Jennifer Zamparelli: 'Every time I came off Twitter I felt angry, I felt anxious'

The RTÉ personality on quitting Twitter, the problem with bras, and the importance of entertainment in a pandemic.

Sun, 04 Apr, 2021 - 08:13

Ciara McDonnell

“Forget the bra! Don’t bother with the bra! The question is, do you want to wear the bra?”

I am discussing the deeper side of ladies' undergarments with Jennifer Zamparelli on a foggy Wednesday, a million days into lockdown. Even though I know that Zamparelli has never had to lift her boob and manoeuvre it gently under her armpit to facilitate a comfortable night’s sleep, she has the gift of making you feel like she is your friend.

So it feels totally natural to find myself hiding from my children in their bedroom (the only place they never look), and chatting to RTÉ’s bright star about her new game show.

Taking all the ingredients of a successful Saturday night tv show, Home Advantage will see Irish families pit their wits against each other all in the name of a solid cash prize. Because we’re in a pandemic, only one member of each family will be in the studio with Jen, while their families are beamed in from home on a giant video screen.

“Ah, it’s great fun,” she says. “It’s just the kind of light Saturday night telly that we all need right now.”

A quiz show was always on Zamparelli’s to-do list. “After doing Dancing with the Stars I realised that I really loved doing family entertainment, so a quiz is the next best thing. Now, it won’t be as glitzy as Dancing with the Stars but it will be just as fun.”

Ironic that, while fronting a quiz show, Jen is not the hottest ticket when it comes to general knowledge. Her street smarts outweigh any lacking in the memory department, though.

“I have a terrible memory but I have a fair amount of cop-on,” she protests.

“If you were asking me about Twitter followers and asking me who has the most and who has the least and you gave me a list of names I'd be fairly good at that kind of stuff. You know — pop culture.”

So who would she have on her Home Advantage team? Her husband Lau is a shoe-in.

“On a table quiz, he'd be fairly spot-on. My brother Barry is the clever one in the family — out of six, it's not saying much — he's very good. My niece Megan is very smart and fairly worldly so she'd be good on pop culture and things that I'd be far too old for.”

For a celebrity version of the game show, Zamparelli barely draws breath when she names her dream contestants.

“Well, you'd have Vogue and Spencer on one team and then you'd have Nicky Byrne and Georgina and then you'd have Twink and her daughters on for the craic.” Watch this space for the Christmas special.

Life has found its way back to a tolerable level of normal for Zamparelli and her family. Her daughter Florence turned eight last weekend and celebrated her second lockdown birthday with a unicorn-themed at-home spa with her Mum, Dad, and brother Enzo.

“I'm in a very good position with my kids,” says the television presenter. “I mean, my kids are young enough to not really notice a massive difference in their life. Plus they're back to school and childcare so I'm trying to keep it as normal as possible.”

A year in, she can see now how fearful she was of Covid. “The first lockdown, I was afraid of everything. I was afraid to touch walls, I was afraid to get off with my husband. I was so fearful of everything.” Turning forty, she decided to re-evaluate the stressors in her life. “I'm calmer now. I've limited how I consume news, which has really helped. I get outside as much as I can because it's relentless, this cycle of bad news.”

The biggest change she made in her day-to-day life was quitting Twitter. Not for her, a Chrissy Teigen-style suspension of account, oh no — Jennifer Zamparelli deleted her account and bade adieu to her 100,000 followers. “It was an easy enough decision in the end,” she says.

“I found myself just watching people's arguments and after going through a bit of a struggle in the first lockdown I wanted to really assess what is bringing me down and Twitter was one thing that I really struggled with.”

In the end, it was the recognition of how much the social media platform affected her mood that made her press delete. “Every time I came off Twitter I felt angry, I felt anxious. These were the telling signs that this was not a good platform for me.”

While she was worried that quitting the twittersphere would mean she would miss out on news and gossip, the opposite has happened. “The weirdest thing about all of this is that the news comes to me anyway. It somehow finds me.”

Instagram is the next hill to conquer with plans to rid her life of that too, eventually. For now, she self-polices with a twenty-minute timer that stops her from using the app after the allocated time. “Before I started to do this, I was just aimlessly scrolling. This has really helped me to focus. It has limited and decreased my anxiety, too.”

Having pivoted her career trajectory from stern-faced Apprentice to becoming one of television and radio’s most likeable personalities, she has seen both sides of the coin when it comes to how fickle the fame game can be.

While Zamparelli says that the public is lovely to her (“nobody is ever mean to me on the street”), and she doesn’t tend to get piled on across social media, it’s never nice to read people passing judgement in a negative way.

It’s the greatest misconception to think that people in the public eye can deflect negativity better than us mere mortals, she says. And it’s important to be mindful of that.

“I don't think anybody has a thick skin, really. It's not nice to read things about you. I think the thing with this job is that you learn to get over it quicker. To say that it doesn't upset you or affect you would be a little bit of a lie.”