Hector O hEochagain

Offbeat TV presenter, proud racehorse-owner and self-described “professional messer”, Hector O hEochagain can still vividly recall the night karma clicked its fingers and almost instantaneously put him on first name terms with the vast majority of the Irish viewing public. As with his friend, former schoolmate and fellow Navanite, comedian Tommy Tiernan, Hector’s big break happened live on the Late Late Show. It came two years ago, when he was discussing the fine art of hanging heavy weights off his penis with Pat Kenny…

“That was a defining moment alright,” he recalls, laughing. “When I sat on the Late Late Show with Pat Kenny and they showed this clip of me dressed up as a ladyboy in a Mambo Bar in Bangkok, hanging things off me mickey. Pat turned to me and said, ‘How was it attached, Hector?’ And that moment was just mad for me. I’d always watched the show when I was growing up and wondered what it’d be like to be on it – and suddenly there I was on the fucking thing talking about hanging things off my mickey!

“I knew I couldn’t say ‘testicles’ because that would’ve sounded curt, so I went, ‘Well, Pat, I hung them off my… liathroidi’ [Irish for ‘balls’] The audience completely cracked up and Pat just really got into it from there, joking away in Irish and all of that. And literally from that moment on, the whole thing just gathered public knowledge and momentum.”

A large part of the ‘whole thing’ of which he speaks is Amu, his increasingly popular TG4 travel series. Prior to his now infamous Late Late appearance, Amu had barely been registering on the TAMS. There had been two series broadcast – taking Hector on haphazard travels around America and Europe – but its obvious low budget and the fact that it was being presented in Irish (with English subtitles) had up to then proved a major audience turn-off. However, the publicity from the Late Late, coupled with the general excellence of the third series (which took him all around Asia), really put the TG4 travel show on the map.

“The first couple of series went down OK, but the audiences weren’t big or nothing,” he admits. “There was only 8 or 10,000 people watching it. TG4 was seen as a Gaeltacht station for Gaeltacht people – for people who were down the west or in Kerry, farmers living at the butt end of a mountain. People didn’t accept it around the country. Places like Longford and Kilkenny – let alone the Pale – just didn’t accept it. But then we did the Asian series and right after the Late Late the ratings just began to really take off. It was mad how quickly it went mainstream!”

Unsurprisingly, life’s been fairly hectic ever since. Hectoric, even. He married his long-term girlfriend Dymphna – a university lecturer from Clare – in Brazil two years ago, but has hardly settled down into a life of steady routine since. The fourth TG4 series Amu Amigos took him all around South America and proved the most popular yet when it was broadcast last year. A new equestrian-based, six-part show called Only Fools Buy Horses, has only just started on RTE (of which more later). And he’s currently in the middle of filming the fifth series of Amu, which he’s obviously enjoying immensely.

He’s put the hour of our encounter back twice already because things keep coming up. When hotpress eventually meets the distinctively redheaded presenter in a packed Galway pub on a busy Friday evening, the 33-year-old wastes no time in gleefully explaining that he’s just back from LA, where he was hanging out with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion (“I asked Hef if he’d ever rode a redhead!”). However, work isn’t the only reason he’s been so difficult to track down today…

“Sorry I was messing around with the times earlier,” he says, in his distinctively drawled Navan accent. “I was getting a couple of tattoos done in this place called AWOL in Ennis. I’m heading off again on Tuesday and they were suddenly able to fit me in today, so I had to go to Clare. Actually, they’re good lads so you might give them a mention in your article.”

Hector had his first tattoo done on the spur of the moment in Tokyo, during the filming of the Asian leg of Amu. The new ones are more personal and intricate though, and have been carefully planned. One is a mysterious “work in progress” (related to his proud Leo status) on his right lower leg, the other a large image of the Hindu elephant god Ganesh on his left shoulder. Seeming oblivious to the fact that the entire pub is grinning inanely in his direction, he rolls up his trouser leg to reveal a massive bandage tightly wrapped in cellophane. “I’m in a lot of pain, but it’s good pain,” he explains. “A couple more visits and it’ll be finished. Then it’ll all have been worth it.”

Whatever about the pain he’s in, you can tell from the excited look on his face that he’s really buzzing at the moment, loving the attention (“An interview with Hector in the Hot Press! Fucking brilliant!”). His success has been a long time coming and, as he readily admits, he’s still only getting used to it. He could ask some of his friends for advice, since he spent his childhood and formative years in Navan, attending St. Pat’s secondary school alongside some other leading lights of contemporary Irish culture.

“Navan – yeah, the centre of Irish showbusiness,” he laughs. “There’s young Brosnan, that guy Timothy Tiernan and yer man Moran. And then there’s yer man Navan Man from the radio but he’s actually from Nobber so he’s a blow-in and doesn’t count. Nah, I was a school friend of Tommy’s, we were in the same class. I was more a drinking buddy of Dylan’s.”

