The Black Hole that is the Late Late Show

First published in the Western People on Monday.

If Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, there exist, somewhere in the universe, things called black holes. A black hole is a region of space where matter has become so compact it has collapsed into itself. A black hole’s gravitational field is so strong that it draws everything around into it, allowing nothing – not light, not gravity, not anything – to escape.

In Ireland, we are familiar with black holes. One will start broadcasting against this Friday night at nine-thirty on RTÉ 1, holding all otherwise sentient, sensible people in its iron grasp for the next two and a half hours.

People once thought that the Late Late Show couldn’t survive Gay Byrne’s retirement. They’ve had to think again – although Uncle Gaybo has never really gone away, his last Late Late Show was fifteen years ago. And still the show goes on after him, Friday after Friday, year after year.

It is not entirely unreasonable to expect that, should the direst of warnings come true and Ireland is three feet underwater as a result of global warming, or the proliferation of windfarms and pylons and the Lord knows what has left the green isle of Erin habitable only by rats, badgers and the rougher sort of insect, there will still be a tower in Montrose that will fizzle fitfully into life every Friday in autumn, winter and spring to announce that tonight, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the Late Late Show, and here is your host ...

Being the host of the Late Late Show is, supposedly, the premier job in Irish broadcasting. This is the reason RTÉ has historically paid its stars great pots of money for the apparently straightforward job of asking some British soap opera star how much she liked visiting Ireland and if, perhaps, she had any relations here. If someone like Pat Kenny wasn’t paid a big ball of money, the fear was that he would go somewhere else, and take all his listenership with him, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The interesting thing is that the bluff has been called. Newstalk made Pat Kenny an offer he couldn’t refuse last year and so Kenny left RTÉ after forty years to do his old show for a new boss. Newstalk’s plan was that Pat’s pipes would sound from Marconi house, and Kenny’s loyal listenership would obey the massive advertising campaign to “move the dial” and follow their leader.

Except that’s not what happened at all. The latest figures are that Pat Kenny’s radio show on Newstalk gets 143,000 listeners, while Pat’s old show in RTÉ, now hosted by Seán O’Rourke, gets 307,000. That’s a hiding by double scores in anybody’s language.

The nation now has solid field data about what happens when a big star moves. Nothing is what happens when a big star moves. RTÉ get someone else, and someone else becomes a star instead. And what is the result of this? UTV come along and offer Pat even more money to do a Late Late-style show for them, once they get up and running. If this column were ever in a position to interview Pat Kenny, the first question would be “can you believe your luck?”

Pat Kenny’s successor as host of the Late Late Show, Ryan Tubridy, is equally blessed in having a career that seems impervious to the market’s opinion of him. In one way, Tubridy was given the media equivalent of a hospital pass when he was asked to replace Gerry Ryan in the 2FM schedule after Ryan’s sudden death. Ryan was not everyone’s cup of tea but those who liked him, loved him. And those who loved Gerry Ryan are not impressed by his replacement.

But in the bigger picture, the poor radio figures don’t really matter. What is amazing about Tubridy is that in the age of the world wide web, internet streaming, Netflix, Sky plus, digital TV and more, Irish adults will sit down on Friday and watch the Late Late Show, let it matter a damn who’s on it as a guest or who’s presenting the show. It could be Ryan Tubridy interviewing Miriam O’Callaghan or Miriam O’Callaghan interviewing Ryan Tubridy. There’s no real difference. It’s Friday night, and this is what we do.

Ryan Tubridy’s Late Late Show isn’t the worst show of its kind on television. That strange show RTÉ broadcast after the nine o’clock news on Saturday night is surely the racing favourite for that dustbin honour. In fact, that show is so far from good it’s hard to understand why it’s not on TV3.

The galling thing is that the Late Late Show isn’t meant to be a show that isn’t the worst show on television. It’s meant to be the best show on television, the show that holds a mirror up to Ireland as this great nation of talkers and wits discuss and debate the great issues of day, from Ireland’s role in Europe to whether the nation should simply put Brian Cody in charge of everything and be done with it.

