Dáithí Ó Sé let it all hang out on Saturday night's edition of Angela Scanlon’s Ask Me Anything, revealing the secret to his physique, recalling the day he set his mother’s clothesline on fire, and his first thoughts when he met his future wife, Rita.
The 45-year-old Kerryman was in characteristically game for anything form on the chat show and had no qualms about talking about how he keeps in shape now that The Rose of Tralee has been temporarily put on hold due to the pandemic.
Prompted by Angela about one of his showbiz secrets, Dáithí revealed that he wears what he called "male Spanx" to keep his belly in.
"I have to explain this," said the Today presenter, lifting up his jumper to show the studio audience and viewing public his vital under garment.
"What's under the jumper Dáithí?" 👀
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Not what we expected @angelascanlon to ask @daithi_ose but it is called Ask Me Anything!
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"Usually in the run up to the Rose of Tralee, I go on a diet and I go running and cycling and I drop around a stone and a half but because we haven’t had the Rose of Tralee for the past two years, the stone and a half stayed, and I put another stone and a half on so that’s three stone so when I’m sitting down, I need a small bit of help to keep myself together."
"I suppose it’s man spanx to hide the belly." he added.
He also spoke about how he kicked his 30 cigarettes a day habit 15 years ago - and how badly he suffered when he went cold turkey.
"I remember having withdrawal symptoms," he said. "I had pains in my toes, my knees, my hair, eyes, my teeth, my . . . every place. I came that close to going back smoking. I gave up but I love the smell of them - if you were smoking, I'd be over on your lap!"
"I remember the second she walked in the room . . . oh my god, she was beautiful, she still is, she had lovely, tanned skin and a beautiful red dress and I said, `howya, loveen?'"
It turns out that Dáithí wasn’t quite the model pupil at Dingle CBS and was even suspended a few times.
"There were a few years in school when I didn’t want to be there," he said. "In third year, I was having hassle with one or two teachers and I told one of them to . . . off out of frustration.
"Now, we had no phone in the house at this time, this was the early nineties, everything was sent by letter so there was a letter being sent to my parents saying I was out of school. Anyway, I offered dad help to remove some felt from the shed outside the house but the whole time I was waiting for the postman to come so I could intercept him.
"I was there on a Friday and I may have been burning the felt off the shed roof at the back of the house and I turned around and there was my father talking to the postman and I turned round and there on the other side, was my mother’s clothesline on fire. Balls!
"I got it from both sides. I think my mother was more upset about her drawers going on fire than my father was about me being out of school, but we got over it."
A bit of a renaissance man, Dáithí has had many different jobs over the years, from butcher, bouncer, circus ringmaster as Gaeilge, TG4 weather presenter, religion teacher and, of course, co-presenter of afternoon show Today on RTÉ One and host of The Rose of Tralee.
"Getting the Rose gig was huge for me," he told Angela. "I thought it was something that would never come my way even though I’d been involved with the Kerry Rose selection for around seven or eight years before and I was on the judging panel a few times, I was on the judging panel the year Rita didn’t win - as her mother keeps reminding me."
Recalling the first time he met his future wife, 2008 New Jersey Rose Rita Talty, who he married in 2012, he said, "I remember the second she walked in the room . . . oh my god, she was beautiful, she still is, she had lovely, tanned skin and a beautiful red dress and I said, `howya, loveen?’ it was a good while after that before we became friends. We were friends for two years before we got together."
Jokingly, he added, "The second I saw her I said to myself she can’t win because then I can’t marry her! I met her a few months later in a social setting and we just got on and then it happened on Facebook. We’d message each other once a month, and then it was once a week and then it was once a day and then it was all day, every day."
Watch Angela’s Scanlan’s Ask Me Anything on the RTÉ Player
