The final of Celebrity MasterChef Ireland takes place tonight and the show's been a real life-changer for GAA star Oisín McConville.
He's made it through to the decider, where he's up against actor and TV presenter Simon Delaney and Eurovision singer Niamh Kavanagh.
"It was a massive achievement to get the final," admits the Armagh All-Ireland winner. "Because, literally, my experience was zero and my aspirations were zero.
"I just wanted to have a bit of fun, have a bit of craic with it, and it worked out really, really well for me. I enjoyed every minute of it. I enjoyed the banter between us all."
Tonight on TV3, the three finalists will enter the MasterChef kitchen to showcase the skills they’ve learnt, and prove how far they’ve progressed in order to impress judges Robin Gill and Daniel Clifford and earn the MasterChef trophy.
"Honestly, people would've just had no idea, or no indication, just how bad I was," McConville admits. Before entering MasterChef, he had never cooked a meal in his life. Even a boiled egg was beyond him.
"Unless you lived with me, and you knew how useless I was in the kitchen, if people knew that they'd be flabbergasted by how far I got," he laughs.
"I suppose the big thing for me was to try new things and nothing's off limits. It's just that you get to a certain stage in life and think that's not me, or I can't do that. That's what I would've said, especially around what happens in the kitchen.
"Now I can go into the kitchen with confidence and just do what I'm going to do but, just in general, it's a wee confidence boost."
The former Armagh star also gained a new set of friends from his time on MasterChef, which is something he hadn't expected before her stepped into the kitchen and in front of the cameras.
"They're not people who would be moving in the same circles as me but I have to say that they were a good oul' bunch and we got on really well," he says.
"Some of them I'll stay in contact with - well until we fall out, I suppose," he laughs. "We'll stay in contact and we'll have the craic.
"We've already had a few nights out and different things like that. So there's the whole social thing as well, which is good."
But McConville also admits that the greatest change Celebrity MasterChef has brought is his attitude to food. His tastes have changed completely, as has his functional attitude towards food.
"Yeah, as far as food goes it's changed everything," he says. "When I was playing football I'd just seen food as fuel. You tried to use it as fuel to burn up, and you'd try to eat at the right time.
"Small amounts of tasty food, in a lot of ways, I find more satisfying now than the carvery lunch that I would've been used to before."
Celebrity MasterChef Ireland, 9.00pm, TV3
