Some people are cut out for live television. I’m not one of them. I remember this a bit too late while sitting in a chair in RTÉ’s make-up department while a nice man called Javier works his magic. Nearby, Bressie is also getting his make-up done.
The Mullingar man wrote a best- selling book about coping with the anxiety he suffered since childhood so surely we’ll be able to swap horror stories about feeling sick with nerves regarding the matter of going on Ray D’Arcy’s live TV show. Did I mention it’s live?
“Do you get nervous before this kind of thing?” I ask Bressie hopefully.
“No, not really,” he says. “Are you nervous?”
"A bit," I say. Which is like saying Pamela Anderson, who is also due on the show, is "a bit" famous. So now I am barefacedly lying to Bressie aka Niall Breslin aka One of the Loveliest Men in Ireland.
Unfortunately, I can’t lie to myself. On a TV screen, Prime Time is reporting scenes from Paris. For a while, that horror show distracts me from the one going on in my mind. “Get some perspective,” I tell myself under my breath, to the annoyance of Javier who is trying to do my lipstick.
Somehow, and I am not quite sure how it happened, half my family has ended up in the green room of RTÉ as a kind of “support” team. They are tucking merrily into the free cheese and wine buffet and taking turns getting their picture taken in front of a sign on a table that says “Reserved for Pamela Anderson”.
Ray D’Arcy hasn’t even had a chance to say hello to me before one sister has him in a selfie headlock. Bressie is similarly purloined. My other sister keeps trying to talk me down from the nervous cliff. She’s saying soothing, reassuring things none of which are helping.
Adding to the torture is the fact that I dropped my phone in a puddle outside RTÉ and I can’t access the notes I’ve written on my phone about what I want to say.
Plus I’ve just been shown the stairs I will have to walk down to get to Ray D’Arcy’s velvet couch. Before I walk down them, I must apparently stand for a moment at the top so the camera can get a look at me.
Even bigger than the fear that I will open my mouth and not be able to speak ON LIVE TELEVISION is the fear of walking down the stairs and going over on my ear.
Then all of a sudden Newstalk's George Hook is coming towards me in the green room. I'm not sure what he is doing here because he's not appearing on the show but someone mentions he's quite the fan of Pamela Anderson. Perhaps, like half my family, he is on the ultimate selfie hunt too.
But Hooky is not happy. Hooky is cross. He wants to know if I am going to go on Ray D’Arcy to talk about the lack of women on his radio show. He’s right in a way. I was planning to mention the recent illuminating Hearing Women’s Voices? study which shows the overwhelming majority of voices we hear on RTÉ and Newstalk are male, but I wasn’t planning to name him specifically.
I tell him that and with a smile attempt a bit of banter: “Maybe you could have more women on your show?” I say, but Hooky is not smiling. He starts questioning the veracity of the study and women’s struggle for equality in general. Already wobbly, my poor nerves can’t cope.
I don’t know what to say when Hooky asks in his familiar, booming voice “but I mean, what do you WANT? What do WOMEN want?”
It’s a question that is too big and too deep for this particular woman at this particular time. Deodorant. A decent spray of Dove or Impulse or even a discount-store version, is what I want to tell him as buckets of nerve-induced perspiration begin percolating from several orifices. But I say nothing, only slink away to contemplate my entire future and of course those stairs.
One thing the encounter does is remind me that I want to use the Terrifying Live TV Appearance to plug The Irish Times Women's Podcast. (It's great! find us on iTunes, Stitcher and Soundcloud!).
In the end what happens is I don’t fall down the stairs. Words come out of my mouth when Ray asks me questions. My mother is magnificent from the audience. Afterwards, my brothers supportively tell me that someone on Facebook posted that “Pam Anderson has changed a bit” when I appeared on their television.
And also in the end I forget to mention The Women's Podcast (iTunes! Stitcher! Soundcloud!) but I've had a better idea to get publicity. I'm going to ask George Hook to come on The Women's Podcast to discuss his views on everything from Pamela Anderson to feminism.
So how’s about it, Hooky?
Public Displays of Emotion by Róisín Ingle is now available to buy from