Culture That Made Me: Tommy Bowe on the Fresh Prince and Gary Lineker
Tommy Bowe presents Ireland AM on Virgin Media One. Picture: Brian McEvoy
Tommy Bowe, 38, grew up in Emyvale, a border village in Co Monaghan. His international rugby career spanned 13 years with Ireland, which included a Grand Slam win in 2009, and two British & Irish Lions tours. In 2015, he married Lucy Whitehouse, a former Miss Wales. He co-presents , the breakfast TV show, which airs 7am, Virgin Media One.
I was a big fan of . Ian Dempsey and his outrageous jumpers. Zig and Zag were a bit naughty. When you’re a kid, you love the naughtiness of a Zig and Zag. They came out with things they shouldn’t have said. I was a bit of a naughty boy. I enjoyed a bit of craic and they seemed to get away with it.
In my teens, was another show where again you had someone up to no good. Will Smith played this kid who lived in Philadelphia. He got into trouble. He got sent off to his cousins, who lived in Bel-Air in a fancy big house. He was the outsider cousin in the house, the cool cousin with the not-so-cool cousins. It was brilliant.
My new favourite film is . I absolutely love it. I saw it three times in the cinema. I’d love to give up everything and become a fighter pilot. Very rarely you get a sequel which is as good as the original, but I thought this one was better. It's a good story, but full of cheesy lines. It brings you back to the 80s and 90s when films were a bit of fun: don't take yourself too seriously, but also exhilarating. A real adrenaline punch.
is a great film. It’s kind of like . It’s about a boxer, a guy who is down on his luck and he gets a chance. Russell Crowe stars in it. The reason I liked it so much was that I wasn't expecting it to be great. I went to the cinema. Wasn’t too sure. Went in and I was blown away by it.
The beauty of a show like was that it wasn’t about the presenters. The job as a presenter is not to make it about you. As a kid watching, I never dwelt on the presenters because they were just getting me to the sport or the next pundit or the next great topic, guiding you along without you even noticing them. That's the secret of it. To make it look easy, like anybody could do it. Des Lynam was the greatest of them, having a bit of fun and a bit of craic that probably went over my head, but I'm sure my parents loved it. At the same time, he was unflappable.
In sport, the game always changes. You have to adapt. When Gary Lineker started presenting , it was with the likes of Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson. It was so serious back in those days. Right now, he’s with Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, having the craic. It’s more light-hearted. People enjoy seeing the fun side of it now. To stay at the top for so long, you have to adapt all the time. He's somebody who's been able to do that.
Graham Norton has blazed a trail on English television. He’s made such a name for himself. Doing his chat show for 20 years is insane. He’s another one who’s top of his game. We actually had him on the show recently. You hear about people that are completely different on camera and off camera, but Graham Norton is the same on or off. He’s a gentlemen, a lovely guy and very proud of his Irish roots. And he has that naughtiness as well. That’s what you want too — the bit of devilment.
the doping documentary on Netflix, which is all about the Sotchi Olympics, is incredible. I find the levels that people go to win is insane. Icarus started off as a fairly simple idea — a documentary about a guy cycling who wondered how much doping would improve him. Then all of a sudden it opened up this murky world of what was going on in Russia and the Sochi Olympics. The Russians were even removing plug holes to move samples from one room to the next. Sometimes I feel I'm blind to stuff that's right in front of my face. When you see something like Icarus, it blows things wide open.
There's very few sports autobiographies that are as open — which is actually the name of it, — as Andre Agassi’s book. That's what makes the greatest books, one that’s brutally honest and not afraid to damage relationships. It’s why is just mind-blowing. His relationship with his father and how we got pushed into tennis. His hatred for the sport of tennis. He was always this rebel. When I read it, I was starting to get to that stage in my career when my body was starting to creak and he was talking about how his back was in bits; at the end of his career, he had to almost roll out of the bed to get himself up and ready. It’s an amazing read.
Steven Bartlett’s podcast is amazing. He has this episode, for example, with a guy called Mo Gawdat, a happiness expert and former head of Google X, which is where they design spaceships for the future and implant chips into people's brains — this endless money that Google use for planning for the future. His son died in a really simple surgery. He's re-evaluated himself, where he's going. He's turned his life around. He also talks about the threat of artificial intelligence.
My wife has got me into this podcast by Dr Rangan Chatterjee. He gets some of the world’s leading people on to talk about how to be healthier in life. A big one that I always find interesting is the people who are into breathing and visualisation, which was a big part of my rugby career too. It’s a good listen.
One in three people from Monaghan bought a ticket to see Garth Brooks at Croke Park. I was one of them. I loved having him in town, brought me back to the good old days. Growing up in Monaghan, Garth Brooks was the man back in the 90s. Me and my pals were mad for a bit of Garth back in the day.
