Michele Hewitson interview: Noelle McCarthy

If you write down what Noelle McCarthy is wearing it sounds completely bonkers, but she has a talent for wearing unlikely ensembles and somehow looking amazing. Photo / Dean Purcell

She used to be naughty and not nice, but now the broadcaster is living a much more proper life ... although there is the matter of the stationery.

When I hear broadcaster Noelle McCarthy on Radio New Zealand, that Longfellow ditty springs, unbidden, to mind: "There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good and when she was bad she was horrid."

It's the curls, of course, that do it. I have no idea whether she can be horrid. But I do know, because everyone does, that she used to be really quite naughty and that now she is really quite good.

She has sat in for Kim Hill on Saturday mornings over the past three Saturdays and she was really very good. I've long wanted to interview her and she has, twice, I think, said no, through the RNZ media chap. This time I phoned her directly and said, sucking up, but also because I really meant it, that she'd been terrific those last two Saturdays and how about it?

She said she'd think about it and called me back and said that she would, although the idea of being interviewed filled her with horror. Her main reason, she said, was because we'd never met and she really wanted to meet me. Never try to out-charm the Irish.

When we met, she said that when she was younger, she used to care "an awful lot about being liked and about how I should sound or how I came across". People used to phone her on the radio and want to talk to her about being Irish and about their grandparents and "I was mean to them. I was like: 'Let's get on with it' and I think about that now ... and nobody was having a good time there."

She cares less now, on the radio and in general, about being liked "Yeah. I wouldn't have done this interview with you if I didn't feel like I could cope if you didn't like me." The funny thing is when she cared rather desperately about being liked - "I was very thin-skinned. I have that capacity to be very sensitive" - she was being mean to the poor old Irish callers and she appeared to be cultivating a reputation for being horrid.

I said, "Are you nicer now?" And she said, "Oh, I hope so." So, now she's nice, she doesn't care about being liked, although "My natural instinct is to want to make friends".

It is just about impossible to spend any time with her and not think that she would make a lovely, funny friend. The really funny thing is that now that she doesn't care whether I like her, I do, very much, and when I didn't think I liked her, she probably would have cared. Well, she is clever and clever people are usually complicated.

She was very nervous and so, she said, she was going "to laugh hysterically". She did, but she even manages to charmingly laugh hysterically. She asked, at the end, whether she'd been what I thought she'd be like. Yes, and no. I knew she had charm but it was that very charm which used to drive me barmy. I hadn't meant to tell her that I used to shout: "It's that bloody McLilty on the radio again." But it just sort of slipped out. I thought she might really mind, and I wouldn't have blamed her. She spent years being that girl who was just on the radio because she had that accent and those pretty curls. And this is really rude because what it meant was that she had little else to offer. Anyway, she has proved that she's very good on the radio which is no doubt another reason (along with maturity) that she is less thin-skinned.

She laughed like mad and said: "McLilty! I love it! Oh my God! If I was a secret agent, that's what I'd want to be called!"

She later sent me an email: "From the desk of McLilty" and included a picture of Isabella Blow wearing a mad hat and holding a French bulldog. She had told me I looked a bit like Isabella Blow, the British magazine editor and the muse to the designer of mad hats, Philip Treacy. I, thin-skinnedly, took exception to this. She was ugly, mad and dead, I said. She said, it wasn't her fault she was dead. "Well, it was actually. She drank weedkiller." She sent the picture, "To prove she wasn't ugly, although she remains unfortunately dead."

She has always been interested in fashion. There was another idea about her, I thought, that she couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted to be a serious broadcaster or whether she wanted to be a socialite, floating about in fabulous frocks.

She said: "My instinct is to bridle at that, Michele, because I think you can do whatever you want to do." She said, later, she was still thinking about whether you could be both serious broadcaster and socialite and I said, not if you vomit in the hall. She did this, once, after a night out, outside her apartment door and of course it ended up becoming public.

She said: "No. Not if you vomit in the hallway. That's not a good look for either of those designations. It's a mess. That's what that is." She no longer drinks and hasn't since 2009. I asked if she had a drinking problem and she said: "Well, not these days because I don't drink!" But did she? "Well, it was causing problems in my life. I was really disconnected from myself. I was angry all the time, you know, and just general sort of day-to-day manageability was negatively impacted by that."

