I'm Amanda, fly me

Amanda Byram is going through her panty-drawer. Sadly, your Hot Press correspondent is at the other end of her mobile rather than ably assisting the beautiful Castleknock girl (“I call myself ‘Mandy from the Knock’ in the words of Jennifer Lopez!”, she quips) sort through her presumably delectable lingerie as she packs her bags for a two-month work trip to Argentina.

“I’m actually in the bedroom getting out the suitcases and chucking in all the knickers and bikinis,” the 35-year-old TV-presenter laughs. “But we can talk while I do it.”
Byram’s off to South America in a few days to shoot another series of Total Wipeout – the hugely successful BBC game show she co-presents with Top Gear’s Richard Hammond. “We’re going back for season two, and then season three again in October, so it’s like a celebratory win for some of us because the show did better than anyone expected.”
A former model, Byram herself has certainly done far better than the local begrudgers ever expected. Having recently returned from a five-year stint working in Los Angeles (where she presented hit reality shows Paradise Hotel and The Swan), she’s been living between Dublin, London and France since late January. A planned trip down under with her new Australian boyfriend was shelved when she was asked to present last month’s Meteor Awards. Now it’ll be June, at least, before she has another window in her busy schedule.
She tells me that she’s glad to finally be out of LA. “It sounds funny to say because I had a boyfriend over there, but I’ve never been so lonely in my life. I found it a really, really vacant town. It’s an industry town and people come and go all the time. People move away regularly so it’s hard to keep friends. Having said that, I’ve got a group of girlfriends there who I was very close to, and I feel like I’ve left them behind on the island on Lost.”
She freely admits that, for the most part, her career is a dream come true. “I always had aspirations to be on the stage. I was one of those little girls who always had the microphone – aka the brush – in the bedroom with the leg warmers on doing Jane Fonda exercises and acting out scenes from The Karate Kid.”
Acting wasn’t to be, though. Although she made a brief appearance in indie movie The Dog’s Breakfast in 2006, she maintains that her time in La-La Land totally dampened her acting aspirations.
“Acting has always, always, always been something that I’m passionate about and would love to get into, but being in LA actually turned me off it. I went to the classes and I did the whole acting thing, but it makes you realise why brilliant actors get paid so much money – because it’s so bloody hard! I think I hung up my acting chops, so to speak, after a little while and just thought if it happens, it happens. But I stopped pining for it a long time ago.”
Byram first came to the Irish public’s attention in the early ‘90s, when she signed up with Assets modelling agency. “My older sister Natasha had been modelling for them for a couple of years and I fell into it by default,” she explains. “I was almost 19 when I began modelling and it was a world of independence. You made your own money and you went to work and you stood on your own two feet and you had an opinion about things and people treated you as an adult. I’d always been obsessed with fashion and I always felt comfortable in front of the camera. And there’s an element of acting to it, too.”
Always ambitious, she was never going to be happy working solely as a model. “I had a wonderful career modelling in Ireland – made some amazing friends and had the best time – but still, in the back of my head, I suppose I was always gearing towards the next big step.”
After six successful years on the runway, she made the transition to television ten years ago, when she became Mark Cagney’s co-presenter on then-fledgling TV3 morning show TV3. She freely admits that she’d used her modelling media opportunities to publicise her small screen ambitions. “I wound up doing a lot of press calls, I was kind of like the press call queen so I decided to maybe flip the industry back the other way and get something in return. My first boss ever on television was Andrew Hanlon of TV3 who spotted a ‘Day in the Life of Amanda Byram’ type article I did, where the journalist asked me what I wanted to do when I finished modelling and I said I wanted to get into television. So I always used those opportunities to put it out there.”
The Irish modelling world has changed enormously in the last few years. What’s her take on the current scene?
“Today there’s more of a social element to it. A lot of the young girls are obviously beautiful, but they’re out a lot and they’re seen a lot. I suppose I did a lot of that towards the end of my career; I used the industry to get to where I wanted to be. But it seems to me that a lot of the young girls really want to get into another area of the entertainment industry and that’s wonderful, but I feel like it’s swayed away from fashion and become part of the entertainment industry by default.”
Was it as bitchy in your day?
