First Dates' Fred: ‘I tried diving like my Olympian daughter – never again’

There’s a huge, free-standing French fibreglass duck in Fred Sirieix’s hallway. We know this because, having bought it for £150 while filming in Hastings for a new episode of Salvage Hunters Celebrity Special, he went straight on to social media and still can’t stop talking about it.

“It’s very colourful, very beautiful,” he says. “It just brightens my whole day. As soon as people come to the house they see it, have a smile and a laugh and then they have a drink or two and we have a conversation with them sitting on the duck, which is very funny… I was with [Drew Pritchard and his sidekick, Tee, from Salvage Hunters] for a week and there were several things I looked at but when I saw this one it was instantly in my heart and I just thought: ‘That’s it, I’ve got to have it.’

“The guys on the show are looking to buy for different reasons,” explains the 49-year-old maître d’ and star of First Dates and the Gallic third of Gordon, Gino and Fred: Road Trip.

“Drew has over three decades of experience. He has the eye. He’s looking at the current value and how much it’s going to cost or how long it is going to take him to sell it on and what he can sell it for, potentially. And that’s why he buys it. The duck I bought just for me.” In a move designed to be literally and metaphorically closer to their celebrity guest’s country of origin, the TV show travelled from Pritchard’s shop in north Wales via a 1,200-acre farm in Suffolk and the Royal Gunpowder Mills in Waltham Abbey to Hastings and visited an antiques trade warehouse specialising in French furniture.

“It took me back,” he smiles. “There were things in there I had already seen in somebody’s house and at Les Puces – the flea markets – when I was wasting time in Paris during my military service. I get my love of antiques from my mum; our house was in the farmhouse style, all the furniture passed down from generation to generation, and her house is still full of stuff like that.”

Presumably not so many fibreglass ducks. “No, not that I remember, although my son Lucien used to like riding on them outside supermarkets when he was little.” The bird would appear to be a recurring theme, and “Mon canard” (“My duck”) the family nickname of his 17-year-old daughter, Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix, the youngest diver on Team GB.

This was something Sirieix revealed when tweeting congratulations on her seventh place finish in the 10m platform event in Tokyo; he added a duck emoji and told the world how “unconditionally proud” he was of her achievements. He also tweeted: “Forever my little girl who once used to live on my shoulders. Only now she flies into the air. #goAndrea.”

“I support her all the way,” he says. “I was a bit worried before the Olympics and when she left to go to Japan because so many things can go wrong. I’m a worrier I guess, maybe a lot of fathers are like that – we worry about the things that can go wrong. What if she gets Covid? Or injured? And, you know, just the pressure of the Olympics because it’s the biggest event on Earth, you can’t get bigger than that. She had trained so hard and it had been cancelled once so of course I was a bit nervous.”

Sirieix knows a little something about the demanding nature of the sport, having previously volunteered to attempt it to see it from his daughter’s perspective – an act of paternal dedication not to be underestimated. “I dived from five metres at first,” he recalls. “And I dived feet first and then jumped from 10 metres and it was very high, very scary and I’m not going to do it again unless you pay me very well. My legs were bruised and I was in pain afterwards… I was in no danger of making the reserve squad for Team GB, that is for sure.”

The experience also taught him something about the mental attributes required to compete in the sport at the top level.

“I know how good she is. She can pull it out of the bag because when you’re diving from that height, and you’re only in the air for a second or a second and a half, it’s about the commitment [you have already put in]. Once you’re in the air you have to perform even though you know somebody’s way ahead of you or you’re worried about something else. Andrea’s able to block it out completely and just go through with it. I knew on the day of the event she would be fine. Once she gets started and gets into competition mode, in the zone, she locks herself inside her mind and she’s just there diving. Once she was at that point I knew she was going to go through to the semi-finals and make it to the final. I had that faith and belief that she was going to do it and she did.”

Her emotional poolside chat via videolink with her parents – unable to attend due to pandemic protocols – was yet another highlight in an incredible year of firsts for British women’s sport that included Rachael Blackmore winning the Grand National, women’s cricket coming to the fore in The Hundred, a landmark TV deal for women’s football and Olympic excellence in sports as diverse as BMX and gymnastics but was arguably topped off by the success of Emma Raducanu at the recent US Open.

“It was so great that she won,” says Sirieix, talking as the father of a high-achieving teenage female athlete and someone who knows exactly what it takes for his daughter to compete at the highest level. “Especially after all the flack she got for Wimbledon [Raducanu retired in her fourth round match against Ajla Tomljanovic after experiencing ‘breathing difficulties’]. And she’s a young girl. She’s only 18 years old and people need to do things in their own time but I’m very pleased and very proud of her. I mean, what she’s done is amazing. She’s won the US Open in two straight sets! What can you say?

“It’s about the commitment, it’s about the training and you just work hard. There are a lot of sacrifices that people don’t see but you’ve got to work for everything you get in life and that’s the reality of it. It tells on your body because physically it’s very demanding, and difficult, so you get tired but you can’t stop because it’s about that quest for excellence. And the only way you can achieve that, in Andrea’s case, is by repeating and repeating those dives so that you can beat whoever’s in front of you because you’ve done the hard work. There are no secrets here. She goes to school, she goes diving, she looks after her dog and she annoys her brother. That’s what she does.”

The workaholic Frenchman leads by example. His determination and drive (First Dates has just begun a 17th series, Gordon, Gino & Fred Go Greek! and Salvage Hunters Celebrity Special are both on TV later this month) have been the hallmarks of both his successful careers to date. Another, he insists, are the people you surround yourself with. “When I started in the restaurant business I only wanted to work in the best restaurants with the best people and I have been doing the same in television. It is great to work with great people like Drew… life is short and I make it a quest almost to be with these fantastic, amazing people because the time I spend with great people or bad people is exactly the same. I’d rather spend it with people that I want to spend time with, people who have something to share that I can learn from and people who inspire me and motivate me.”

And that would seem to include his daughter who last week walked up the red carpet with her father at the National Television Awards.

Whether it is television, Olympic high-diving or life, it seems, the advice from M Sirieix seems to be to get all your ducks in a line.

Salvage Hunters Celebrity Special is on Wednesdays at 9pm from September 22 on Quest

Gordon, Gino & Fred Go Greek! is on ITV at 9pm on Monday September 27