INTERVIEW:He seems to have been on our TV screens for ever, but that's because Brendan Courtney is a self-starter who is not afraid to push his talent and his ideas. Now, as co-presenter of RTÉ's 'Off The Rails', he has found expression for his long love affair with clothes and for his mission to make women feel good about themselves 'We're not just using these people to make television, sell ads and entertain people. These women get spat out at the end of this feeling fabulous and that's a really good feeling'
WE KNOW THE drill. A vaguely bewildered woman is led around the shops by a glamorous presenter with a smile as bright as their sense of certainty. The woman loathes her arms, or hips, or stomach, or legs, or all of the above. At the end, her body is strapped under industrial-grade undergarments, her hair glossed and her skin buffed. There are whitened smiles (and carefully-blotted tears) all round. It's the new-frock-over-magic-pants approach to fixing your life.
For TV presenter and producer Brendan Courtney, the redemptive powers of the makeover are real. Sixteen years after he first went for the job, he is finally comfortable in his own skin on screen as the new co-presenter of RTÉ's Off the Rails. He says he gets immense satisfaction out of helping women to feel better about themselves, and being nice is the new black in the fashion world. Yes, it's temporary and shallow, he says, but then so is life.
Sitting at a hotel table with his latte, Courtney looks like a man who knows a thing or two about handwashing fine wool. He is groomed and slim, looks like he gets his hair cut every fortnight, and has telly presenter skin and teeth. He is surprisingly likeable and it is this slightly nicer persona that Irish audiences are now seeing on screen. Over the next hour, the discussion ranges from makeovers to mortality to discovering, bizarrely, that he and Morrissey share a cousin.
But first to the clothes. Shortly before he turned 14 he asked his mother to stop washing his clothes because she was ruining them. For the next three years (until he moved out to a rented house around the corner from his Tallaght home "as you do when you're 17",) he had his own laundry basket on the landing and did all his own washing.
Twenty years later he is back living at home on the days when he is in Dublin to shoot Off The Rails. He has only dared once to ask his mother to put a load in the machine for him. Word of the request swept the family.
Life in television for Courtney started with a £220-a-week job as a researcher on Open House, the daytime magazine show presented by Marty Whelan and Mary Kennedy. Courtney had left DIT in Rathmines with a business studies degree and his first job was as the Dublin Fringe Festival's co-ordinator. He went on to work with Tyrone Productions on Riverdance. As a teenage member of the Dublin Youth Theatre, he had desperately wanted to be in a creative job and set his sights on a job as a television fashion presenter when he was just 20.
It took him until he was 26 to get his toe in the door of RTÉ with the researcher job and he sat at home in his sister's apartment in the evenings writing an idea for a show. One day he picked up the internal directory in RTÉ and rang the then commissioning editor, Clare Duignan. "I told her, 'I've got this brilliant idea. You need it.'" Two weeks later his show, Wanderlust, was commissioned and he insisted Brendan Courtney as presenter was part of the package.
The dating show saw him spend three and a half years jetting round the world making acid-tongued comments to camera and playing up to the tag of "gay TV presenter" by which the tabloids routinely describe him.
He is proud of his self-made break because for years it was assumed that "people like me" did not become TV presenters. But there have been career wobbles along the way.
"The big glaring obvious one was The Brendan Courtney Show," he says, and he had decided not to talk about the short-lived TV3 chat show for a long time, "because I hated it so much". The initial pitch appealed to his vanity. "I was 33, and I thought if someone offers you a show with your name on it, you pretty much should do it." There were a few basic mistakes. He stipulated that he would continue to live in London, so he flew in, rehearsed, recorded and flew out again. "How naive of me to do a chat show without any idea of what was going on here." Then there was the issue of funding. "We wanted to do [ Friday Night with] Jonathan Rosswith Playschoolmoney. We couldn't afford to pay for guests so I would do things like run across Soho Square to Rupert Everett going, 'Hi, you don't know me, but I really like you. Would you do my show?'.
"The other big problem with it was that because I've always been kind of funny there has been this pressure on me to be a comedian which I kind of indulged in my late twenties. One of my best friends said, 'You don't have to be funny. You just have to be nice and deliver.' I am naturally kind of witty, but I'm not naturally funny."
