HOMETRUTH
So what did Dermot Bannon really make of Daniel and Majella?
DANIEL’S FANS ARE TRULY DEVOTED AND HE REPAYS THAT. HE IS VERY FUNNY AND SO WITTY.
Dermot Bannon arrives at the Fitzwilliam Hotel in a flurry of energetic apologies and slight confusion. He is late, not by much, but having driven back from the tip of Kerry the night before his errant time-keeping is excusable. A Room To Improve project is nearing completion and he is beside himself with excitement; a combination of adrenaline and relief with a small smattering of pride thrown in for good measure.
While he may be the busiest man in Ireland, there is little doubt that he is the man of the moment in Irish television. His Room To Improve special with Daniel and Majella proved to be a ratings extravaganza. The one-hour show brought in a consolidated ratings total of 860,000 with a staggering audience share of 53%. These are the sort of numbers reserved for the likes of such esteemed broadcasts as The Late Late Toy show and international Irish football matches. It is hard to believe that the Dublin architect thought long and hard about even accepting the project to begin with. But he is adamant that he won’t be doing any more specials, despite the spike in audience share.
‘Would that prompt me to do more celebrity specials? No. I didn’t want to do their house unless there was a real project there,’ he insists. ‘There had to be a real story and emotion there and I had to be able to genuinely do something for them.
‘Otherwise I genuinely believe it would have ended up being a pantomime. It would have been a load of egos and ended up being a load of nonsense. I don’t mind the celebrity thing as long as the project is real.
‘We went up and talked everything through with Majella and got a good brief and I was only half in because the house wasn’t that bad, it was okay. But it was only when Majella showed me the pictures of Owey Island and her face lit up and it was her two-roomed cottage and that was me hooked. I had to create some of that magic in their house and it became about a feeling.’
All in all the build took six months but Dermot says he was immediately immersed in an unwelcome bubble of publicity from the moment he decided to get on board. It was a level he quickly became uncomfortable with.
‘Look we always knew it was going to be a popular show because there was so much talk about it,’ he admits. ‘Normally I do the series and I have a time of the year when the show is on and you talk to media and then the show goes out and then people stop you on the street and congratulate you. Then it is over and I go back to work. I like that cycle. But because people knew early about Daniel and Majella that was it. Anytime I spoke to anybody they wanted to know about them.
‘Even my own aunts and uncles were asking me about it. Daniel was doing interviews about the house and it wasn’t finished. We were at this really stressful stage and he is there on The Late Late Show chatting about it like it is fine.
‘I don’t like to talk about something until it is done. He had a Christmas album on and was doing loads of radio and every station I tuned into he was there talking away about it. I couldn’t watch or listen to it anymore. That amount of publicity was uncomfortable to be in. I had never had that amount of it before and it was the first time I ever felt like a real celebrity. There was this constant attention about the one thing.’
Of course Dermot is quick to point out that the real celebrity in the bunch was the Donegal crooner created by his devoted fan base. He admits he was initially taken aback at the singer’s vast celebrity when they made contact and says he didn’t really know a huge amount about him before the project started last year.
‘I knew he was big but I didn’t realise the popularity of him. But I get it now,’ he says. ‘He is incredible with his fans. We went up to a concert in Bundoran and it finished around 11pm and he stayed up until 3am signing autographs and taking pictures. One of the things Majella said to me was that Daniel’s chair is really important because when he comes home at Christmas he will sit there for three days answering fan mail and recording videos of people. He does it all. I got it and when I was going up to see them on site people were asking me to get videos for them. I was too embarrassed to ask him until the final day but I did once the project was finished and he did it. His fans are truly devoted and he repays that. He is very funny and so witty.
‘There are no flies on him and it is the softly-spoken accent and how calm he is. Majella is from Tipperary and everyone forgets that so she is a totally different fish. Everyone in Donegal is kind of horizontal and Majella is vertical. I had no idea how funny he was. We would be walking through the rooms and he would come out with this one-liner and all the crew would be in stitches and we would have to stop filming. He doesn’t say much but when he does it is incredible and gold. He is very sharp and great fun to be around.’
