Creedon up for more after Fáilte Towers win
The exhausted 49-year-old spoke yesterday, just hours after winning the celebrity reality television show, Fáilte Towers.
He agreed to take part in the charity show — played out in a hotel — to raise money for Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin.
John’s decision to back the charity came after he lost his granddaughter, Lucie, last year.
She was born prematurely to John’s daughter, Katie, and died just eight and a half weeks later.
“I would do it again for charity, but it would have to be a charity I wanted to get involved with,” the RTÉ Late Date presenter said.
However, he felt it unlikely that the company which screened the series, Adare Productions, would have him back.
“I guess I won’t be asked back again, because I became a sort of trade union representative for the younger contestants,” he said.
“There was low level stress the whole time. At times it wasn’t so much hitting myself, but I felt sorry for the younger members as more and more pressure was applied to them. You just never knew what was going to happen next. The 18-hour days were hard. I would say I had new-found respect for people working in the hotel industry,” John said.
The Cork man said if he was to do a similar show again he’d be “better able to handle the genre.”
John said he’d learnt a lot from the gruelling 16 days and nights in the hotel which — under televisions spotlights— were akin to 24/7 surveillance.
“I was having a shower on one occasion and a member of the crew came down and said I was needed upstairs immediately. It was just constant pressure.”
He was voted into the Fáilte Tower top spot by viewers, who gave second place to former Big Brother star Brian Dowling, and third to singer-songwriter Don Baker.
John said the producers deliberately kept contestants in the dark and while they’d also applied a lot of psychological pressure, they hadn’t self-edited to protect their own interests.
“In their defence, when I was critical of them, they didn’t edit it. Even when the judges were criticised, or shown in a bad light, that wasn’t cut. There was a degree of honesty in terms of what went out,” John said.
Like all the contestants, he will not know until next month, how much money he will generate for his chosen charity.
John’s late-night audiences are usually middle-aged but, on the back of his Fáilte Towers triumph, he’s found a new generation of adoring fans.
“After I won it, kids from the other charities came over and were hugging me. I had to sign plenty of autographs for them. That was great,” he said.
