Laughing her way to the top
The historic levels of precipitation we’re getting this summer suit the RTÉ presenter just fine. “I’m learning to surf at the moment, so I’m probably the only person in Ireland hoping for bad weather,” she laughs. “I’m going home at the weekend and I want Monday to be absolutely miserable, so there’ll be some waves down in West Cork and I can get up on my board.”
The 28-year-old has been surfing for the last couple of years, whenever she can fit a few hours into a schedule built around her roles as presenter on the daily celebrity gossip show Juice on RTÉ Two and her new gig, hosting The Big Money Game with Brian Ormond on RTÉ One. Juice has wrapped up for the summer months, but The Big Money Game goes out on Saturday night, so there aren’t too many weekends free for surfing. However, Kennedy is committed to her new hobby. “It’s a time and money thing, isn’t it? When you’ve got the time, you’ve never got the money and vice-versa. Sure that’s always the way, but I get out there when I can. Practice makes perfect all the same.”
‘Practice makes perfect’ is an adage that applies as much to Sinéad Kennedy’s TV career as it does to her surfing. Plucked out of a sea of hopefuls who auditioned to be a presenter on the Saturday morning TV show Satitude while she was still a teenager, the Cork native — she’s from Ballincollig — has spent the last decade learning her trade in pretty much every show RTÉ has made for young people, from Satitude to The Rumour Room, Two Tube, and now Juice.
Kids TV is not the preserve of shrinking violets, traditionally, and Kennedy has proven herself game for anything over the years, whether it’s riding elephants, recording rap songs, or taking off Chris Hemsworth for a Home & Away skit on Two Tube. Her Aussie accent may be terrible, but you can’t fault her enthusiasm, and there’s a naturalness and a warmth to Kennedy’s presenting style that many of her peers in ‘grown-up TV’ might do well to cultivate.
After nearly 10 years in the business, the highwire act of live television is second nature to her by now, but she’s the first to admit that she doesn’t always do things perfectly.
“Oh God, I’ve made so many mistakes! I’ve fallen over on air, I’ve said the wrong things. I had a producer before, and he said, ‘I love it when you make a mess of things because it’s so funny watching you get out of it.’ He used to talk in my ear and say all sorts of mad things, just to get me laughing, just for the craic. It’s important that you can do that though. It’s only television, at the end of the day. It’s not life and death.”
Making Sinéad Kennedy laugh would not be a hard job for any producer, from the sounds of it. Here is a woman who laughs as loudly and frequently in real life as she does on screen. Being a gigglebox has gotten her into trouble in the past she says, but when she gets going, nothing stops her. “It’s terrible when it happens. You know you shouldn’t be doing it, so you can’t stop. It’s like being in school. We had this little girl on the show once, and me and the co-host, we literally were crying laughing, and this poor little child just didn’t know what to do. She’d never been on telly before, and there we were in front of her, and we couldn’t breathe we were laughing so hard, and the producer in our ear was going mad.”
Kennedy is trying to sound remorseful, but she can’t help laughing at the memory. Fortunately, she is possessed of one of those infectious brands of laughter which is not only impossible for her to control, but which incites others to laugh with her. This is probably why she comes across as likeable rather than ditzy on TV, even when she’s corpsing in front of schoolchildren. This is no mean feat, in an industry dominated by the spectre of the airhead blonde presenter.
Kennedy has platinum hair, and is as glamorous as her job demands she be, but she is also funny, straightforward, and refreshingly self-aware. She’s been studying psychology by night for the past four years, and hopes to graduate next year, but asked about whether she’d ever try to combine her degree with her day-job, say by fronting a documentary series, she’s clear-sighted about how people see her. “I’d love that, but coming from young people’s TV, how seriously would you be taken if you start working in a programme on for example, criminal behaviour in Ireland? I mean, a lot of people wouldn’t even know I’m in college, and they might just think, ‘what the hell is this? How is this one ending up presenting this?” It might be a valid question for her bosses, but it’s more credit to Kennedy that she’s able to ask it herself, laughingly and without rancour.
Whatever she might end up doing in the future though, for now Kennedy has brought her laughs to The Big Money Game where her double-act with Brian Ormond has her presenting to an adult audience on a primetime Saturday night slot. It’s a big step up from Juice, and the only question her fans might ask is, what took her so long to get there?
Kennedy admits she’s asked herself the same question. “It’s been a long time coming, I know. But I’ve been doing bits and pieces in older audience stuff for years. I remember, after only a couple of years on Satitude I screentested for Dreams Come True with Ray D’arcy. It was a big family entertainment show on RTÉ One and I got it and I was only 21. I was young and naïve, and I thought, ‘Boom, I’ve made it. I’m here. I’m doing adult stuff.’ Sure I thought that was it! And then it went really well, and then — nothing. I went back to Satitude and nothing else happened, in terms of getting older stuff.
“I remember thinking at the time, ‘What happened? What went wrong?’ But nothing went wrong. It was just a case of: ‘You work in Satitude, and that’s working well for us, and there’s nothing else going in entertainment, and if anything comes up you can screentest. And I have done that over the years, I’ve screentested, and I’ve gotten stuff and not gotten stuff... Different things have happened, and every time they do, you just think ‘maybe it’s now?’ And then: ‘Maybe not’. But the fact I’ve taken so long is only going to stand to me, really. The experience I’ve gained from working in a live, daily environment, you couldn’t buy it. For me, I feel like I’ve got less nerves now, doing The Big Money Game. I feel like no matter what happens, we’ll pull ourselves out of it, or we’ll talk ourselves out of it, and it will be fine.”
And then Sinéad Kennedy finishes the interview the same way she started it. Laughing.
