By Sarah Caden
Sunday Jul 4 2010

'I was the kind of kid who got physically sick in the run up to Christmas, worrying that Santa wasn't going to come. Physically sick," says Ray D'Arcy, by way of illustrating how he's always been a sensible guy. "I was old before my years. I would have been a worrier, and I think if you worry, then you're naturally cautious, and being sensible follows."

That sensible child was going to grow up to be a doctor -- an ambition born out of 10-year-old Ray's stays in hospital with "a skin complaint" -- and, having enjoyed growing up as one of nine children, he was going to have a big family. "Not that I told anyone this was the plan," Ray laughs, but as far as he was concerned, at one point, the future was going to be Dr D'Arcy, father of many little D'Arcys.

Teenage ambitions often go awry, as most people will testify, but for most, their later lives become more staid and sensible than they had hoped in their youth. However, for all his natural caution, sensible Ray's life veered away from medical aspirations into entertainment, and finds him a little less "uptight" and more relaxed in his mid-40s than ever before. Personal happiness isn't something most adults feel comfortable admitting to, but, content with his lot, Ray D'Arcy will confess to it. And even if "45-year-old radio star father-of-one" isn't quite what he envisaged for himself in adolescence, it's most certainly what makes him happy now.

"And in recent times," says Ray, alluding to the period since the death of Gerry Ryan, which provoked both personal and professional self-assessment, "I've done more thinking than I normally would about where I'm at, where the show's at, why some things work and why some don't. I wouldn't normally overanalyse, but some things force you to."

He'd be a different person if the doctor thing had worked out for him, I suggest.

"More patronising?" Ray asks. "Or maybe just different. Who knows?"

Ray D'Arcy doesn't do a lot of interviews. And it's evident in his body language during the first 15 minutes of this one that he doesn't exactly enjoy them. He's sort of a classic 21st-century Irish man, well able to talk and articulate what he thinks and what he feels, but still quite proudly old school, reluctant to let anyone believe he thinks he's great or worth talking about or anything. And Ray is prickly; he'll spot a slight at some distance and a running joke among the on-air team on his Today FM radio show is how he can hold a grudge. "They get a great laugh out of the fact that I say I don't hold grudges, but, really, maybe I do," he says, then admitting he has an imaginary grudge "sack", currently containing the names of five media people. Any suggestion that he's dull or less than intelligent, he laughs, gets you in the sack instantly. So to speak.

He's doing this interview ostensibly to plug the HB Happy Days Tour, which sees the Ray D'Arcy Show offering four listeners the chance to win a HB party, complete with ice cream, entertainment and party goodies and the D'Arcy team broadcasting live from their house. It's about ice cream and old-fashioned good times and in order to enter, listeners will come on-air to share stories of their happiest or gloomiest moments. The potential for amusement at just what makes people happy is massive -- and is very much in keeping with the ethos of the D'Arcy Show -- and it does cause a person to mull over the sources of their own contentment or discontent. And fatherhood is top of the list when it comes to Ray's happiness. His three-year-old daughter, Kate, puts life in perspective, helps him focus on what matters instead of fretting over things he can't change. And she makes him laugh, as does his partner -- and on-air partner -- Jenny Kelly, who listeners will know is equally skilled at making him lighten up.

"Jenny's very relaxed and that helps," says Ray, "Because I'm . . . uptight."

You're complementary; it's a two-way street, surely?

"Right," he concludes. "She's relaxed and I'm uptight. And I cook. That helps."

Further, as already mentioned, Ray's been doing a fair bit of self-assessment lately, what with all the talk of a move to 2FM to fill the slot left gaping by Gerry Ryan's death, and within days of our meeting, he phones to confirm that he and the team will be staying at Today FM.

"It's about being happy here," he says. "It's about being comfortable and being loyal. Radio listeners are very loyal, so you reciprocate and you're loyal in return. It would have had to be ridiculously comfortable to move to 2FM, so we've decided we've got a good gig here, we're happy, we're staying put.

"And, as I said on the show last week, when it was announced that Ryan [Tubridy] was taking the 2FM job, 'Let's get ready to rumble,'" says Ray, half-joking, flashing the confident and competitive streak that contributes to his ability to do what he does.

Growing up in Kildare town, Ray may not have been marked out as either a doctor or, for that matter, a star of radio and television. He jokes about how he makes out his childhood to have been some sort of Monty Python-style 'we were poor but happy' existence, but he is quite proud of his very traditional big Irish family, the paper round he had at age nine, and the sense of industry and ambition that brought him to where he is now. By his own account, Ray was a solid kid; conscientious, hard-working, dependable, good at school. His father, also Ray, was in the Army for a lot of Ray Jr's childhood, taking tours in the Congo and, later, Cyprus and the Lebanon, but this was Kildare, on the edge of the Curragh, where that wasn't unusual.

"I only have two memories of my dad being away," says Ray. "He used to bring back stuff, and there was a TV programme at the time from the States, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, and that was our sort of mantra. Oh, and a third memory was looking out the window waiting to see him coming back.

