Dermot O’Leary, 51, found TV fame as a presenter of Channel 4’s youth show T4, before going on to host The X Factor. He now presents This Morning with Alison Hammond, Radio 2’s Saturday breakfast show and is the host of Dermot’s Taste of Ireland, a new ITV travel and food show. He also writes children’s novels. He lives with his wife, the TV director Dee Koppang, and their four-year-old son, Kasper, in north London.
My childhood holidays were spent in Co Wexford in Ireland, which felt so exciting. Ireland was always such a land of mysticism for me. I’m Irish — but I’m not from Ireland. I grew up in Colchester with Irish parents and I was never considered English enough to be English or Irish enough to be Irish, though I had an Irish passport from the year dot and never had a UK one. That wasn’t a point of principle or any anti-British sentiment from my parents, but there was a big Irish community in Colchester and, while it wasn’t all wrapping ourselves in the flag, there was a definite sense of identity.
Those Wexford trips were all banana sandwiches and chocolate digestives on the beach, and swimming in the sea until my fingers went numb. We stayed in a caravan and that only made everything more fun. We would visit relatives, eat sandwiches, have apple tart, then go to the next relatives and repeat. Three of my dad’s four siblings were still in Wexford so I always had loads of cousins to play with.
O’Leary spent his childhood holidays in Co Wexford
GETTY IMAGES
As I got older, my dad and I would go over every year to watch Wexford play in hurling. They’d normally lose, until 1996, when they won the All-Ireland Championship for the first time in a generation. To be there with him for that was just extraordinary, and I drank it all in because hurling was fundamental to my identity when I was growing up. After games we’d go drinking with my dad’s friends and I’d be absolutely hounded to drink as much as them. I’d stay up until 2am and felt like I’d been hit by a truck the next morning.
The first time I went on a plane was to visit family in Guernsey. Flying there made it seem very glamorous because we flew there, but our first ‘ooh-la-la holiday’ was to a Eurocamp site in the south of France when I was ten. When you’re a kid and there’s crêpes wherever you go and French fries from pavement cafés, it’s just marvellous.
At 18 I went interrailing. It was just me and Glen Rayner, my mate from sixth form. There were meant to be more of us but they couldn’t organise their way out of a paper bag. We did France, Switzerland and Italy, spent all our money and then thought “Sh*t, we need to go east”. The hostel we found in Prague was basically a gym in an old school, and I woke up at 3am to the sound of an Egyptian guy screaming with night terrors. After that, Glen and I both caught a sickness bug — I knew the toilets of Prague pretty well by the end of the trip.
Some of the travelling I’ve done with work is so incredible you think “is this really happening?” With T4, we were in the States about once a month. We did a special at the L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills with Destiny’s Child singing on the roof. Andi Peters [then the boss of T4] told us we’d got the hotel for free but that we had a minimum spend to meet, so to order anything we wanted as we had to reach £600. By the time we’d all ordered lobster, Andi was like “What are you doing? You’ve overspent by £150 already!” No two days are the same in this job — one day you’ll be watching Destiny’s Child in the lap of luxury, the next you’re doing a voiceover in a field of cows in Shropshire.
The presenter owns a holiday home in Puglia
GETTY IMAGES
And then there was all the travel with The X Factor. The judges’ houses were always in amazing locations. Mykonos with Tulisa was insane, like an Ibiza weekender. Put the words Mel B and Mexico in the same sentence and you know a lot of fun is going to come from that, and Nicole Scherzinger in Nice was one of my biggest highlights. There are stories, but a boy never tells. I’m not going to lie, it was always the easiest part of the job for me. But every time I felt guilty, I’d remember being in an arena until 2am with people still auditioning because Simon Cowell wouldn’t start work until 6pm.
Before we had Kasper, Dee and I used to take a month off at the start of the year to travel — we particularly loved Brazil. But holidays have changed in some ways since we became parents. Kasper is lucky because my mum and dad now live in Ireland, and Dee’s dad is in Oslo, so we spend a lot of time in both countries. Norway is a wonderful place to go on holiday. It involves a lot of prawns, a lot of swimming in fjords and a lot of waffles with brown cheese and jam.
We also bought a house in Puglia 15 years ago, and that has become a second home to us. Swimming in the sea in beach coves, dusty espadrilles, outings to the fish markets and lots of trips to wonderful local supermarkets. Simplicity is key with holidays with Kasper, and I love that. Life isn’t simple, so there’s something lovely about making it central to our trips.
Dermot’s Taste of Ireland starts on September 23 on ITV1 and ITVX, with new shows daily until September 27 (itv.com)
Become a subscriber and, along with unlimited digital access to The Times and The Sunday Times, you can enjoy a collection of travel offers and competitions curated by our trusted travel partners, especially for Times+ members
Sign up for our Times Travel newsletter and follow us on Instagram and X