That is very different from listening to comedian Des Bishop, economist David McWilliams, stylist Lisa Fitzpatrick and Dolores Kehoe. Who on earth is Dolores Kehoe? Who cares what the other three think about anything?

Writing in the Irish Times about Tubridy’s unhappy radio listenership figures, Laura Slattery suggested that the problem wasn’t Tubridy but RTÉ management, for asking Tubridy to do a job for which he clearly isn’t suited. But it’s easy to see how RTÉ management could be puzzled by Tubridy, as he’s not suited to presenting a TV show that holds a mirror to a nation either, and the figures for that show are solid as the rock of Gibraltar.

The answer, as is often the case, lies closer to home. It’s us. It’s the nation. The people of Ireland would watch the Late Late Show even if were presented by Lorcan Murray and featured the cast of Fair City reading tweets of the week. What incentive is there for the Late Late Show to be any good if there’s no disincentive for it to be awful? Why can’t we move the dial? Why do we feel we have to do what we’ve always done? What’s the matter with us?

Claire Byrne is the Late Late Show's Only Hope

RTÉ has a dilemma in regard to the Late Late Show. It is this: the number of people who watch the show seems to exist in inverse proportion to those who actually like it.

If people stopped watching the Late Late, the next step for RTÉ would be obvious and inevitable. But people don’t stop watching. Twelve years since Gay Byrne did his last Late Late Show, the program remains a ratings juggernaut for RTÉ, even though the amount of people who claim to like it is equivalent to the current population of the Great Blasket.

The Late Late is an anachronism. In its glory years of the 1970s and 1980s, there was nothing else. The very presence of people in Ireland talking on television about Irish things was remarkable in and of itself. To think that that the Gay Byrne Late Late was shy about combing the RTÉ canteen is to re-write history. But that wasn’t a problem then, because the very existence of the show was novel and thrilling. Who cared if this was Maureen Potter’s ten millionth appearance? Ireland had taken her place among the nations of the Earth.

That thrill is now long gone. The audience’s sophistication has increased dramatically, meaning that they are less tolerant of the revolving guest list of Pat Shortt, Brendan O’Carroll and someone from Fair City. But they are not so sophisticated as to go watch something else. The nation hasn’t reached that level yet, it seems.

This presents RTÉ with a dilemma. The show must stay on the road because it brings in the money necessary to pay those extraordinary RTÉ salaries, but the standard of show is now so low that it has to be depressing everyone who works in Montrose. It’s time for a change. Tubridy is out of his depth. They need a new host – or hostess.

Miriam O’Callaghan is presented as the Woman Most Likely whenever this discussion comes up, but RTÉ should be a little more daring and give the Late Late Show a 21st Century hostess. Someone who can talk equally well to the Fair City starlets before the break and put the heat on public figures after.

There’s only one choice. It has to be Claire Byrne, and for three reasons.

Firstly, she can do all the frothy stuff, as she does weekly on the Daily Show. Your correspondent has never seen the Daily Show but it’s almost certainly fine, if that’s your bag. Tubridy is fine interviewing the Fair City barmaids too, but it was, famously, a point of contention for Pat Kenny.

But while Tubridy struggles with the grown-up stuff, Byrne is excellent, as she proves daily on the Late Debate on Radio One and used to prove on the Newstalk Breakfast Show. This is the second point in her favour. Claire Byrne understands current affairs. Not only is she is a tenacious interviewer, but she never editorialises. She knows he purpose is to moderate debate, rather than participate in it.

The final reason Claire Byrne would make an excellent hostess for the Late Late Show is less obvious, but vital. She can’t be pushed around.

It’s a small thing, but subtly revealing – the Newstalk Breakfast Show does a paper view every morning. And while your correspondent hasn’t been keeping score, I do have the impression that Ivan Yates always does the broadsheets and Chris Donaghue always does the tabloids. When Claire Byrne co-hosted, they alternated. That says a lot about La Byrne.

If the Late Late Show can be saved, it’s only Claire Byrne that can do it. And if RTÉ send Brendan O’Connor to Mongolia and replace his wretched show with Máirtín Tom Sheáinín’s marvellous Comhrá on TG4, that wouldn’t be a bad day’s work either.

