Her toilet humour is unrestrained, her laugh the loudest and dirtiest ever heard on RTÉ, yet Lucy Kennedy is more than just a Podge and Rodge sidekick. She talks to Róisín Ingle
A veteran broadcaster with the BBC once told me he knew just from meeting Davina McCall and watching her audition for a dating programme that she was destined for big things on the small screen. "She was the same person off screen as she was on it. She had the same sparkle. That's how you know," he said.
Before meeting Lucy Kennedy - Podge and Rodge's straight woman, presenter of The Ex-Files and occasional contributor to the travel programme No Frontiers - I unfairly assumed that her matey persona had been cynically created for television. That girl-next-door, tongue permanently in cheek, a stash of witty one-liners up her sleeve, was surely too much of an act to keep up when the cameras stopped rolling. I was wrong.
Her presenting style might not be everyone's cup of tea, but, like McCall, Kennedy sparkles in real life just as she does on television. The conversation is relentless, the toilet humour unrestrained and her ability to laugh at herself unparalleled. (She has, incidentally, the loudest, dirtiest laugh ever heard on RTÉ television.)
Kennedy also gives the impression of having fallen into television presenting almost by accident, but when you watch her keeping Podge and Rodge under control in Ballydung Manor, or quizzing innocent bystanders on Moore Street about their sexual preferences, it's hard to imagine her doing anything else.
Kennedy, who went to Holy Child in Killiney, Co Dublin, left school having decided against college. "I wanted to travel," she says. She became an au pair, then worked for CityJet for three years.
At 23 she completed a course in television presenting and production. "I started the course wanting to be a presenter, but by the time it was over producing was all I wanted to do," she says.
Four hectic years working as a freelance followed, during which stints on the dole were sandwiched between jobs as researcher, production assistant and production manager. She worked on everything from TV3's The Weakest Link to A Scare at Bedtime, on which she had her first encounter with the boys from Ballydung. "I was 27 and I felt like a loser," she says. "All my friends had nice cars and mortgages, and I was still renting and having to make Christmas presents because I had no money to buy them."
After much thought she decided to ditch television in favour of a sales job in radio. "I was a crap salesperson. I hated the idea of making people buy something, but I got some good clients, and just when I had a steady income and a new car, television came back to haunt me," she says. At the audition for The Ex-Files, a dating programme in which contestants hook up with former boyfriends or girlfriends, she says she went into the room and was "just totally and utterly me".
When she found out she had got the job, she couldn't believe it. "I mean, television presenters on RTÉ are so well groomed and very attractive, and I'm not," she says, although on this score she protests a little too much. "I'm the girl who picks her nose and laughs at fart jokes. I watch a lot of telly because I'm a bit of a homebird. I love watching people where I think, yes, I could go for a pint with you, and they don't have fake smiles. That's when I feel I can relate to them. So I suppose that's what I do when I am on TV: I'm just myself."
While filming the first series of The Ex-Files the 30-year-old was given a shot at the Podge and Rodge job. She was last into the audition but felt immediately at home. "It was in the dungeons of RTÉ, and there were all these serious RTÉ heads around the place. I walked into the room and Podge said, 'Lucy, your boobs have grown,' and I thought: I might have found my calling here. I left the audition with a pain in my tummy from laughing."
Kennedy loves being "surrounded by vulgarity" on the show. "I've always been naughty and cheeky, so this was just a natural progression. My family say, 'Lucy, you were born to do that show,' and I know what they mean," she says.
Kennedy plans to set up a production company to develop original reality-TV-style shows, but she has an extended series of Podge and Rodge, expected to start in October, and another series of The Ex-Files to keep her busy. Asked the secret of her recent success, she says: "I'm just me, warts and all." The real secret, though, is that she makes being herself on TV look easy.