When Craig Doyle, 29-year-old presenter of the BBC's Holiday programme, was 12, he wasn't out playing football on the street in his native Kilmacud. He and his older brother Keith (coincidentally a presenter on RTE's travel programme, No Frontiers), spent their leisure time "playing radio station".
Their subsequent broadcasting careers have continued to overlap, with Craig following in Keith's footsteps to a postgraduate course at the London College of Printing (LCP), and the two even appearing together on a travel programme, sampling a holiday punting down the Thames: "It was a bloody awful holiday: hard work and we had to sleep on the boat, which leaked," Craig recalls.
Gone are the days when Irishness holds up your career path in the UK. Both brothers found broadcasting jobs easily: Keith landed a job with the BBC as a news correspondent, followed by Craig, who was offered a job with BBC Radio Suffolk before even graduating from his postgraduate course. "News editors saw my Irishness as an advantage," says Craig. "By the mid-1990s, there was a swing away from the Home Counties accent in British broadcasting. Irish and other regional accents were trendy. When I worked in radio, my Irish accent was seen as providing a dash of audio colour. It helped me to stand out."
Some confusion between the brothers resulted in Keith being given the credit for a radio scoop of Craig's: "It was about a local MP caught in a three-in-the-bed sex scandal," says Craig. "I got a tip-off early on a Sunday and put a radio package together. It went out on all the stations. Everyone thought it must be Keith's story, so his name was used, and he even got a day off for working on a Sunday. I was gutted."
Now Keith is a more familiar face on RTE, as presenter of It's Your Money, while Craig, although based in Dublin, is working for the BBC, where he finds a wealth of Irish talent: "I meet and work with Irish people all the time, and my boss, Anne Morrison, the head of the BBC's features department, is from Northern Ireland. There's loads of Irish broadcasting talent around, and unfortunately it's all in England. There are so many more job opportunities there. The amount of local radio stations means that you'll always get work."
In his teens Craig wanted to be "a sports star, or a vet, or anything" but after a degree in History and Sociology at Maynooth he did the postgraduate course at the LCP in the knowledge that "if you get in you are guaranteed a job - it claims to be the best journalism course in Britain and Ireland". He got through a day-long interview process: "It was a nightmare day. Out of 30, two of us were accepted." The course was "fantastic", and living in London "opened up a whole new world for me".
He was happy with his radio career and the offer of a job presenting a children's programme for ITV came as a complete surprise. "It was a bit embarrassing. My career went from chasing news stories to saying, `So, Posh, what's your favourite colour?' " He is highly critical of his first TV performances: "I was appalling, really wooden. Just thinking about it makes me cringe. I was 25. Luckily it only lasted five months." Then he was offered a job as a reporter for Tomorrow's World: "It's an amazing show. I did a story a day, 12 stories a fortnight, travelling all over the world. It was such a relief to lose the Disney cartoons and get back into writing news stories - the heart of things."
His job on Holiday started with "doing the odd slot for Jill Dando when she wanted time off. I replaced her about a year ago. She wished me the best of luck. After seven years of having no life of her own because of all the travelling for the show, she had fallen in love and wanted to get married. Two weeks later she was dead. "I never heard a bad word said about her and TV is a very bitchy place, so that's quite an epitaph. She was really good at her job, and I would have been toasted if I'd tried to copy her. I had developed my own style after presenting a short series called Holiday on a Shoestring."
Now filming a new series of Holiday (the current one ended its run this week), Craig is also getting ready for a new BBC programme called The Candidate, due to start in June: "We've made the pilot and I'm really excited about it. What I do is groom a person for a job. We actually check the job listings, so it's a real job. The person is then prepared in every possible way, from training to interview skills to their appearance. The grand finale is the job interview. It's a brilliant idea and quite entertaining." He is also keen to get into sports presenting: "But who knows what the future will bring? I never planned to get into TV, and now look at me."