“There’s bitchiness in every business but – it sounds pathetic, but we all got on really well. We had such a brilliant time. Most of my good friends now, people like Vivienne Connolly, are friends from my modelling days.”
While there were rivers of champagne flowing during Byram’s catwalk years, she denies there was ever any serious drug use. “There wasn’t – because we were all so bloody innocent!” she laughs. “Which was fantastic, really. But it does make you scared to think that there’s drugs going on. We’d heard of a couple of the girls going off to Paris and Milan, and one of my really good friends actually experienced agents telling the girls to do drugs. Thankfully this friend of mine was really, really headstrong and just said, ‘You must be joking me!’ But it goes on in the more high pressured industry environments. I suppose in Ireland it’s a little less high pressured. Like many things in Ireland, it’s more quaint and fun and fantastic.”
Did you know the late Katy French?
“I never met Katy French, but what a shame and what a waste,” she sighs. “I actually wrote her mum a letter just after she died. And it’s true – it could’ve been any of us. It’s such an easy thing to fall into if there’s a group of people around you doing drugs. Young girls are so impressionable and the unfortunate thing about the fashion industry is that you tend to need to be slim. And some girls find that the way to be slim is to diet or to do drugs.
“It’s just not the answer. Unfortunately there’s always one or two or three that get sucked into that world and that’s what I said to Katy’s mum. It could’ve been me, it could’ve been my sister, it could’ve been my girlfriends, who just met the wrong people, took some drugs and... the rest is history.”
It was while presenting Ireland AM that Byram first met Northern Irish comedian Patrick Kielty. The couple embarked on a relationship that lasted five years. No mean feat in the notoriously fickle entertainment industry...
“I’ve been lucky in my relationships,” she says. “No job I’ve ever done has really had an affect on any relationship I’ve had. I’ve had the normal boyfriend, so to speak, and then I’ve had the industry boyfriends – I went out with Paddy for, oh gosh, almost five years. And while a lot of people say two people in the industry can’t be a good thing, there were a lot of times when it was the best thing for us because we were the only people that understood each other.”
Are you still in touch with Kielty?
“I’d send the odd email or Facebook message and stuff, but it’s different when you break up with someone and you have a new boyfriend and they have a new girlfriend. But we just messaged each other recently, just after I got the Meteor Awards gig. He had hosted them a couple of years previously so the first person I texted was him kinda going, ‘Oh, what’s the story, whaddaya do, do you’ve any tips?’ So we’re still in contact. He’s a really good guy, living in London and madly in love.
“So that was the industry relationship. After that I was with a guy in the States who was technically not in my industry, but he was a cameraman and we went out for quite a few years. And the fact that he was away a lot led to the downfall of that relationship, we just drifted apart. But now I’m with a really normal boy, who’s an ex-rugby player (Craig McMullen) who’d never seen me on the telly before, apart from once maybe six years ago when I was hosting Miss World in China. He had no clue really about me or what I did and the industry. So it’s just so refreshing to be with someone who doesn’t care about any of that stuff.”
Does dating a former rugby pro make you a WAG?
“I hope not!” she giggles. “I kind of missed the whole WAG culture because I was living in LA. I just think it’s really funny. Sure there have always been pretty women hanging out with footballers. They’re young footballers, they make a lot of money, so the circles they socialise in are full of these pretty young girls who’re infatuated with fame, and these gorgeous-looking guys with loads of money.
“So you’ve got this culture of hot chicks hanging around with good-looking sports boyfriends and it seemed to multiply and become something worth commenting on. But it’s like the rock star and the model type thing. It’s always gonna be there. There’s always gonna be that fascination and that attraction. But I think it’s really funny. It’s almost like a drama. That Footballers Wives thing is almost too real to be true.”
After a couple of years on Ireland AM, Byram moved to the UK in 2001 to present The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 (ousting Denise Van Outen in the process). Although it was a very popular show, she says she didn’t take full advantage of its potential.
“If anything, The Big Breakfast would’ve been a really high profile tabloid-esque type show to be presenting. But I didn’t go to the red carpets and I didn’t go out with the famous boys and I didn’t put myself out there. Technically I was screwing myself because if you don’t do that kind of stuff and you don’t get in the tabloids then the less famous you are. But there’s a great compensation to that.”
