For a time as a teenager, Brendan Courtney thought he might want to be an actor. But then the TV presenter realised something. “I didn’t want to play a role being somebody else. I’ve spent so long trying to be myself,” he says, sitting in the sunny apartment he shares with boyfriend Adam Maryniak, who he met seven years ago in Mother nightclub. “I knew so many closeted actors, and I always felt it placed more layers on them.” Instead, after school he worked in accountancy, then production, before getting a job in RTE when he was 26, as a researcher.