Craig Doyle

Lots of people still recognise you from Holiday, the travel show you presented for quite a time – do you have happy memories from those days?
Oh yes, really good memories! Any travel memories are good ones – well, most of them are anyway. I moved on from that kind of show but I still enjoyed my time on it. To travel the world as part of your job is fantastic and I still have pictures and memorabilia all over the place. Perhaps my most memorable trips were horseriding in Botswana and visiting Zimbabwe – just sleeping on a little boat in the middle of Lake Kariba with hippos bashing against the side of the boat!

How did you get started in travel presenting? Was travel something that you had a particular interest in or did you fall into it?
No interest at all – it fell into my lap! I was trying to get into sports presenting actually. I had spent three years on Tomorrow’s World and then someone at the BBC asked whether I would mind presenting one or two short travel reports; I did them, it went well, and the next thing I knew, I was offered the job. There are a lot of things you want to do in life and you don’t know whether you’re going to get there or not, so you have to take all the opportunities that come your way. I was always trying to head towards sport but I just couldn’t turn down the chance to travel the world for a living.

And where would you say your favourite places are in the world?
Ireland. I love Ireland very much – that’s why I still live here. It’s a very beautiful country and nature’s been very kind to us; we’ve got beautiful mountains and a great, quite diverse coastline. The beaches are like Caribbean beaches – white sand and turquoise water where the Atlantic meets the land – and the mountains in Wicklow where I live are just stunning. My family all live within a six-mile radius of me. Further afield, I love Africa and the element of danger you get there – the thought that at any moment I could easily become the victim of a hungry lion! Visiting Africa you get a true sense of nature and the power of nature, as well as a diverse range of humanity. But the most peaceful place in the world is probably Patagonia, certainly the Chilean side of it – it’s just very beautiful and peaceful and barren and lovely.

With your transition to sports reporting, travelling for work presumably means covering sporting events these days? Which have been your favourites so far?
I always used to love covering the British Open when I was working at the BBC, that was always fantastic, especially when it was up in the wilds of Scotland, somewhere really historic like St Andrews. But perhaps my most memorable event was covering the Triathlon World Championships in Hamburg, because I was also competing in the age-group category for Ireland. My race came directly before the big race of the day, so I remember crossing the finish line for my own race, collecting my medal and feeling very proud, then having to do a piece to camera straight after, still in my Ireland jersey, to introduce the main event… I threw up on camera, so it wasn’t my finest moment! Covering rugby in Italy is always an absolute joy and the Champions League matches, which I cover for ITV, are great – although unbelievably tense sometimes. I always think stadiums have an energy of their own though; whenever I go into any stadium I get a buzz straight away, even if it’s empty, so I don’t really mind where I am.

It sounds as though you have your dream job – is there anything else you’d like to do?
Well with sport there’s an old saying that if you’re not good enough to play it, try and be good enough to talk about it. I would have given anything to be a professional sportsman – I wouldn’t have cared what sport it was, if it was Coke-can kicking I would have done it! But I just wasn’t good enough in any sport to turn professional, so I’m doing the next best thing in my eyes. I will always do sport.

And how many reality TV shows have you been offered?
Oh, every single year the same ones get in touch – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, all that stuff. But the day I do that is the day I do something else altogether, become a farmer or something. I trained as a journalist to become a broadcaster, not a celebrity!