Eamonn Holmes: Set to rise and shine

A resurgent Eamonn Holmes, 'everyman' of daytime television for a generation, is sure he can juggle Sky News and Five Live. He talks to Sholto Byrnes

Some may think this is blowsy talk, given that Sky is a big opportunity for Holmes. Since vacating the GMTV sofa in April after 12 years, he has, after all, been without a high profile, regular presenting slot. Hosting special editions of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? isn't on quite the same level. He does describe himself as being "very complimented" to be joining the channel. But he evidently thinks that the compliment cuts both ways. "I think signing me is one of the ways that Sky is trying to raise their profile," he says.

Asked about Sky News's reputation as the upmarket flagbearer of Rupert Murdoch's satellite television operation, and how the breakfast show will be part of maintaining that, Holmes is emphatic. "I'm not there to do it for Rupert Murdoch or Sky News," he says. "I'm there to do it for me. It's great for me."

We are sitting in a studio at BBC Television Centre where Holmes has just hosted his Saturday morning show for Radio Five Live. He is as genial off-microphone as he was during the show, during which he sang about the footballing Neville brothers to the tune of David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel"; their sister Tracey, the England netballer, was a guest.

He seems genuinely fond of the radio show, which he will continue once he starts presenting for Sky four mornings a week. I ask him why he started at Five Live a year ago, given that he was then still very busy with GMTV.

"You're right, I didn't need the extra day," he says. "In terms of commitment I needed it like I needed a hole in the head. But I knew that in terms of fulfilment this was what I wanted to do."

By that point Holmes was thoroughly dissatisfied with his job at GMTV. "I said to myself 'when am I ever doing interviews that I really enjoy?' Answer: rarely. Every week I come away from here having enjoyed speaking to people who interest me about a subject that I'm interested in. And they have a respect for me. Whereas at GMTV if you weren't 17 you wouldn't go on. It was all the latest babes in Coronation Street or Hollyoaks - that was the interview you were doing."

Holmes refers, unprompted, to GMTV repeatedly during our conversation. "It was very cynical," he says. "It was only about making money, that was the attitude. Get the texts in, get the phone calls in, enter the competition. There was no idea that you were doing a full programme of any description. Sport was cut out of the brief. Increasingly you just weren't feeling satisfied with anything that you were doing."

He contrasts the intelligence of the phone-in quizzes on the BBC programme with the pathetically easy ones on GMTV. "The normal GMTV question is: where does President Bush live? Is it a) the Black House, b) the Blue House, or c) the White House? I had that question once and they forgot to put the White House in." He shakes his head with disbelief. The problems at GMTV, according to Holmes, started at the top. "I spent a long and unhappy time there working for bad management who made you feel very insecure. At GMTV you've got weak people, not very talented people, in charge. They're threatened by anyone who's got ideas. I should have got out of there a long time ago."

When should he have left? "After the Anthea Turner business [Holmes infamously labelled her "Princess Tippy Toes", and Turner's friends claimed that his behaviour regularly reduced her to tears] it was quite obvious that there were friends of Anthea left behind." As Turner left in 1996, this means he now thinks he should have left nearly nine years ago. "I stayed for pragmatic reasons," he explains. "It paid my wages, it gave me profile, and you could be out of there by 9am."

He's still bitter, though, at the constant stream of stories that appeared in the tabloids about behind-the-scenes backbiting at GMTV. At one point it seemed as though barely a day went by when The Daily Mail's (now defunct) "Wicked Whispers" column didn't print a disobliging item about Holmes. "They had a hotline there, totally," he says. "There were probably two individuals in the management who felt that I was bigger than the station, and they were determined to knock me. It was a vicious environment."

Holmes recently encountered the column's editor, John McEntee, at a party thrown by Des Lynam. "McEntee offered to start writing good stories about me," says Holmes. "I told him where to stick it. Now the whole column's being dropped. What goes around," he adds with some satisfaction, "comes around."

Once Holmes starts at Sky, one assumes he will put the GMTV experience firmly behind him. But the breakfast show is only part of a very full portfolio, which includes Radio Five Live on Saturday, a Sunday afternoon slot on Magic FM - "It's recorded," he says, "I'm not as stupid as that," - and a column for The People. How does he fit it all in? "I'm very well organised," he says. "I've got two secretaries. It's all run as a business." A very well-remunerated business, at that. Sky is said to be paying him a salary of £2m for his services. "Over how many years is that?" he jokes. "It's like hire purchase. No figures are really like that in broadcasting. It just makes a good headline. What I would say is that it obviously takes a lot to persuade you to get up at half past three in the morning."

Even if his new job was not so well paid, I suspect Holmes would still be happy to rise before the lark. He has a very strong work ethic, instilled in him by his father. "He was a carpet fitter and a perfectionist at what he did," says Holmes. "When you see sweat breaking on a man's brow like that for little or no financial gain at the end, that hardens you up. Believe me, getting up at 3.30am is nothing to what my father had to do. It's child's play in comparison."

One of five sons, 45-year-old Holmes grew up in Belfast and attended a well known local school, St Malachy's College. His competitive spirit was evident even then. "The reason you stay in broadcasting," he says, "is that although there are many people in the field, very few are really very good. And that comes back to school sport. You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I used to be a middle-distance runner. I've got the medals.

"You would get to the point when you wanted to be sick, and you could feel the breath of the person next to you. And then you had to pick your point and say 'byee', and just go for it. You might even throw up when you crossed the line. But I love that idea of kicking the heel in and just going."

