Travelling Light
She was the face of No Frontiers for a decade but when that show ended Kathryn Thomas had to reinvent herself. So she put away her rucksack and took a job presenting Winning Streak. Then Gerry Ryan passed away and she found herself stepping into his shoes on Operation Transformation. In a revealing interview she discusses her ‘rivalry’ with Grainne Seoige over hosting The Voice, losing her virginity at 17 – and why RTE needed to stop paying its stars so much.
Olaf Tyaransen, 21 Mar 2012
OLAF TYARANSEN: What’s your earliest memory?
KATHRYN THOMAS: My earliest memory is sitting in the back of the car going from Carlow to Wexford. We had a holiday place down there, still do actually. Well it’s a holiday house and a mobile home. There was a caravan there as well at one stage. The earliest memory is being in the back of the car with my brother and sister fighting over a packet of Rusk biscuits on the way to go on holiday.
If it was Rusks you were fighting about, you must have been very young.
Yeah. I think it was my sister in the middle who had the rusk – she’s three years younger than I am, then there’s myself and my brother, he’s a year older. My other brother Stephen is 19 now. There’s a ten-year age gap between him and my younger sister.
He was the afterthought.
Yeah. It’s funny because when my mom had Stephen I was 13 and I was in the convent in Downcarlow secondary school. And the following year I was sent to boarding school in The King’s Hospital in Dublin, because me and the nuns didn’t really see eye to eye, let’s put it that way (laughs). I don’t think being in an all-girl school really suited me. But I didn’t want to go to boarding school. My brother was already there and I had this vision of bars on windows and Mallory Towers. So I thought no, not for me.
I would’ve thought an Irish boarding school was more about drunken pillow fights in your underwear than Mallory Towers...
It was actually much closer to that than bars on windows and stuff (laughs). But it was great because the year Stephen came along I was at home. It meant I got to experience that first year when he was very young. We helped out. If my mom needed a night off we had the pram beside the bed, did the night feeds and did the changing and all of that. So babies don’t scare me or intimidate me in any way now. I’m totally comfortable around them.
What did your folks do for a living?
My mom was a teacher of Irish and French. And my dad’s a steel fabriactor. So we had a steel company that’s been in the family for generations, Thompson’s Engineering. Just two years ago, like everyone else, things really went downhill. They’re struggling big time at the moment. My brother worked in the company as well, as did my cousin. It’s a real family thing. It was my great-great-grandfather who started it. They employed a lot of people in the town. It’s difficult times for them, difficult times for everybody. My dad is kind of, in my head, the symbol of positivity. They went bust before in the ‘80s and rebuilt the company again. They’re going through the books and going through the business but from an outward perspective, he’s still very positive.
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Olaf Tyaransen
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