His greatest moment was when Sinead O'Connor walked off. "When she got there, she didn't like what she was going to do. So she just went, 'Yeah, yeah, that's great and I'm just going to the toilet,' - and she disappeared." Later that night he was smoking outside the Trocadero restaurant with the maitre d' and told him what had just happened. "And he looked at me and he went, 'Brendan these are the good old days.' And I just thought, what a great line: I will talk about this until the day I die."
Six years ago, he set up Giant Film and Television in London where there was the draw of having 700 channels to pitch to. Then he bought The Clothes Showprogramme which had been off the air for nine years. It was like "bringing back Top of the Pops," he says.
Two years ago, he went back to college part-time to study art direction at Central St Martin's and loved it. "I skipped off to college every weekend", and the exposure to young fashion people as opposed to television people was a blast of fresh air.
He has loved his six months on Off the Rails. And he credits this to his co-presenter Sonya Lennon. "I set out just a few basic requirements that I didn't want to be part of a team. Then they rang me and said, 'Good news: we really want to offer you the job, but we want you to do a co-presenting role.'" He reacted badly until he heard who the co-presenter was going to be. "Her pedigree is really excellent. I just texted her, and it's not a phrase I use at all, but I said 'Hey roomy' and she rang me immediately and said, 'I have just called you "roomy" to my boyfriend and I thought, 'That's it, we're meant to be together'."
Along with the on-screen makeovers, Courtney runs a service for private clients where he will come and restyle them through a website ihatemylook.com. He's booked up for two years, he says, and then laughs and admits they do one client a month, but still they are not short of business. "That is the work that, the more I do it, the more I realise how responsible that job is," he says. He feels he is tinkering not just with someone's wardrobe, but with their self-esteem. "We're not just using these people to make television, sell ads and entertain people. These women get spat out at the end of this feeling fabulous and that's a really good feeling." A variety of factors, "history and media and men controlling fashion and magazines," has led to a situation where "women fundamentally don't like their bodies. I think body confidence comes with living in a hotter country where we get our bodies out more, where you work out more. I think Irish people live in the rain so we cover up and there's a whole load of reasons why body confidence is pretty low here."
But does looking good actually make you feel good? "Yeah, in my experience. Is it a temporary measure? Life's a temporary measure. I was working with this woman recently who had real issues, I won't go into what they were. I had to sit her down and say, 'I'm not a therapist, I can't help you with this, but I'll tell you what I am and what I realise from the day I came out. As a fashion person and as a homosexual I am here to distract you from the horror of your normal life and put you in a beautiful frock and make you feel special for a day and if that's not a good thing, well, then I'm in the wrong job."
Courtney has had his share of real-life issues, most recently with a family breast cancer scare (which thankfully resulted in an all-clear) and the birth of his niece 16 weeks prematurely. She has grown into a fine, healthy baby, while her older brother, Courtney's four-year-old nephew, features as the main picture on his Facebook page.
He had his own mini-breakdown at the age of 23 when a friend collapsed and ended up in a coma. As a child, fear of death loomed large at home. His mother and father had lost two daughters in two separate cot deaths, each born on either side of his place in the family. Every childhood cough saw him rushed to the doctor. After his friend's collapse, he suddenly seemed surrounded by death and was hit with a massive panic attack.
Through Open House, he met Australian writer Pauline McKinnon whose book In Stillness Conquer Fearwas about overcoming chronic agoraphobia through meditation. He still meditates "nearly every day", and has found living back at home with family life around him an incredibly positive experience.
He describes his mother as an amazing woman. She ran her own business and drove her own car in the 1980s when such things were unheard of. Then she trained as a yoga teacher and went back to college to study counselling, and now works as a psychotherapist.
When he came out at the age of 20, they took it well. "They're very liberal. My mum's two sisters are gay. They're twins. They both had two sons and they both came out and that was all happening before I came out so they'd been desensitised to it." Single for the last year, he says he would like to "get married and have kids". He goes from Tallaght "where there are nephews hanging out of lampshades" home to his empty flat in London's Ladbroke Grove and enjoys both lives.
"I've just found out I'm related to Morrissey," he says, describing meeting a stranger who knew his cousin on a Dublin street while filming the show recently. Later, his dad confirmed the connection telling him that yes, the cousin, a Crumlin hairdresser, is the son of an aunt of Morrissey's.
"I'm so looking Morrissey up to say 'Hi Cuz'. I said to my dad, 'How the hell could you never tell me the world's most famous songwriter was my cousin?'"
Off the Railsis on RTÉ One on Wednesdays at 8.30pm
