Ray D’Arcy: “I’m getting older and more comfortable in my skin”

As another year of ‘Run with Ray’ takes to the roads this week, broadcaster Ray D’Arcy sits down with Janice Butler to talk about getting the nation moving, his own life goals as he approaches 60 and why giving up alcohol has changed his life.

Ray is right on time for our scheduled sit-down, meeting me in the main TV reception in RTÉ. I get the sense that he’s a punctual person. Having grown up with Ray D’Arcy on our TV screens watching him on everything in my youth from The Den to Blackboard Jungle and School Around the Corner, it’s hard to believe when he tells me he’s going to be 60 in September; how can Zig and Zag’s trusty companion be 60? I’m suddenly feeling very old.

Looking incredibly fit and healthy, dressed all in black, apart from the grey hair, the Kildare native has barely aged a day since his antics with the wisecracking puppets. The broadcaster, who will be undertaking five ‘Run with Ray’ races in the coming weeks as part of his afternoon RTÉ Radio 1 show,
seems to be hitting a sweet spot in his life.

The work/life balance is finally good, he’s achieving certain dreams ahead of his milestone birthday and
after more than 30 years in the business, he’s very comfortable with who he is as a broadcaster, something we may not have always seen from him in the past when he hosted his often criticised Saturday Night Show.

“You can’t be anyone but yourself in this job because it reveals itself eventually,” he replies when I put that to him. Love it or hate it, he’s authentically himself on the airwaves, something we don’t always see in the industry.

“I’m getting older and more comfortable in my skin. And it took me a while to get used to being in here again,” he adds, referring to his move from Today FM back to RTÉ in 2015 after 14 years away from the national broadcaster.

“But look, at the end of the day people are people, whether you’re talking to Jeremy Irons or Mary who’s putting on chicken curry for the dinner, it’s all people. When you get to my stage, there’s no pretense,
good, bad or indifferent. And that takes years, it’s about confidence.”

His ‘Run with Ray’ series will see D’Arcy and his team hitting the road for a week, with runs planned in Tralee, Galway, Athlone, Navan and Dublin. It’s the seventh year of it, his third with RTÉ. “It’s a lovely event – I was trying to articulate it on the radio the other day, but you have two to three hundred people, they gather of an evening, everyone puts on their ‘Run with Ray’ t-shirt and we run five kilometres. It’s a lot bigger than the sum of its parts; something magical happens, and everyone goes away smiling, sweating a bit, with a nice, warm fuzzy feeling. And in a world where there aren’t that many of those things, it’s great to be involved in something like that,” he says of the event that he’s clearly proud to be part of.

“For us as a team, it’s lovely to get out of the studio and be on the road with the Roadcaster; that brings its own energy. You’re a little bit closed off in the campus here so it’s brilliant to get out and meet the people who are listening to you and to just be out in the real world.”

He’d like to do more pressing the flesh with his audience. “Ireland is tiny really, so as an organisation we should be doing more of it. We were on the road when the whole RTÉ thing exploded last summer, or whatever word you’d like to use there. The odd thing about it is, nobody brought it up to me, it was front page news, and it wasn’t what people wanted to talk about with me; when you’re out and about, people want to talk to you about local issues.”

He doesn’t want to labour the RTÉ discussion and who can blame him?

But he does remark that it has given pause for reflection on what the national broadcaster is delivering. “I felt angry at the time, and at a human level I felt sorry for the people involved because they all have families and commitments, but I felt very angry,” he says.

“RTÉ is a hugely important institution in Ireland and I’ve worked here on and off for 36 years. I love it here and I know what it can do when it works well, and I suppose this is what I’m saying about the ‘Run with Ray’ stuff; we have this platform and if we use it for good in a real way, that’s public service broadcasting and sometimes we might lose sight of that.”

How does he feel about his salary constantly being a topic for discussion?

“If you ask anybody, would they like their salary published in the national papers, they wouldn’t like it. You’d prefer that that wasn’t the case, but it is. I was very honest at the time, I came out and told people what I was on, and I was in the commercial sector for 14 years, so I know what the salaries are outside of RTÉ and therein lies a story that’s never told, because it doesn’t suit the narrative.”

He says he’s never been shy of hard work and he and the team on his show are always looking at what they can do to add to the quality of their offering. “We have to be different to the rest of the line-up in the schedule – we would have done a lot more serious stuff in Today FM, and that changed in here and that’s something I think about on a regular basis. But there’s a mix and we get to do some really interesting things,” he says, going on to pick a recent highlight of his.

“Back in April we did a show with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra live from Studio 1. ere was an audience of listeners and a stellar lineup of singers. You had duets featuring Liam Ó Maonlaí with Toshín and Shobsy with Faye O’Rourke. It was a special afernoon, showcasing what Radio 1 can do and the hard work of our team.”

Away from work, the family man, who has two kids (Kate, 17 and Tom, 11) with wife Jenny Kelly, is lling his spare time with tness and music. He runs every morning in UCD with his Golden Retriever Stanley, before
the family wakes – it’s for both body and mind and gives a routine he craves in his day.

“It’s routine for me. I need to do it. It’s a lovely time of the day and there’s a lovely community up there, everyone acknowledges each other,” he says. “There was a stage where I’d only go once or twice a week and I was feeling stale. ere were other things going on at the time, when I was on TV, I was working far too much, it was ridiculous. Some weeks it was 60 or 70 hours a week; it wasn’t healthy but we’re out the other side now,” he reflects.

Another big life change the broadcaster made was giving up alcohol in recent years. While he says he never had an issue with drink, he made the decision one day while out on a run and hasn’t looked back since. “I gave up drink four years ago and it’s changed my life,” he says.

“I didn’t drink that much. Jenny gave up drinking six years ago and the kids would say. “Daddy, why don’t you?” and I thought well, I just have the odd glass of wine on a Friday evening, I don’t drink enough to give it up,” he adds.

“One day I was on holidays down the country, I’d had a few glasses of wine and the next day, out on a run, I felt a bit fuzzy, and I just thought, I’m going to give this up. ere was no big deal about it, I hadn’t discussed it with anybody, I just decided it was something I was going to do. I suppose I was inspired by Jenny and seeing how much it changed her life,” he says of his decision.

“Not to sound up my behind, but I feel lucky that I don’t drink. It’s the even keel and you get so much more out of the weekends. Some people might think that’s very boring, but I nd it very attractive.”

He plays down his impending roundy birthday. Will there be any big celebrations? “Oh I don’t know,” he laughs, and admits to being low-key about everything.

“Well, when I was 40, I said I was going to learn to swim, which I did, and I did the triathlon just before my 40th birthday. So, for this one, I’m learning how to play the drums. I can half play ve songs, so far,” he says of his new passion.

Why the drums I ask?

“My dad was a drummer so that might be part of it, and I suppose from doing the DJing, I felt I had a bit of an in,” he answers, referring to when he worked as a DJ in his teens to make a few bob.

He’s in the process of mastering Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Charles Wright’s Express Yourself. He uses it to be fully present in something and for all-important bonding time with his son, Tom, who can
play the bass and is dabbling in the drums with his dad.

“I can’t describe what it’s like,” he says of that time with Tom. “He was on to me to get the drums and I was putting it o . He was learning the bass and was keen to do the drums too, so I used him as an excuse. It’s very, very special to enjoy it with him. It’s those little things that mean the most.”

Is his new decade a cause for reflection?

“I don’t think so, I don’t feel 60,” he laughs. “I remember in my 40s telling the physio that I wanted to be able to run in my 60s and she laughed at me and said there’s no certainty in life. But I can still run, so I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.”