I wondered whether there was any one event that made her give up, and she said: "You'd think the vomit in the hall would have made me think that. But it didn't. No." Still she must have been mortified. "Well, I think that's where the disconnection comes. Because you get to a phase in your life, and I got to a place, where that was my normal. That was a night out."

Shall we get the mortifications out of the way? There were the nasty emails she wrote about a departing colleague, which is probably where the idea she might be horrid came from. I said, "Was there an idea that you were a bitch?" She said: "Look, what other people think of me is none of my business, but I feel being nice is ... it's free, you know. It doesn't cost you anything. It's easy and the nicer I am, the nicer people will be to me."

I'd have to give her an example of her not being nice, she said. "I'm not going to admit to that generally." I gave her an example: those emails. I assumed that now she was nice, she no longer sent emails like those.

Radio host Noelle McCarthy. Photo / Dean Purcell.

"Well, I certainly wouldn't send them, Michele. I'm very careful in my correspondence after seeing my correspondence on page 3 of the Sunday newspaper!" She sends emails to herself, instead. She also keeps a diary, as she has done for years, and she really would be mortified if anyone read it because it is so boring.

Also she pinches the yellow notebooks she writes her diary in from the stationery cupboard at work: "I'll admit to stationery theft." I was glad to hear it. It would be a blow to find out that she had become a complete goody two shoes.

A boyfriend she had when she was 18 did read her diary and turned it into a play. This was performed in front of her family and his family and their friends and it came as a complete surprise to her, and to her best friend who was referred to as "your bitch best friend". The worst thing about all of this, even worse than the interpretive dance sequence, involving forward rolls, and the deafening silence at its conclusion, was that "I didn't think it was very good". That was the end of the relationship. I assumed it was the end of the boyfriend's career as a playwright. "He teaches drama. Ha, ha, ha. I'm not making it up."

Things do seem to happen to her. Or they happened to her when she was drinking. There was the plagiarism, in 2008; she had lifted bits of other journalists' work without attribution. I wondered whether she was cutting and pasting, drunkenly. Because, what was that? "I was just a mess. It was a big mistake."

She is a Catholic and her God is one of "general benevolence and general guiding principles". I wondered what her God thought when she was playing up. "I think he was hugely forgiving of all of that. He was hugely patient, Michele." He must have been. There was the night in the hotel, after judging the Rose of Tralee contest, which involved much drink and riding in hallways on luggage trolleys "like a drunk tobogganist ... and a shameful bout of smoking inside," she wrote in a column, some years later.

She no longer smokes, either, and is engaged to former rugby player and now writer John Daniell, and runs and claims to now understand the attractions of "whiteware".

She was doing her best to make herself sound terribly grown up (she's 36) and boringly interested in fridges. I'm not completely convinced about that last item.

She was wearing a canary yellow coat, thick white knee socks and checked pants. She looked like Bertie Wooster's colourful sister, off to play a round of golf. The coat used to be long. She cut the bottom off. With nail scissors by the look of it. If you write down what she is wearing it sounds completely bonkers, but she has a talent for wearing unlikely ensembles and somehow looking amazing. She wears costumes, really. This may run in the family.

She showed me some pictures on her phone, of John with her "mammy". John is nearly 2m tall, mammy is about 1.5m. Mammy loves John. "Because he's tall. She's so happy. 'You've got yourself a grand tall man'." Mammy has orange hair and is her role model. "This is my favourite mammy photo." Mammy was wearing a pumpkin head. Oh, at Halloween? "No! This is the thing. It's not even Halloween! She found all these costumes for €5 and she bought them, she said, for us. But they're not really. They're for her. That's her altar there behind her. You can see that's Jesus there, with the tiara. That's my tiara, from my 21st."

I said something rude about Cork (her hometown) and some peculiar job in marketing at the Cork Opera House that she went back to do in 2011 and was predictably ill-suited to. She laughed hysterically the whole time. Can Cork even have an opera house, I asked. She said: "Cork has a fabulous opera house, Michele. I will take you to Riding Hood, the pantomime after Christmas and we'll sit in the front row. We will listen to the Lady Gaga songs. Mammy will wear her pumpkin head. We will have a fabulous time."

Then she went and put her bright red lippy on for her picture and had it taken lifting the curl off the middle of her forehead. She looked not all horrid and not too good, thank generally benevolent God.