She’s not a fan of tabloid culture or of celebrity magazines. “Things like OK! magazine I’m quite allergic to. Of course I flick through them because it’s my business, but I’m quite a private sort of person. There’s certain things you talk about because people are gonna ask the question and it almost gets rude to say, ‘No, I’m not gonna comment’ – because who am I to say I’m not gonna comment about certain things? But I’ve never been stitched up because I’ve kind of shied away from that sort of stuff. I’m not tabloid fodder. I’m kind of boring to the tabs.”
After The Big Breakfast, Byram appeared as a guest host on BBC’s Liquid News and also presented the UK edition of Sky One’s Entertainment Tonight. When she broke up with Kielty, she took a chance and relocated to Hollywood to try and make it in the movies. Although her acting career never took off, her gorgeous looks and easy Irish charm soon earned her plenty of work in TV-land.
She presented Miss World from China and also covered the Oscars aftershows with Sharon Osbourne. “I hosted the Oscars with her from Elton John’s party. She’s completely insane. She’s brilliant. She just doesn’t give a shit about anything! But she’s really, really sweet. She’s quite phallic in her thinking. Everything is about tits and asses and penises – and Ozzie and Ozzie’s penis. She’s just the most random woman.”
Of all the TV work she did in the US, the plastic surgery-themed reality show The Swan, in particular, was a massive hit. However, she says she had serious reservations about doing it.
“Initially, of course, you think ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a plastic surgery pageant – this couldn’t be sicker!’ But then I met the women and they were just these wonderful women who were so downtrodden and at such a standstill in their life. And the biggest part of The Swan – and I know it sounds like bullshit, but it’s true – is that it was mainly focussed on them fixing themselves from the inside. It was like this huge public social experiment.”
As it turned out, it was an experiment with some decidedly mixed results: “A couple of them turned into monsters, which was quite disconcerting. They were these women who had always been told they weren’t good enough and then all of a sudden they were these most beautiful creatures – and they became big divas! Which was really disappointing.”
For health reasons Byram recently had her famous facial mole removed: would she ever consider going under the surgeon’s knife for purely cosmetic purposes?
“I always say ‘never say never’, but at the moment, no. I work out a lot and I’m really, really conscious of my skin, I go to see dermatologists and stuff, and I try to do the best I can do with what I have. But when you have kids and there’s extra skin and all that kinda thing, I would say I’d consider it. At the moment I can safely say no, but if I can’t shift it after a couple of sprogs then possibly. Ha, ha! ”
Are children on the agenda?
“You know, I hope so. I’m turning 36 this year and it’s definitely something that I want. My sister has two – actually she’s pregnant again, she’s going for her third. My best friend just had a beautiful little daughter. It’s something in the water. I think you get to the stage where it’s not because everybody else is doing it – that’s definitely not it – but I think you get to the stage where you meet the right person and finally everything just kicks into place. So it’s definitely something on the agenda.”
Before that happens, though, and while all of her bits are still naturally intact, would Byram ever consider posing naked for Playboy?
“No, definitely not the Playboy thing. I actually feel sorry for a lot of girls who do those kind of things. A lot of them think that it’s gonna make them famous, and it does, but it’s for all the wrong reasons.”
Not, she hastens to add, that she’s some kind of prude. “I’ve done a lads mag. There’s a magazine called Stuff magazine in the States – there’s one in England as well, but it’s a little bit more tacky. But they’d approached me a couple of times, it was the time I was doing The Swan, and I said I wasn’t totally opposed to it. Because as a model I do think photography can be sexy and women in their underwear can be sexy. But I told them it would have to be the least tacky shoot in the history of the magazine. It would have to be tasteful.
“And I was actually really happy with it. We did a red leather boudoir-esque style shoot, and the hair and make-up was really classy. There are certain things you have to take control of and if you’re going to do something like that, you commit to it and you have to be proud of it. You have to take control. You don’t go there and think, ‘right, well, I’ll just take my knickers off and do what they tell me’.”
Speaking of knickers, it’s probably time to let her get back to packing for Argentina. But just before Hot Press hangs up, does Amanda Byram have a motto in life?
“A motto? Oh my god! I very often say we’re here for a good time, not a long time. And why wait ‘til tomorrow to do what you can today, because if you like it... sure, you can always do it again tomorrow!”