Eamonn Holmes attended the Young Chef, Young Waiter, Young Mixologist competition as a judge last month, and it gave him a chance to reflect on his roots after growing up working in a pub. But the TV star loved his evening job so much that he kept it up even in the early days of building his own career, until one day his boss encouraged him to just focus on pursuing his TV dreams. His first TV stint was in 1979 as a reporter and host for Ulster Television (UTV) in Northern Ireland, but his career only continued to grow from there.

However, Eamonn was ever apprehensive that his career would one day just stop that he wanted to keep pouring pints in a pub while he could, and he was in absolutely no rush to leave his job before he eventually did give up the evening gig and focus on his TV career.

Speaking to Express.co.uk, Eamonn reflected on his career at the YYY awards event and said: "Nobody in the UK had been given tea time programmes at 21, so when I did, it went in my favour. But I was working in a pub, and the head barman said to me, 'what is this? You serve them up the news until seven o'clock and then you're in here at 7.30pm'."

He explained that in response to his manager at the time he said: "But does this TV business ever last?" The barman told Eamonn defiantly that it will last and then encouraged him to have a drink with him, and then told him to pursue his dreams, with Eamonn telling us: "That was my last night in the bar."

Eamonn believes his bar experience helped him get into TV, saying that it brought out his personality and taught him how to speak to people.

He said: "It taught me to be more relaxed with a TV audience and how to talk to people in television, so that was amazing. It was a bitb strange, I didn't know anybody who was in television or presenting, but that's what happened."

His big break in Ireland was just the start of his career in TV, moving to the BBC in 1986 and later GMTV in 1993, where he stayed until 2005 and took on a magnitude of other TV gigs in the meantime, including working on Sky News, BBC show Jet Set, and occasional stints on GMB.

Eamonn's most recent role has seen him nicely set up on GB News hosting the breakfast show.