has revealed that he’s glad his time on T4 came before the age of social media and everyone and anyone became an armchair TV critic on social media.
After working as a model, the Welsh TV personality, 45, started his presenting career in the late 90s working on the staple weekend TV show T4, which was broadcast every Saturday and Sunday morning on Channel 4 and ran from 1998 to 2012.
It is credited with launching the careers of many of its presenters, who have gone on to have been highly successful household names, from , , , , , to, among others.
Speaking exclusively to , Steve revealed that the fact the show was made before social media is one of the reasons he loved working on it so much: ‘With the T4 crowd, this is before WhatsApp and all that stuff. We’re analogue people.
‘It’s before Twitter, before Instagram all of that stuff. We’re not WhatsApp group people, we much prefer just to get together sit down and catch up the old fashioned way.
‘We enjoyed working on [T4] so much because it’s before the age of “everyone gets an opinion”, everyone can tell you how bl**dy awful you are, so we were just out there full of confidence because we weren’t getting any feedback, you know, only from the channel.
‘People occasionally would approach you in the street and say they would tell you that they were enjoying it, but whether people loved or hated what you were doing, we weren’t aware of it we were just focused on being ourselves and having a laugh, which is why it was such a wonderful period in my career and I guarantee everyone else who worked on it feels the same.’
The presenter, who’s now happily married to food-writer wife Phylicia Jackson-Jones, 36, who he met while he was living in LA, also touched on whether he thinks T4 would still work today.
‘I think so, why not? There’s a wealth of very successful TV shows out there, so let’s not forget that T4 was a wrap-around show that linked into Friends, Hollyoaks, and Smallville.
‘So it’s more about the shows that you’re wrapping around rather than the presenters who are linking into them. I like to think that we brought in a lot of people who enjoyed our antics.
‘I think there’s definitely a hole there for it, and I feel for people who want to get into presenting nowadays because there’s not really anywhere you can go to cut your teeth.
‘Because we’re live presenters, we learned the trade over years doing it, and we got better for it, so I think nowadays, to be a presenter, it’s just getting on with it, there you go.
‘And I think that’s a shame, it’s a breeding ground for new young talent coming through.
‘And I guess people are being chosen in a different way these days so and you do whatever you need to do to become successful, but I know I appreciate the fact that I slowly went through and learned my trade through T4 and it was important, very very important.’
After learning the ropes on the show, Steve has gone on to work in a wide range of TV, from fronting up BBC One’s Lets Dance for Comic Relief with to presenting the first series of in the United States alongside .
More recently, he took over as the face of Formula 1, which he has now fronted for seven series.
Now, Steve has just finished presenting the new series Perfect House, Secret Location, on Channel 4, in which prospective homeowners are shown around a potential new favourite home, but there’s a catch – they aren’t told the locations.
One of the main parts of the four-part show features the would-be house-mover being bungled into the back of a van and taken to the secret location of their potential new abode.
Commenting on this, Steve laughed: ‘Nobody has pressed charges yet, so I think we’re getting away with it.
‘I like to, the people on the show have been specifically chosen because they’re really adventurous people.
‘They’re hardy, they’re not scared or intimidated by something a little unusual, and of course, it’s very unusual to be pushed into the back of a blacked-up van, and have a blindfold put on you and all the rest of it.
‘But they’re such great sports, they know what they’re getting themselves into, that’s what our legal team will say they will contest anything that the house hunters might prosecute us with, they knew what they were getting involved with.
‘The only thing is, they’re in the back of the van, sometimes they get a bit of motion sickness back there. Apparently, if you’re in a car, you can get a little bit sick, but they get used to it, it’s a long process.’
Perfect House, Secret Location season one, episodes 1-4 are available to watch on 4OD.
