end of my time in RTÉ, I made a programme called Out of the Blue and I was pretty much my own boss.
I was a little de-institutionalised when it came to the time to show me the door and for that I was grateful.
‘It still comes as a shock. The people who rise highest in an organisation are the people who take to retirement the worst. It represents a loss of esteem.
‘The head of TV3 or RTÉ retires on a Friday and that’s when the chauffeurdriven car disappears and the free tickets to opening nights. And the spouse just becomes the spouse of the former boss of RTÉ and TV3.
‘I never felt defined by the job. I had other interests and I don’t think I felt that so acutely.
‘I do have a couple of colleagues who I know will be carried out of the place feet first because they are defined by their job.’
Davis, 64, said that winning Celebrity Bainisteoir in the year he retired was a delightful distraction.
He said: ‘The challenge was the fact that I had been so busy and it was to tune down to not being busy at all.’