Dermot O'Leary and Simon Cowell
Dermot opens up on working with Simon Cowell(Image: Photo by Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock )

This Morning host Dermot O’Leary has opened up about his time hosting The X Factor – and why he’s more selective about what shows he fronts these days.

Dermot has been in the business for almost three decades, having kicked off his career in 1998 when he fronted T4 in 1998. The 51-year-old isn’t slowing down anytime soon, as he’s set to host new game show, Silence is Golden on U & Dave. The new show will see a chance for the audience to win a split of £250,000 – if they can just stay silent during hilarious comedy performances.

Speaking on his choice to front the new show, Dermot said: “It wasn’t necessarily I wanted to do a comedy game show. I mean, I’m desperate for it to succeed. I’m passionate about it and I want to do another one, but so many things have to align for that to happen. So this was more about that it felt like it was something different.”

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Simon and Dermot
Dermot hosted The X Factor until 2018(Image: ITV / Fremantle / Syco)

The star, who welcomed son Kasper with his wife Dee Koppang in 2020 continued: “There’s a couple of jobs I’ve turned down since we’ve had Kasper that I would love to have done, but I’m not going to go away for the amount of time. Not unless he was with me. You’ve only got one life.”

One of Dermot’s most memorable gigs was Saturday night prime-time show The X Factor, which he hosted from 2007 to 2014 and 2016 to 2018. He left after eight years in 2014, before returning a year later.

 

 

Dermot and Simon reunited last week on the This Morning sofa as Simon and Bruno Tonioli sat down to speak about the upcoming Britain’s Got Talent live semi-finals. However, things got awkward when Bruno Tonioli appeared to become frustrated on This Morning when asked about a contestant who was plucked from the talent show’s audience, telling off host Alison Hammond for being “nasty”.

As Alison joked they had a “lie detector” on the show to make sure the moment wasn’t fixed, Bruno snapped: “Why do you always have to go for the nasty? It is not set-up my darling.”