"Kildare was an army town. Soldiers and jockeys," he adds, "and I always thought it was quite cosmopolitan, oddly, because you had all these soldiers and jockeys coming from Dublin and all over." Ray laughs as he says this, but he's characteristically only half in jest. He can see how someone else would find this image of cosmopolitan Kildare fairly funny, but he really, truly means it, and is happy to say it.

As the third-eldest, young Ray found, unusually, that he often carried on as if he were the eldest, taking charge, worrying, being responsible. "Without going into too much detail," he says, "there would have been moments in the life of our family where, even though I wasn't the eldest, the responsibility was thrown upon me."

It can fall on whoever is willing to take it, I suggest. "Yes," says Ray. "That sounds better. I'm being guarded."

Ray was close to his siblings, learned a lot about music from his oldest brother, Joe, and, as often happens in large families, speaks with a nearly paternal affection and pride about his youngest sister, Joan. There is a five-year gap between Joan and the eighth D'Arcy child, Claire. Ray's mother -- to whom he is very close and about whose intelligence and warmth he speaks several times -- not only believed she was finished having babies, but had trained as a teacher of the Roman Catholic church-backed Billings Method. She had only just begun to teach classes, he laughs, when she found herself pregnant with Joan.

"The rest of us are quite close together," says Ray, "but you can see the benefit of the five years' gap in Joan. Our house was a bit mad, but then she came along and she became the focus of all our love and it's amazing to see how relaxed and together she is. And I was 13 when she arrived, so I was much more aware of her as the baby. I was kept out of school to mind the house when my mother went in to have her, and then I'd push her up the town in her pram. Because you get a lot of attention, as a teenage boy, with a baby in tow.

"And she's 5' 7"!" he concludes, drawing attention -- as is his wont and before anyone else does -- to his neat build.

At the age of 15, Ray -- who had a paper round at nine, as he often mentions -- began DJing at discos. His older brother was more into music than he, but Ray says he had a greater ability to suss how a disco could be done, with astute song choices, as opposed to a love of music that was about "reading reviews and being into albums".

"I was sitting at a local disco at the age of 15," he recalls, "and watching this local guy DJ. He was 6' 4", he was wearing a monkey hat, he had a bad stammer and his favourite song was My Boy Lollipop. And I thought that if he could do it, I could."

That has always been his motivation, Ray says -- "Not money, never" -- but that sense that he could do a thing better than it was being done already. "That's either competitive," he says, "or an ability to spot incompetence." Soon after, he started doing discos with a friend who had the necessary equipment, but when that guy decided he wanted to become a drummer, he sold the gear to Ray. And Ray very quickly started to do well at it, becoming skilled at judging the mood of the crowd, the flow of the night, when to play one song or another.

"First of all," he recalls, "my grandad drove me around in his Toyota. But he dropped me off; he wouldn't be able to collect me afterwards. I walked home from Newbridge a few times. And then a friend started bringing me, and eventually, at about the age of 22, I got a car."

By that time, Ray had a college career under his belt, having done his Leaving and started a degree in psychology in Trinity at only 16. He missed the points for medicine by a hair's breadth -- one point in the old points system -- and, while Ray was bitterly disappointed at the time, it wasn't an option to repeat or defer. "I'm from a working-class background," he explains, plainly. "No one from our estate went to Trinity. My mother's very bright, my brother did engineering, but it wasn't the norm to go to university, so you didn't mess around."

He supported himself through college with the DJing and then was a graduate at 20 -- "far too young" -- who worked with Anco for a while, before applying to RTE when they advertised vacancies in children's TV presenting. By that stage, doing the discos had fostered in Ray a new ambition, to get on the radio, though he didn't realise that goal until the age of 36. Television, and children's television initially, was only a route to radio, he explains. He got the job as one of several presenters of the kids' early-evening magazine show, Jo Maxi, where he stayed for two years before taking over from Ian Dempsey on The Den.

"I was always aware that The Den was a very special time," says Ray, while admitting that, when he sees clips of it, he hardly recognises the person he was. "It was huge before me, with Ian and Zig and Zag, and it was a responsibility. And nothing since in kids' television has really compared; there was that freedom there that is unmatched by anything else. Because it had started out as just linking programmes and there was no real studio or even a camera in the room with us, it was very free of any shackles."

It was a great time and it was eight years, through most of his 20s, but he was never one for any wildness or recklessness. "I'm not a total goody-goody," he laughs, "but I was never, ever wild."

And yet, the plan of settling down to start that big family never happened either. "It was sort of work, and sort of other things," says Ray. "You know, I've sort of analysed it in my head, but I'm not going to share it with you," he says with a laugh that is hearty, but also a full stop.

He was 33 when he decided to leave The Den. "I was getting greyer; it was time to move on," Ray says. "Looking back, it probably stunted my growth as a human being. Not my height, I'd still be small, but you weren't called upon to think about things. It was great crack, and the real world didn't impinge on you in any real way. It was just time. And then I did a ridiculous show called 2Phat for two years and then I was out in the wilderness before I started talking to Today FM. And we were chatting for a while. I had a conversation with [radio producer] Stephen Carolan that started on my 35th birthday, and I started the show three days after my 36th birthday."