What do you think it is about Navan?

“I really don’t know. I’d loads of friends in school and still around Navan and Galway that are very talented people and funny people. I think everyone in Ireland has a group of friends that are a funny, talented and mad bunch. Most of the humour happens at parties or during drinking sessions. It just happens that some of my crowd have managed to make a living out of it.

“Nobody ever planned it, although in school we did a lot of improvisation in classes, not to mention messing around. We had this great English teacher in secondary school in St. Pat’s – Richey Ball. I think Tommy and Dylan have both mentioned him in interviews before as well. But he was brilliant. From second year onwards we were always doing role-playing in class and being encouraged to express ourselves.”

Given his manic, piss-taking and irreverent public persona – which lies somewhere between an Irish Ali G and the Fast Show’s ‘Brilliant!’ character – it comes as little surprise to hear that Hector was always a bit of a clown in school.

“I was one of the biggest messers,” he admits, laughing. “Obviously some of my friends were funnier than me – though Tommy’s nicked a couple of my jokes. But I was always well able to mess and now I’m getting paid to do it professionally on TV. But how could you not be a messer in any school in ’80s Ireland? Like, I remember a religious teacher in school telling us, [adopts redneck accent] ‘Right lads, when you’re washing yourselves be sure to pull the foreskin back and clean out all the fluff.’ How could you not mess when you’re hearing that kinda shite in Christian Doctrine class? Take the fluff out of your foreskin? Come on!”

He learnt to speak the native tongue at Colaiste na Bhfiann, an Irish college which he attended over several summers in his youth.

“It was one of those places where if you were caught talking English you were sent home. But I’d never have learnt Irish any other way. It was great craic. I was going there from when I was 8 until I was about 16. I only got a C in Irish in my Leaving but I was still well able to speak it.”

He sat his Leaving in 1986 and, despite a previously poor academic record, managed to scrape his way into Trinity. He studied Early and Modern Irish for a year but, somewhat ironically in retrospect, failed his first year exams and quickly scraped his way out again.

“I was too young and immature to be able to handle the freedom of university,” he says. “I was away from home, living in Stoneybatter and having a great time. Going fucking mad for it! Once I’d flunked out of college, I just got on with the partying really. Eventually after a few years of pricking around I left Dublin in 1991 and went to live in Inis Maan in the Aran Islands, just to chill out for a while. There were no cars – only donkeys and Honda 50s.

“And then I did a TEFL and went to live in the Basque country. I followed the love of my life out there and taught English for a few years. I’d a great lifestyle out there – 20 hours work a week and having a great time. Then my missus came back – she’d been taking a year off college – and I followed her home. It took a while to settle back into the culture here – fucking cold weather after the Basque country!”

Hector first attempted to break into the world of television in 1994, when fledgling Irish-language channel TG4 was in the process of being set up.

“I put in an application with TG4 for an office job in 1994 – back when they were just starting and there were no shows. They were just doing pre-production stuff. I didn’t get anything. Then, after loads of messing around and doing different things, I eventually got a fashion show called Iomha for TG4 in 1996. Looking at it now it was absolutely cat – doomed cat. But back then I thought that was it – I was gonna get me red carpet and loads of fucking jobs and all the rest of it. But nothing happened.”

Eventually he wound up working with legendary, low-budget American ‘director’ Roger Corman, who was then making movies by the fortnight in the west of Ireland.

“I went working in Roger Corman’s film studios for a while doing special effects and mechanical effects,” Hector explains. “I was working for £115 or £120 a week, doing 10 or 12 hour days, getting up at 5 in the morning, crew call at 7 – and of course sunrise in Connemara is at fucking ten to nine! And we’re doing blood and guts on the set.”

Corman really churned them out, didn’t he?

“Bigtime! It was great, though, because you’d be in Connemara in the middle of November and David Carradine – yer man out of Kung Fu – would be the actor. Or Michael Yorke – the guy from Logan’s Run and Austin Powers. There’d be people like that there a lot of the time. And we’re out in the middle of Connemara, trying to recreate Spiddal as a village in Massachusetts. It was a good time – nice people on the crew. I still have friends from that time. And I think I’ve learnt that in this business when you get nice people, nice job, get paid well, it’s a novelty when it happens. That’s what I learnt from working with Corman. That it’s not an easy business to get into and to make a proper living.

“Then after Corman I went and did another audition and wound up doing a show for TV3 called Gimme Three. It was a kid’s show – a rival to Dempsey’s Den in the afternoons.”

Although Hector gradually developed a cult following amongst pre-teens, students, stoners and the unemployed, he didn’t particularly enjoy working in TV3 and eventually departed, having done more than 500 shows.