When he was 20, Holmes got his first job at Ulster Television as a farming reporter. "I knew nothing about it," he recalls. "On my first day I had to go a hill farm during lambing season." To illustrate the story, Holmes was told to lift up a lamb. "The next thing," he says, "it weed and pooed all the way down my coat."

After moving into sports reporting, Holmes then joined the BBC in Manchester, where he presented a Friday night sports programme. "It was brilliant," he says. "But then a new controller came to Manchester, and he wiped the board clean. From that I spent two years really scraping for work."

Holmes built up a collection of presenting roles, including Pot Black, tennis and snooker tournaments, and The Holiday Programme. "None of them paid particularly good money," he says, "but collectively... And then GMTV came along."

He was the only presenter to refuse to sign an exclusive contract. "I said absolutely not. I was not going to put my eggs in the one basket again. I've always seen television as nothing more than a job," he explains, "and when it stops I'm in trouble - I've got kids to support. So business sense said why would I go and work for them exclusively in this niche market?"

That niche market has proved very useful to Holmes over the years, enabling his profile to grow to the point that even those who have never watched GMTV are well aware of who he is. I ask him who he thinks of as his audience. "I'm lucky," he says, "in that I'm a sort of everyman." (His newspaper column is titled "Man of the People".) "I'm very complimented that the research says women like me. I think I make them laugh. And men aren't threatened by me - they think they could have a drink with me. Younger people have grown up with me, waking up to breakfast TV and watching various quizzes during the day."

Confirming that he has become a figure with a certain status, the Cambridge Union has invited him to speak. "I asked them why they wanted me," says Holmes, "and they said 'you're a cult, you're a cult'. Or at least I think they said cult." He hasn't accepted yet, though. "It scares the wits out of me," he says. "I'm a working class council house lad who's made good. I feel I've got a broad communion with an audience. But you've got to know your limitations as well."

Holmes claims to be uncomfortable with the idea of his own celebrity, a concept whose currency he thinks has been devalued. "I've never felt that I'm part of a celebrity club," he says. "I grade celebrity, anyway. Sir Alex Ferguson is a celebrity, and so is Des Lynam. But is so-and-so from Big Brother a celebrity? The hell they are. They haven't earned their spurs, served their apprenticeship, or achieved anything at all."

He is contemptuous of those who use their celebrity to act arrogantly to others. Alex Higgins, for instance. When Holmes took part in a charity golfing tournament in Northern Ireland 20 years ago, his father approached Higgins, but the snooker player rebuffed him and swore at him. Years later, Holmes encountered Higgins again at an airport. Needing a seat on an already full flight from Manchester to Belfast, Higgins asked Holmes if he would sell his ticket. Higgins offered progressively larger sums of money for the ticket, until Holmes told him: "All it would have taken was the price of an autograph for my father." Higgins said he would gladly provide one. "Too late," said Holmes, and turned away.

"I was going to get even with him and that was my way of doing it," he says. "A lot of people in Northern Ireland are still quite proud of Alex Higgins, but a lot are embarrassed by him. He's more of a receiver than a giver. People in Northern Ireland are very proud of those who do well, as long as you don't forget your roots. And I've never done that."

Holmes is proud of his achievements, and is certainly not short on self-belief. How does he warn against self-confidence sliding into arrogance? "First of all those around me wouldn't let that happen," says Holmes, who has three children with his ex-wife (they live in Belfast), and a three-year-old son with his partner, Ruth Langsford. "And then I don't think that there's a television critic in the land who would ever write anything good about me. There are people on personal crusades to knock me." He mentions The Sunday Mirror's Ian Hyland. "He makes a point of writing about me every single Sunday."

Later, I look up some of Hyland's comments. They seem more than sufficient to keep Holmes's ego in check, as two examples from recent months show: "Britain's Fattest Man was on Sky One, Monday night. In other - though not unrelated - news, Eamonn Holmes starts on Sky News at the end of the month." And: "Clarification: The Big Eat (C4, next Sunday) is not the Eamonn Holmes life story. It's a documentary."

Holmes has a congenital hip problem which makes exercise difficult for him. But the digs about his weight don't seem to bother him overly. "I'm developing a very good face and physique for radio," he jokes.

I ask him who were his broadcasting heroes when he was growing up. "I studied them all," he says. "Presenters like David Coleman, Frank Bough, Dickie Davies. I always think that the people who have the consummate skills are the sports people. There is no difference between presenting football results on Grandstand and a general election programme.

"Des Lynam sitting there saying: 'Let's just take a look at the situation. It's Millwall two, Norwich City nil. Both those goals scored by Dennis Wise.' That's no different to saying: 'Let's look at the situation in Burnley North. Yes, we see there's a swing to Labour there of 5.2 per cent, and if it continues that way let's reflect that across the country.' The technique is exactly the same, the skill is realising that it is."

Despite bringing up political programmes, Holmes says he is not interested in bidding to take over Peter Snow's swingometer. What he would be interested in, however, is a job his name has been linked with - presenting This Is Your Life.

"I feel that's fate," he says, "because I was named after Eamonn Andrews. When I was born, my mother looked at me. I had black curly hair, and he was the pin- up in Ireland at that time, the biggest export outside Guinness.

'He looks just like Eamonn Andrews,' she said." So, could Holmes really inherit Andrews' big red book? "It's fate," he repeats, and he certainly seems to believe it.