Dermot O'Leary: finding a new happily-ever-after as a children's author
Dermot O'Leary
Dermot O’Leary is fashionably late for our Zoom interview.
It’s not a long wait, though he remains profusely apologetic, both over the delay and the fact that we have no more than 20 minutes to chat. I’m acutely aware of the clock ticking as we talk, but he’s a busy man.
Even as it was announced he won’t be a regular on our screens as in seasons past with the end of TV talent show X-Factor, he’s had his hands full enjoying family time with his young son Kasper during lockdown, and writing the fifth book in his much-loved series.
The reviews for the previous books of this adventurous cat and her many escapades are, for want of a better term, glowing. Parents love the language, the vocabulary which challenges its young readers, and the beautiful illustrations by Nick East always get a special mention on the book tours, he says.
The 47-year-old is as likeable over Zoom as he is on television, and this being his fifth rodeo in the children’s book department (the opportunity to write them came in 2015 after he wrote a well-received musical memoir, ), he is more at ease now than he has been during previous book releases. They all began with an idea, he explains, that came right from home and specifically, his cats. Two cats that he and his wife rescued a few years ago from their home in Italy.
“The background of the cat, we adopted Toto (and another, Socks) from Italy, we’ve had her for like a very long time, eight years now. And when we first got her over here, we realised quite quickly, she was blind, but she could see breaks in the light, so she had these incredible reactions. So we started calling her a little ninja.
"There was no cynicism to it. I didn’t sit down and say, I want to write for kids, it began with this idea that I soon realised I could write about. I wanted it to be the stuff I used to love reading when I was a kid, which was always kind of quite counterintuitive, and quite naughty — kids love that. And I loved that as a kid, so I wanted to do that justice as well.”
Ireland naturally comes up, as we talk of storytellers (the Irish are renowned for their story-telling capabilities after all) and he mentions his Irish parents, Seán and Marie, as huge influences in that part of his life. Three years ago they relocated from their adopted home in London back to their native Wexford.
“My dad came over from Ireland in the late sixties. We didn’t really have a lot growing up, but he was a hard-working guy. He used to work a lot from home. He had a big computer with lots of paper laying around and I used the paper to write stories on. I’d take them round to the neighbours in the village and knock on doors and try to sell this 10-year-old detective fiction for 5p.”
And even then, he had a knack for winning people over. “I always made a profit, I didn’t have any overheads after all, I got a couple of bags of sweets out of it.”
He is clearly very proud of his Irish heritage (including being a patron of the London Irish Centre) — it shaped his own ideas and methods of writing as he heard Irish fairytales at bedtime.
“It was a big thing for me that my dad would come back from work, and if we were lucky, he’d come back just in time for storytime. He and my mum would always encourage me to read. It was never forced, it was just there. My parents were great parents because they never threw anything down our throats, but it was there and you were just encouraged to read it — that was the beauty of it really.
"I think it’s like any small nation, or any immigrant nation, where you always sort-of punch above your weight. And you always tend to be quite creative,” he continues. “There’s a uniqueness to Irish stories — a lot of a kind of mysticism, and that kind of stayed with me, right through to when I got a bit older,” he continues.
As ever, he is keenly aware of his audience, something that makes him a natural when it comes to the many facets of his day job.
Kids are not idiots, though - he says they are no mean audience.
“So you’ve got to make sure that you are consistent, that you get their attention and you don’t have any inconsistencies in plots because they pick up on it.”
The language and vocabulary in all the books have been praised for presenting a challenge to the reader, and even though they might be 10 years old, he explains it was so important not to patronise, as it was not to give everything away too simplistically.
“I think, fundamentally, you’re writing it for your eight-year-old self and what you found funny, because you need someone to be able to relate to.”
And he had time to think about all of this for the new book, though not as much time as he might have had, as he and his wife Dee had a baby during lockdown last June. The ‘baby bubble’, as he calls it, is something he truly appreciated, despite the awfulness of lockdown.
Better still, now he had a captive audience to try out material on, even if his son was still too young to give him any feedback.
“He won’t want to read these as he gets older,” he says, laughing. “He’ll grow up and think, oh, not again!’”
Now being a parent himself, he says he values feedback from those who read the books to their own children. “When you meet parents, and they say, you know, mine don’t really read too well, but they love your books. And that’s kind of the take-home that I never thought or never expected to get. But I can encourage kids to read and they enjoy it, there’s no higher compliment than that.”
And if he hadn’t had children of his own, would he still write for kids? It’s definitely different to the glamour of television he says, but in its own way, helps keep him rooted in family life.
“I definitely would have carried on if we hadn’t had kids, because I think writing fiction for children is wonderful. And reading stories to him [Kasper] is one of the daily joys of being a parent.”
We scarcely get to mention the glory days (and the rest) before our time is up. Twenty minutes on the dot, he says, impressed.
Quick as a cat, as you might say. Well, almost.
- (Hodder Children’s Books, approx €9.99) is out now