“TV3 was like going into Stanstead at the beginning. There’s nobody there, nobody talks to each other and it’s just like… plastic. It didn’t really help that I was doing this thing with Ren & Stimpy cartoons at 4 o’clock on the day. I kind of presented and wrote sketches for the show and we had a bit of craic with it, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing. But then again, the whole TV3 thing was an education. Everything I’ve done has been great because now I look back and go, ‘Well, I won’t do that again’. You come out of there and you’ve bettered yourself. It’s just been a nice progression.”

His first real break came shortly after the millennium, when he successfully auditioned for a different kind of travel show.

“Yeah, lo and behold, in March 2000 I did an audition in Monkstown for Adare Productions – walking through the streets as if I was in a marine base in America. The series was going to be called Amu in America – i.e. to lose the plot or to go astray in America – and it was following Irish people in quirky jobs over there. I did something right at the audition and I got the job that evening. Five weeks later I was on the plane to America. That was show one. And now I’ve just come back from LA having done show forty-seven.”

Had you done much travelling before getting the show?

“No, I’d lived in Spain and done a lot of Europe, but that’s about it. Trips to Amsterdam and that kinda thing. I hadn’t been to America before the first series but I did ten cities on my first trip. So that was pretty good. We went from Minneapolis to Kentucky, San Fran, Boston, Vermount, Dallas, Seattle… that was my first one. Then I did Amu in Europe – Amsterdam, Copenhagan, Berlin, Moscow and ending in Bilbao. Strange, I was living in Bilbao and then I’m coming back with a TV crew a couple of years later.”

Although there’s only three of them on the crew and it’s a running joke that the budget for a single episode of RTE’s driving show is the same as theirs is for an entire season, Hector obviously loves his work.

“There’s no scripts there,” he laughs. “I can do and say whatever I want and as long as I know that I’m enjoying a situation then I’m pretty sure that the viewers will as well.”

Although it’s a laugh, it’s also hard work. By his own reckoning, he’s taken more than 140 flights in the past two years. Does that constant travelling ever get gruelling?

“Well, there’s nothing like coming home, I will say that. Like when we were filming Amu Amigos I picked up my tickets at Dublin Airport. And it was like… (adopts auctioning voice) Dublin to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Mexico, Mexico-Cuba, Cuba-Jamaica, Jamaica-Costa Rica, Costa-Rica-Venezuela, Venezuela-Rio, Rio-Santiago, Santiago-La Paz, La-Paz-Lima, Lima-Ecuador, Ecuador – the Caribbean, Caribbean – Dublin. Then home to Galway on Aer Aran. That’s not a normal fucking job. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself.

“I know that I’m lucky and I’m privileged to get paid to go and be myself and have a laugh. That’s what I always wind up telling myself on day 74 or something. I miss my missus a lot, that’s the worst bit. We got married in Brazil two years ago, but because I’ve been travelling we haven’t really settled into any kind of normal married routine yet. It’s difficult but we’re learning to deal with it.”

Have you ever encountered any serious trouble on your travels?

“I’ve actually had really good luck. The only dodgy place really was Mexico city. Three people on the plane there told me to be careful. And I’ve never felt such tension on the streets of a city. It’s the fastest-growing city in the world – 22 million people, bigger than New Delhi. The former mayor of New York Guiliani is down there on a million-plus salary a year to try and bring in zero-tolerance. After nine o’clock you don’t leave the hotel. It’s just not nice, but it’s not anybody’s fault. So Mexico is dangerous but other than that we haven’t really been in a dangerous situation.”

Are you making serious money now that the show’s taken off?

“I’m doing alright now, but it’s not constant work. Like, I’m not working for Channel 4 or BBC. It’s just on TG4 and in Ireland the budgets are minuscule compared to across the pond.”

Aren’t you worried that the fact that you’re speaking Irish limits the show’s appeal abroad?

“No, not at all,” he shakes his head. “I think it’s universal because most of my shows I’m speaking Irish one minute and Spanish the next. But I’ve got shows you wouldn’t see on Channel 4 and I’m speaking Irish. I’m just happy that now the boys – whether they’re up in an RTC or sitting in a flat in Carlow – can have a few spliffs, drink a few cans and watch a bit of homegrown TV and enjoy it. Instead of going to a British channel.”

He may claim to be merely “doing alright” financially but it’s a soon to be televised fact that, within the last ten months, Hector became the proud co-owner of a racehorse. His first show for the national broadcaster Only Fools Buy Horses hilariously details the trials and triumphs of horse ownership. The premise is simple enough – Hector is given seven grand to buy a racehorse, take it through training and then, well, race it. Of course, as he quickly discovers, it’s really not that simple. Not that simple at all.

