Stars are always getting sacked from the X Factor, but Dermot O'Leary is pretty sure he's secure. That's not to say he doesn't have his eye on Question Time
It is quite something to sit backstage at The X Factor and witness the entire machinery of the entertainment industrial complex come into action. I can report that Sharon Osbourne looks as flame-proof in real life as she does on TV, her skin unmelted by time or any other natural process, and that when the music starts up, the thrillingly bombastic the-judges-are-about-to-descend-from-the-heavens-above throbbing crescendo played on speakers the size of small terraced houses, I actually feel my bones vibrate. An off-stage voice intones: "This IS London. And this IS The X Factor", frenzied hysteria erupts from the vast Wembley arena and not for the first time do I think of the Nuremberg Rallies.
I'm chatting to the show's host, Dermot O'Leary, just off-stage when this last bit happens and he's politely asking me what story I'm working on next and I've just launched into a quite boring explanation when he says: "Hang on just a mo." And I watch as he sprints off up the steps and runs on to the stage, where an even bigger roar goes up. "Gosh," I say, when he comes back. "You're not one to show your nerves." He shrugs. It's when the live shows start up, he says, that the real thrill starts. "That's what I love. Being live. That's what I'm good at. The adrenalin is something else."
Do you think, "I'm the king of the world!" when that music starts up, I ask. "No," he says. "I don't think that. I think I just want to run away." But then this seems like a sensible response to the cultural phenomenon that is The X Factor. It's about to swing into its 10th season, having weathered the departure of Simon Cowell and Cheryl Cole (among others: it's also seen off Dannii Minogue, Tulisa Contostavlos and Kate Thornton – the host before O'Leary), and it still averages around 10 million viewers a week and fills pages and pages of news articles day after day. And that's even before the season's started. It's like the premiership. Even the off season is a tabloid extravaganza of rumour and counter rumour. And Dermot O'Leary, who made his name in that other theatre of celebrity derangement, Big Brother, is there at the centre of it all, now in his seventh season of presenting the show, which is so operatic in its emotional highs and its thrilling finales, as well as soap operatic in its cookie-cutter telling of stories of woe, that it's not unlike watching the cast of Hollyoaks attempting to perform Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Essex-born, of Irish parents, comprehensive-school educated, chatty, sane, with a face that doesn't look like it's been remodelled to look like his Madame Tussauds waxwork, he is, quite frankly, a breath of normality among the pantomime grotesques.
"What do you mean by grotesques?" Well, the judges' personalities, I say. They are somewhat exaggerated, aren't they? Isn't Sharon Osbourne a little bit grotesque?
"No way! Sharon's awesome. I think most people are like that. I'm not myself talking to you on telly; I'm myself at a party making sure everyone's got a drink. It's always still you. It's just a different side of you."
Is that how you think of it? Do you go around metaphorically saying: "Now does anyone want a top-up?"
"Pretty much, yeah. You honestly are actually at the biggest house party in the country."
He's not only at it. He's its host. It's a role he finds hard to shake. He metaphorically keeps trying to top up my drink: asking me polite questions, and while there's something of a coterie at the photo shoot – "the glam squad", he calls them – he's friendly and unprimadonna-ish.
But then he's always been something of a "grafter", a quality he admits he probably inherited from his parents, who arrived in Britain from Wexford without a penny and gradually worked their way up, his father starting as a labourer before going to night school and then university, and getting a management job at BT.
O'Leary's dream, he says, would be to do a live chat show five nights a week – "But I know how difficult it is to book a show like that, so maybe three nights a week," he concedes. And he credits the fact that he started out behind the scenes as a runner with helping to keep his feet on the ground. That and his long-term partner, Dee Koppang, a TV producer he recently married. He turned 40 not long afterwards, but he claims not to have reflected much on it. But then he is hosting the second-biggest show on TV, he has a beautiful home in celebtastic Primrose Hill, another in Puglia, a third in southwest France. He gets called up to do shows like Young Voters' Question Time, a BBC3 programme in which he interviewed the party leaders. He occasionally has time to pursue his hobby, fishing, and has done what rich people do when they want to become a bit less rich and become a partner in a restaurant (Fishy Fishy in Brighton).
The only fly in the ointment, I say, is if and when Simon Cowell decides to sack you. Kate Thornton, his predecessor, went without warning and has said she'll never speak to Cowell again. And working for Cowell is like playing chicken, isn't it, I say. You need to stay just long enough not be sacked.
"You know you've got to believe in a meritocracy, otherwise you'd go mad. And if I carry on doing a good job…"
I expect Cheryl thought she was doing a good job, I say.
"The most important thing for me is that I carry on enjoying it."
I expect Dannii thought she was doing a good job…
"But you'd go mad if you thought that. Do you know what I mean?"
Isn't that the point, I say. Working for Simon Cowell is a recipe for mental instability?
"You know, I think Simon is actually weirdly far more chilled than he lets on. I've probably had three or four chats with him in seven years about what I'm doing. And for the most part he lets me get on with it and, therefore, I can't come to any other conclusion than that our relationship is built on trust." It's not a line of questioning he's enjoying so I ask him if he was surprised at the recent Cowell conception shock. "I was slightly surprised," he says. "I thought I'd be a father before Simon was, if I'm brutally honest."
