The Jen Commandments
After five years as part of a breakfast radio team, Jennifer Zamparelli is starting her first solo gig on 2fm. She talks to Jess O Sullivan about the importance of listening and the joy at finally getting up at a decent hour
“It was going to be Jen at 10, so the only reason I got the job is because my name rhymed with ten. But now I’m going an hour earlier, so the show is going to be called Jen Just Before 9 Warming Up Before 10. It just rolls o the tongue.” Tongue-incheek banter is typical of any conversation with Jennifer Zamparelli, and what makes her so enjoyable is that she’ll just as readily put herself in the ring line of her razor-sharp slagging as she would anyone else. It’s funny exactly because it’s completely unbiased – no one is safe, not even her – and always good-natured. e show she is referring to is her new solo radio show on RTÉ 2fm, which will actually (and more aptly) be named e Jennifer Zamparelli Show, and will air from 9am to 12 pm on weekdays. is is an integral part of 2fm’s recent schedule shake-up which begins from June 4, and which will see Doireann Garrihy and Eoghan McDermott take on the breakfast slot, Tracy Cli ord at midday and Jenny Greene move back to the station to take on a 3pm slot.
But no amount of self-deprecating humour on Jennifer’s part can take away from the fact that landing her own radio show is a mark of just how popular she is with listeners and how hard she has worked for the last ten years since she burst on to our screens as a contestant on series 4 of e Apprentice UK in 2008. e media at the time portrayed her as the ‘ice maiden’ of the series, but since then Jennifer has shown a di erent side. Her recent turn as co-host of Dancing With the Stars, alongside Nicky Byrne, won her new audiences, though she’s quick to bat away any compliments. “I think what I’m very good at is covering my own mistakes and that is key when you’re doing live. And I’ve made so many mistakes that I’d have to write in jokes for the next episode of Dancing With the Stars. Like when I couldn’t say Demi Isaac Oviawe’s name. Took me weeks. So then I had to make a joke in the second half to say Demi has vowed to stay in the show long enough for me to learn to learn to say her name properly. I suppose I learned it from Breakfast Republic – you just need to keep going.” Parting ways with her former Breakfast Republic cohorts, Keith Walsh and Bernard O’Shea, will be bittersweet for Jennifer, as she says that she’ll miss the guys, but she is also happy that she will nally get to stretch her presenting talents to the full. “I’ve always been the sidekick or the token girl. It’s nice to
branch out on my own because I’ve never done that. When I started on the Republic of Telly I was the little reporter girl who went o , and then Bridget and Eamon, obviously I was in a partnership there, and on Breakfast Republic I was part of a team.” Bernard and Jennifer still have their own production company, along with Jason Butler, who also writes Bridget and Eamon. “We have a lot of scripted comedy ideas and we are in the process of writing.” e worry of overexposure is always at the back of Jennifer’s mind because many other Irish celebrities have fallen out of favour with viewers and listeners in the past for that very reason. “It terri es me, because you just get sick of people. You don’t want to be everywhere, but you have to work, so it’s a double-edged sword. So I try and take a little break, or a little break from social media, and not be as active on it.” Jennifer admits that just last week she turned down six requests which followed the tragic death of a guest on the Jeremy Kyle show. “Obviously coming from a reality TV background, and I’ve talked about my mental state a er coming out of reality TV and the e ects of it and how it needs to be monitored. So once the Jeremy Kyle story broke I had all these people wanting interviews, but I thought, ‘no.’” However, Jennifer has found other ways to show her solidarity with those who have been a ected by suicide. Earlier this month she took part in the Darkness Into Light walk for Pieta House alongside her mother-in-law and found it a profoundly moving experience. “ e amount of people there was shocking. For me the biggest thing was these kids with pictures of, I presume their dad, on their back. at they’re that close to suicide and they’re so young and they have a concept of what suicide is because their parent has taken their own life... at was quite shocking to me and a bit of a wake-up call. It was nice just to walk with people and to talk.” Jennifer, whose new show format is going to be a phone-in chat show, says that she knows that listening is a really important skill as a radio presenter and more than anything she hopes that people will feel that they can call in and talk to her.
One of the other things Jennifer is looking forward to as part of her new show, is the later start time, which will allow her to get up at a more reasonable hour in the morning. “ e joy for me is that I’m able to wake up with my kids, have breakfast with them, get organised, drop them o at crèche, go to work, pick them up at 1pm, so I get to see them a bit more.” However, she acknowledges that it’s not going to be plain sailing as rstly she has to get used to not having anyone in the booth to bounce ideas o in the same way. “I think the new slot is going to take a lot out of me because I always had the lads to rely on. It’s a lifestyle change again, but it’s di erent.”
However Jennifer is quick to praise her husband Lau (also a target of her on-air slagging at times, though she insists he knew what he was signing up for!) who she says is a huge support to her in her career. e pair will celebrate their h wedding anniversary in July and have two children, Florence (4) and Enzo (1). “We’re a very good team. I couldn’t do what I do without him. We enable each other in a very positive way which is good because he works in stunts on movi e sets and so he’s not taking any work for the rst two weeks in June so I can settle into my show. But we have the luxury to do that, which not many people have. I’m very grateful because otherwise I don’t think I could. You’re a working mother – it’s fu****g hard trying to juggle everything.”
With two healthy kids and her star on the rise, Jennifer recently revealed that she had her “tubes tied.” ough she says she was surprised that there was so much interest in her decision. “I don’t think women talk about it. Like fellas say, ‘I had the snip’. Really it was simply the case that I went in for a scheduled C-section and she said I can do this while you’re open. I was like, ‘Great, that will save him [Lau] taking a day o and getting the snip. Grand.”
Right now, Jennifer is very happy with her lot in life. She has one little girl “with oodles of con dence” to the point where she was worried she’d “be a bit of a pain in the hole.” However a friend helped her to think about it di erently. “She said, ‘Con dence diminishes the older they get, so keep it up there, because the older they get, that con dence is chipped away, when they go to school, with their friends, going for job interviews; all the knock-backs, and that con dence will just ebb away as the years go by.’ So now I’m embracing it and I’m letting her just go for it. Life will bring her down, but we’ll be there to hopefully build her back up and make her feel okay.”
And her little boy “never stops smiling” to the point where he had pneumonia before Christmas that went undetected because he was in such great form. “Two doctors appointments, three hospital visits, no detection of pneumonia. And we thought, ‘No it’s de nitely something, he’s been coughing for four months. We nally got an X-ray because our GP wasn’t happy with the diagnosis of tonsillitis, which he did have, but they said there was a little shadow between his lungs which was pneumonia. is was during Dancing With the Stars so there were a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of me running to the hospital with him in the middle of the night because his temperature would go up. But my point was he smiled through the whole thing. I show people the pictures and I say, ‘ at’s the child with pneumonia’. And of course I had to keep smiling through the whole thing as well, but hey, that’s the job.” Con dence and a sunny disposition – it’s no mystery where her kids got those qualities from.