Of course viewers of the hit show will be all too aware that there were a number of tense moments when Daniel’s laid-back demeanour was challenged. Most notably when he came back with a budget that had nearly doubled from the initial €200,000 target to nearly €395,000.
So was he surprised that the singer who is worth over €30million would be irate over such a relatively small overspend?
‘No I wasn’t surprised because for a start he didn’t think there was anything wrong with the house in the first place,’ says Dermot. ‘€300,000 is a lot of money and for someone who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with it that is a huge leap. Majella wanted it and he decided to give her what she wanted.
‘He spends an awful lot of his time on tour, he is only home six weeks of the year, and for him all he could think of was that for the six weeks he would be living on a building site. For him it was the upheaval of it as well. Look I get it, I hate staying in hotels when I am busy so I get it that he didn’t want the upset in his
life. But there is no stopping Majella. She is great fun and they are a great couple. She gives him the gee up that he needs and he levels her. With regards to the budget it was just that he doesn’t like wasting money or people’s time. And he saw that there was a perfectly good workmanship that had gone into the house and he was obsessed with that.
‘He was the same with me. When he rings you the first thing he would say is that he doesn’t want to waste your time. He values people’s time incredibly but he doesn’t throw money around, he is cautious and that’s just the type he is. Maybe that comes from growing up in a big family where money wasn’t thrown around, who knows.’
While the end result is a stunning modern property with panoramic views of the ocean and Dermot’s trademark floor-to-ceiling windows; he says the friendship h e has developed with Majella is priceless.
‘We are good buddies and I am very fond of her,’ he says. ‘She is a very open and honest person and is great company. They both are. I would have seen a lot more of her because he was on tour. But I really got to know her and I am mad about her. She has been through a lot in her life and she is a great leveller.
‘We would spend an hour driving in the car around Donegal and we chatted very openly and personally and she doesn’t do small talk. She isn’t interested in that and she wants to talk about real things and that is really refreshing. Daniel will do all the small talk in the world and he is great at that so you end up having deep conversations with her and I enjoyed that.
‘She got stuff out of me that nobody gets. She said to me that if they were away that this house is here for me and the family and I said to her the house would be nothing without her in it. But I know I could count on her to do anything for me because that is the friendship we have now.’
For this reason it should come as no surprise that Dermot took exception to the rather stern line of questioning heaped upon Majella during a recent Ray D’Arcy interview. The RTÉ Radio One DJ took umbrage with what he perceived to be their flaithulach renovations during a national housing crisis. But Bannon hit back insisting that the O’Donnells are not responsible for solving the homeless problem.
‘People spend money doing up their houses every single day’, he says. ‘We live in a society and things happen at different levels.
‘Big businesses are growing, do we blame them? It is starting to get a bit crazy where people are being made to feel responsible for every crisis in the world. Majella and Daniel have done a huge amount for people around the world. They built an orphanage for God’s sake.
‘Locally Daniel does a huge amount and I don’t get why he isn’t allowed spend a bit of money on his own house. Why is that a big deal? When he works hard all year around. We have a Government who have not invested in housing. The reason we have a crisis here is because we have no bloody supply.
‘There are a lot of chats and plans and visions for 2040 but I don’t see any houses being built. They are hanging on to housing starts that were given planning ten years ago and were just waiting for funding.
We all watch Grand Designs and we don’t begrudge it. Room To Improve is for a lot of different people on different levels. For some they want to get ideas for their own home. For the majority of people it is just a bit of escapism on a Sunday.’
While fans religiously tune in to watch Bannon’s often unique transformations, a second sport has emerged online watching people’s reactions unfold on Twitter. And Dermot reveals that he too sits at home surfing the comments.
‘I sit on Twitter while the show goes out because I have seen it’, he says. ‘I don’t mind it at all. ‘You have to engage with people, even the ones who slag me off and are mean to me. You have to treat it as funny. People get caught up in the begrudgery but I think the majority of the public enjoy the journey.’
I REALLY GOT TO KNOW MAJELLA AND I AM MAD ABOUT HER. SHE HAS BEEN THROUGH A LOT.
Room To Improve, RTÉ One Sunday, 9.30pm