Baz demands answers from the bookies
TV star on the story behind his new RTÉ show, changing his tune and how fans only ask about Nancy
ONE of the things that makes Baz Ashmawy a great television presenter is his honesty. It’s also one of the things that makes Baz the kind of person you want to be around off screen too. What you see is what you get and if you ask him a question, you’ll get a straight answer.
With 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy, Baz achieved the success he had long deserved, leading to other opportunities including his latest show Change Your Tune, currently halfway through a six-week run on ITV.
The bizarre new format sees, the very worst singers — rather than the best — battle it out for the £10,000 (€11,000) prize, scored by a studio audience.
The first episode was slammed by viewers who thought it was an elaborate April Fool’s prank but Baz was determined to try something new after the runaway success of 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy with mum Nancy.
‘It was exciting. I am not sure it worked, I am not sure there will be a season two,’ he says. ‘It was great fun to make it — just sometimes you don’t know how it will turn out. Obviously I didn’t make the show, I presented it.
‘I don’t know what will happen but it was great fun and I have been back and forth to the UK radio stations which has been great.’
Baz is a man comfortable in his own skin and he’s not stressing about what will happen with Change Your Tune in the future.
In fact, he loves being at home in Dublin and commuting over to London for work, so there won’t be any chance of a move to Britain for Baz and his sizeable brood of six with fiancée Tanya Evans.
‘You know what, I am kind of milking being in Dublin at the moment,’ he says. ‘I suppose just being around the kids. It is great being able to work from Ireland and sort of commute to London.
‘I am loving being able to make what I want at the minute.’
Obviously being home means Baz has more time to spend with his mammy — the fabulous Nancy who is loved just as much as her son thanks to their Sky TV double act. And if the public get their wish, Nancy might get her own show too.
‘I get people on Instagram or on Snapchat every day asking me if Nancy has her own show yet but she doesn’t,’ he adds.
‘Even when I was doing the ITV show people kept asking me was my mother with me. They just expected her to be behind me the whole time.
‘We will see, you never know and she would be great. Watch this space so to speak.’
On Monday night Baz will be showing his serious side again, stepping once again into the world of documentaries in All Bets Are Off, this time dealing with the thorny topic of Ireland’s relationship with gambling.
‘It is great to do this documentary and I have loved the process and the end result,’ he says. ‘But I definitely can’t wait to do something really uplifting and funny and good craic and totally different.
‘It is that choice of being able to do what I want which is liberating.’
Baz learned first-hand of the dangers of serial gambling as a result of his Eygptian father’s regular poker games.
However, he insists: ‘This documentary is not about me. It is about these people I met and the professionals I spoke to. It is a real eye-opener.
‘My dad liked to play poker. He played it enough to put me off playing it for life. I grew up around it and I don’t know if it was a problem, but he played enough for me that I never picked up a deck of cards in my life and I am a lad’s lad.
‘I like to sit around drinking whiskey and smoking cigars but I just don’t play poker. It makes me shudder a bit.’
And it was while pursuing his own pastimes that he got the idea for making the documentary.
‘I enjoy a good day out at the races but when someone brought my attention to the issue of problem gambling I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere — betting ads on my phone and on social media and signs from bookies at matches,’ he says.
‘I just became overwhelmed by it and thought it would make an interesting programme. I found it amazingly interesting.’
In the show, the 43year-old confronts Ireland’s growing gambling addiction and believes it is the hardest programme he’s ever made.
‘I am really happy with it. When I started I thought it was going to be about gambling but that is just too big of a world and it is now about problem gambling,’ he explains.
‘Gambling is in our DNA as Irish people. People love an underdog and it is in our language. There’s an attitude that gambling is just normal and part of everyday life and that is grand but that shouldn’t be the case. This is not a finger-pointing documentary. At the same time you come to the conclusion at end of it where you can’t understand how things have got so bad. ‘How have we not changed legislation in this country since the 1930s? We spend more per head on online gambling than anywhere else in Europe. ‘Yet we haven’t done one case study in Ireland. We don’t even know how big the problem is and we haven’t looked into it.’ And Baz says he is baffled at how the Irish Government has let down their citizens by refusing to legislate against online gambling. ‘I would say (to Leo Varadkar) it is absolutely disgusting that the legislation in this country hasn’t changed in over 50 years’, he says. ‘It is just disgraceful. Talk to any of the big addiction centres and they will tell you there are more and more problem gamblers coming in every day. And they will tell you that 5% of problem gamblers seek help. They
don’t even know how many people are affected. Come on. Start somewhere. You have to start now. Why not?
‘Because you are all getting money? You are the Government. I am some clown and I promise the next documentary I do won’t be heavy like this because it is pain in the a**e going home feeling down every night.
‘But if this is me doing eight or ten weeks of research my God, what will the professionals find out? Maybe if I make a bit of noise about it people will take notice; maybe they won’t.’
Baz believes that services aren’t available to addicts in Ireland. And he discovered through his RTÉ investigation that most serial gamblers suffer in silence until it is too late.
‘I can understand if someone is on smack and they can’t stop because it is a physical addiction. I never realised what a gambling addiction was about,’ he says. ‘It is a dopamine hit; it is a physical addiction like any other. Yet it doesn’t have any support structures like other addictions.
‘If you have a problem with gambling and you want help you have to pay for it. This is surely wrong.
‘How do you pay for it if you are broke and have lost all your money and probably your family’s money? When rock bottom hits with a problem gambler things are bad.
‘With gambling maybe your house is sold from underneath you or you face prison or worse. The highest rate of suicides related to addiction in this country comes from gambling.’ Baz believes the GAA is the only sporting organisation in Ireland that is actively taking on the bookies.
‘This is not a witch hunt and I love sport and they go hand in hand but the GAA are the only ones in Ireland that give a s**t,’ he says. ‘They know because they have players who have suffered.’
During the programme Baz speaks to Niall McNamee, the Offaly player who ended up before the courts because of his gambling addiction.
He also talked to former postmaster Tony O’Reilly who stole €1.75 from An Post because of his gambling and was sentenced to a three-year jail term.
‘Addiction is a hole of sadness and you fill that up with whatever poison keeps you going, in these cases gambling,’ Baz says.
Baz contacted all the major online players in Irish gambling and each one turned down the chance to give their side of the story.
‘I asked all the big name bookies to come and chat to me and nobody would,’ he says.
‘I am not trying to point a finger, I just wanted to know how we move forward. But we need someone to stop things and, for the sake of our children, to try and get some level of control.
‘This is not about the industry and the people who like a flutter. They are the majority and good luck to them.
‘But these young people are killing themselves over problem gambling and something needs to be done about this.’
All Bets Are Off, RTÉ One, Monday, April 23, at 9.35pm.