“I don’t want to give too much away about it because it’ll only be on the second episode by the time this interview appears,” he says. “And I’ve only finally bought the horse at the end of episode two. After the second episode we have the horse – Traverse – and after that it just becomes a fucking A-Z of problems, highs and lows. But by the end of episode two I bring him to the trainer, but then I have to go and get my colours done, I have to register as an owner and all sorts of stuff.”

Does he actually race?

“He races six times, he’s like the bionic man. I can’t tell you if he won or not but I’ll tell you he’s getting bigger, stronger, better, faster. He ran all over the country. It’s difficult to talk about Traverse because he’s still a living animal.”

He says that he hopes the show will dispel horse-racing’s elitist image and encourage more ordinary people to get involved in the sport.

“What’s great about the show for me is that I’ve gone from being in a smoky, stuffy, bookies on a Friday afternoon – when I should be down at the house doing the hoovering or me missus will kill me – to now being a horse-owner. And there’s no wax jacket, nothing. You see the way I am in jeans, shades, earring and the mad hair. Some of the looks I got at the races! But the thing is anyone can do it. People have syndicates – all sorts of people. Horses aren’t the preserve of people with big country mansions and big jeeps and loads of money. It’s right up there with the GAA. One-and-a-half million people paid at the turnstiles last year.”

The show was entirely his own concept. He’d always loved travelling and he’d managed to make that his job. He’s always loved the horses too, so he decided to chance his arm and see if he could make that his job as well. The good folk of RTE gave him the go-ahead…

“I was always into the horses, I was always backing them. Going into the bookies on a Saturday and spending the whole day there. Going into the bookies with ten pounds and coming out with 60 – or vice versa. Those things happen but there’s nothing better than winning a five pound treble. I knew if you read about them you’d have a better chance. So I studied the form. I backed my first horse in 1985. Cool Ground, Adrian McGuire, a jockey from Navan, won the Gold Cup. I got £52 quid back on it, which bought a hell of a lot of snackboxes.”

What’s the most you’ve ever won at the races?

“I once did a E50 each-way treble at Cheltenhem and I made £2,500 sterling. But I did a 25p each-way treble about five years ago and I won £125. And that’s what it is. Just the buzz of studying the form and picking the winners.”

Although Hector takes much more of a backseat role in Only Fools Buy Horses – horse experts Padraic Maloney, PJ Flynn and Eamon Reilly play pivotal parts and explain most of the technicalities – his irreverent Amu persona still regularly raises its cheeky redhead. There’s a hilarious scene in the second episode where Hector is advising his newly-arrived horse to eat the grass in Waterford – going, ‘I love grass. Get it inta ye! Grass is good for ye!!!’ He stops short of winking at the camera but it’s still obvious that he’s taking the piss and that the hapless horse trainers have no idea what he’s on about.

“That was just a simple play on words that’ll make it easier for people to accept,” he grins. “If you smoke grass in this country then you’re a drug addict, if you drink a few pints of Guinness as a 12-year-old sitting at the table with your uncles at Christmas then you’re a man. And we have to hammer and chisel away at that. Down the country some boys just back from Amsterdam or a father who still likes a smoke, will go ‘Yeah!’ and have a laugh. That’s all it is.”

Is your manic persona in any way a media construct or are you always like that?

“No. It’s only when you get asked these kinds of questions that you consider it. I’m the same Hector now that I was before all of this. You know, never happier than when I’ve got a bottle of wine and a chicken curry, sitting at home with the missus. The hardest thing is learning to be natural in front of the camera, and I think I’ve got that one down. If you tried to fake it you’d be spotted a mile away. People come up to me on the street thinking they know me – and the truth is that they do. It’s just been a nice steady progression for me. Anyway, if I pretended to be someone else my mates would fucking kill me!”

HECTOR’S TOP TUNES IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER…

‘Step on’ – Happy Mondays
“The time, the place, the buzz.”

‘Sproston Green’ – Charlatans
“Saw them at Top Hat, Dun Laoghaire 1989 and then in New York in 2000!”

‘Out Of Nowhere’ – Faith No More
“Flagons of cider and cruising in a Ford Escort RS 2000 in Navan in 1987.”

‘Nothing Else Matters’ – Metallica
“A great ballad!”

‘Super Sharp Shooter’ – DJ Hype
“A great movin’ tha body jungle track.”

‘Ready For Love’ – Indie Arie
“For mise agus mo cahilin amhain!”

‘Jeremy’ – Pearl Jam
“Quality that lasts from the first album… teenage years in the royal county.”

‘Fire And Water’ – Free
“I chilled to the music of Free for three years on the beaches of the Basque country.”

‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ – Simple Minds
“Wiped the moves on the floors of Navan’s top niteclubs from spiders to diamonds – a chick puller if ever there was one.”