Ray D'Arcy says he's bad on chronology when I ask how long he and Jenny have been together, but he tells me the 10th birthday of the Ray D'Arcy Show falls on September 4. Three days, obviously, after Ray turns 46. But then, there's no point picking apart the professional and personal chronology, because they are inherently interlinked. If it weren't for the show, Ray and Jenny might never have met and their personal relationship is one of the things that contributes to the success of the format. The other members of the on-air team, Will Hanafin and Mairead Farrell, are also essential, but nobody can really make Ray lighten up -- and light up -- like Jenny, and that's all part of his mellowing and moving away from being one of life's worriers.

"We inherited Jenny from the previous show," laughs Ray, explaining how it was a fairly basic set-up when he came from RTE to Today FM. The former is such an institution, an establishment, and the latter was only finding its feet, with only Ian Dempsey and, then, Eamon Dunphy, as its big names. The good thing about this was that the D'Arcy Show crew was able to learn as it went along and to make mistakes without a massive audience. That came with time, but initially they were up against Gerry Ryan and his more than 300,000 listeners and that seemed indomitable. Ray, who had done a small amount of radio at RTE, liked the sound of zoo radio in America, liked the idea of an ensemble in the studio and not just a star with a lot of backslappers on air with him, as he felt Chris Evans was doing in England. So they gave Jenny, then a researcher, a trial on air, and it was a "car crash", but later, when Fix-It Friday became a regular slot, she made it her own and gradually became a daily feature. Will and Mairead came later and also gradually, which Ray believes was key. "That way, everyone knows who everyone is," he says. "Will's a zoologist and a barrister. Mairead is a married mother of one from Finglas. Jenny's from Foxrock and she had a pony. I'm from Kildare and had a paper round."

He laughs, and any listener will know he kind of loves that supposed dichotomy, her alleged posh, pony childhood against his school-of-hard-knocks beginnings, both of which are caricature. The couple are together about five years, and Kate will be four in November, and, while they are not against the idea of marriage, it hasn't happened yet. In his 30s, Ray was engaged to fellow Den alumnus Geri Maye, but they didn't marry.

"We haven't decided not to get married," says Ray, "and I can't speak for Jenny, but it's not a burning issue, let's say."

When he quit The Rose of Tralee this spring, after five years of hosting it, Ray cited the desire to spend more time with his family. Working for a commercial station, with only so many weeks of holidays a year, Ray says he felt the need for the time off with Jenny and Kate, particularly as Kate approaches school-going age. "'It's not all about you, Daddy,' as she told me recently," Ray says.

"There are pros and cons," Ray answers, when asked if he thinks he's a better father in his 40s than he might have been in his 20s, as he might once have planned. "I find I'm more comfortable in my own skin now, which is good. I think I'm less likely to pass on my oddities to her. But I suppose the downside is that at the other end of her life I will be around less. I will die. I'll be in my 60s at her 21st. I do think about that and it's not the ideal situation, but it is what it is."

Ray doesn't envisage now having the big brood he once did, but he would like Kate to have siblings, in time. But he's not worrying about it. He remains, by nature, a worrier, but Ray D'Arcy is better these days at ascertaining what's really worth the stress. And in lots of areas, he's very content and very lucky. He and Jenny enjoy the amount of time they spend together at work and, at home, he is mad about his daughter and what she has brought to his life. He's also pretty happy with how the career is working out for him and pleased with the decision to stay at Today FM.

"People have been saying to me lately that RTE's my natural home, but I don't necessarily think that's the way the world is anymore. And, you know, if you wanted to think about it this way, there are opportunities in RTE that don't exist anywhere else. If you are in RTE, you could still be on Lyric in your 60s, or even your 70s if you're Gay Byrne. And that's a factor and they're hard to turn down.

"But I've turned them down loads of times; it's a broken record. I've a good gig where I am and I'm happy and the bottom line is that if they really want you, they have to show you, no half-measures. I didn't understand that in my 20s. You never realise your own worth in life, but you do learn what you can do and what you can't. You learn your limitations and that's important, because so many people never do."

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As part of the 'HB Happy Days Tour', the 'Ray D'Arcy Show' will give four listeners the chance to win a 'HB Happy Days Party' and broadcast from their own home. The broadcasts will take place each Friday, July 9-July 30. You can also be in with the chance of winning a 'HB Happy Days Party', without the live broadcast from your house, through the HB Ice Cream Facebook page, by emailing your 'HB Ice Cream Happy Moment' pictures to happydays@hbicecream.ie or posting them on www.facebook.com/hbicecream

Make-up by Seana Long for Make Up For Ever, 38 Clarendon St, D2, tel: (01) 679-9043

Shot at The Casting Couch, see www.thecastingcouch.ie

- Sarah Caden

Originally published in

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