The X Factor's 10th anniversary has been a moment for reflection, he admits. He did spend the first year worrying about getting sacked. "And then I had this strange meeting with Simon in America and I thought it was going to be a well-done-pat-on-the-back thing. And Dee came with me and he said: 'Can I speak candidly in front of Dee?' And I thought: 'Oh Jesus, where are we going here?' And he just went: 'Look, you've got the gig, don't worry about it. Next year go for me more – be yourself.' And that was the only encouragement I needed."
When The X Factor USA was announced, he publicly admitted he wanted the job of hosting the American show and was publicly gutted when he didn't get it. "Yeah, very much so," he says. (Steve Jones did, only to be sacked after a year.) Weren't you quite relieved, I ask, in the light of what happened next?
"No, because I think I probably could have done something else with it. I think I probably could have done a good job at it."
There was, he says, though, "some consternation in my camp" when they realised it was only him and Louis left on the UK show. "But it was a kind of pull-your-socks-up time, especially with me and the producers. It was like: all right, let's make the best show we possibly can. And we did. We did a great job. We were really happy that year and, well, every one since then."
Meanwhile, American X Factor has, if not exactly tanked, flopped from setback to setback. Except, of course, he's too polite to mention this or agree with me when I point it out. But then politeness, friendliness, normalness is, it turns out, O'Leary's bugbear. His greatest strength, that he can chat to Mr and Mrs Ordinary and console Master Ordinary's failed boy band, is the source of some of his greatest criticism. He moans about an interview of him that appeared in the FT.
"We took the interviewer fishing and went to Fishy Fishy afterwards and she said she really enjoyed herself, and then in the article she's just a bit: 'Oh, he's so vanilla.'"
I thought she was nice about you, I say.
"Not that nice."
She said you looked like an off-duty soldier. Was that what got you?
"That's not bad. It means I'm quite fit. I'm happy with that."
With a "forgettable face" I say.
"Yeah, well, forgettable face isn't the nicest thing you're going to read about yourself." But then he tells me about his holiday in France where nobody "looks twice at me" and how being voted the sexiest man in Britain is "just because I'm on TV" and he doesn't seem vain, though he does match his watch to his outfit, he tells me, and quite likes them "because it's the opportunity men get to really wear a bit of jewellery". You can take the boy out of Essex…
It's the idea of being "vanilla" that gets him, I think, although he is cagey about his beliefs, partly, I assume, because he hopes one day to get a serious politics broadcasting gig (he's said he'd quite like to present Question Time).
A week after the shoot, I turn up at his Radio 2 studio to watch him record his Saturday Sessions show. "I just don't want it to come across that I don't love my job. I love The X Factor. I love it. I mean, who wouldn't? It's the greatest job on TV." I can see why he likes doing radio, though. It's just so much less… mental. He chats away to the band Bastille, which is performing an acoustic session in the studio, including a version of their hit, "Pompeii". "We've had a lot of youngsters singing 'Pompeii' this year," he tells me.
"Ugh," says the band, almost in unison.
"Don't groan!" says Dermot. "No, I love The X Factor," says the lead singer, Dan Smith. "It just puts… such emphasis on the song." But then that's The X Factor all over. It elicits a collective sort of groan from the nation, which then goes on to compulsively watch it. And it shows no signs of going away. Is it the empire that is going to rule a thousand years, I ask. "It gets unfairly dubbed Simon Cowell's empire but, you know, it's just a really honest talent, family-entertainment show."
Up to a point. Later, I watch as two young Scottish boys called McKane take to the stage while O'Leary stands backstage with their 20 or so closest relatives, who have all flown down from Glasgow for the occasion. They're like a teen version of the Proclaimers. And there's absolutely no way they're going through. They're buzzed off in seconds and as they troop off, valiantly not bursting into tears, I can't help thinking that their shattered dreams are just grist to ITV's profit mill.
That's showbiz, though. And O'Leary is a consoling presence. But then his hero isn't someone like Jonathan Ross (though he loves Ross, he tells me – Jonathan Ross, Chris Evans and Terry Wogan are his TV idols, he saw a live recording of Wogan aged eight and it was a pivotal moment that changed his life), it's… Ernest Shackleton.
Shackleton! Isn't he just about the polar opposite of a TV presenter, I say.
"Oh no – Shackleton was a terrific showman and a wonderful leader of men." And he launches into an epic re-telling of the Shackleton-didn't-lose-a-man while Amundsen-ate-his-dogs fable. "You know he actually came back a stone heavier than when he left?"
Do you think you apply the lessons of Shackleton to your stewardship of The X Factor? "You don't leave a man behind and you don't eat the dogs. I just love the fact that he was a massive showman, which is why he got the backing to do the expedition, but when push came to shove he stood up. He was a proper guy."
I think Simon Cowell might be Amundsen, I say. He would shoot the dogs. "Cowell shoots the dogs!" he says. But if he has any sense he'll spare Dermot O'Leary, a showman for sure but also possibly a proper guy, too.
The X Factor is back from 31 August on ITV