The Late Late: Guests from Aldi, 24 Carat Diamonds Left at Home

The galling thing about the Late Late Show’s booking policy isn’t just the pool of dodos from which guests are regularly harvested, painful though that pool is. It’s that the Late Late is remiss in its duty as the cultural flagship of the nation in bringing actual culture to the people, and churns out a lot of old gas from Frances Black, Eamon Holmes and Charles Bird instead.

An Spailpín was reminded of this when buying a CD recently. The CD featured Seán Ó Sé as a guest star of the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, which is a development that An Spailpín thinks worthy of a Late Late special all to itself. Bear with me for a few hundred words, and then decide if this isn’t of greater import to the nation than Ronan Keating or Mary Byrne.

Who is Seán Ó Sé?
Seán Ó Sé is a retired schoolteacher in Cork. But in his spare time he is one of the saviours of Irish traditional music. The economy is buggered, the language has been burning diesel for over a hundred years and survives from sheer spite alone, but one thing we did do right is that we saved the music.

The rising tide of the 1960s US folk scene helped in no small measure of course, t say nothing of the huge archive at the BBC offices in Shepherd’s Bush, but the indigenous impetus to save the music came from Seán Ó Riada and Ceoltóirí Chulann. Ó Riada showed that Irish traditional music was every bit as sophisticated as the great musics of Europe if arranged in a similar style and all of a sudden the nation realised that we didn’t have to hide fiddles under the bed like they were some sign of hopeless boggery. The music took her place among the musics of the world and hasn’t looked back.

Seán Ó Sé was the singer in Seán Ó Riada’s band. Why Ó Sé didn’t move on when Ceoltóirí mutated into the Chieftains after Ó Riada’s early death in 1970 I don’t know, but Ó Sé is still an unquestioned hero of Irish music and culture and should be treated as such even if he never cleared his throat to sing An Poc ar Buile again.

But he’s done even more than that. Recently retired from teaching, Ó Sé is using his retirement to push the boundaries of music even further, and the collaboration with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band is further evidence of that.

And Why’s That?
Because although he loved traditional music, Seán Ó Riada had very clear ideas of what traditional music is and what it isn’t. And Seán Ó Riada particularly despised ceilí bands. He hated them. He said they had “all the musical integrity of a bluebottle buzzing around in a jamjar.” It was a rotten and unfair to thing to say – not least for a man who played the harpsichord himself, hardly the prettiest of instruments.

Ceilí bands had their advocates too, not least the late Ciarán Mac Mathúna, who pointed out that buy playing them at dances ceilí bands saved countless tunes that could have been lost. But there has always been that snobbery associated with ceilí bands, that that are not fully of the tradition.

Crossing No Man’s Land
And that’s what makes the Ó Sé collaboration with the Turloughmore so significant. Ó Sé has crossed no man’s land to join the opposition. In recording a CD with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, Seán Ó Sé has declared music to be all one, streaming out from the forts of Tuatha de Danann and the other weird peoples that have lived here before us.

If that magic is captured in the nets of the Pipers’ Club or Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann or the hammer men on stage at a hooley while the dancers belt the floor, what matter, what odds? Isn’t it all music all the same, and all particularly Irish, resonant and harmonious with the Irish soul?

That’s what An Spailpín thinks a Late Late Show should be about. The Chieftains and Ó Sé talking about Ó Riada and what he did. Jim McCann and Barney McKenna talking about the folk singers, now the Clancys all roam the other worlds. Planxty and the Bothy Band and Altan to bring it up to date. And then a huge band of the whole damned lot of them, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, giving it socks on the Rocky Road to Dublin.

And what do I get instead? “Ryan Tubridy chats to Charlie Bird about his new documentary series of legendary Antarctic explorer, Tom Crean. Mary McEvoy talks about her new book, Ireland's greatest slimmer gives advice on how to shed the pounds, Ali Hewson and Adi Roche talk about the Chernobyl Children and Jessie J performs her hit single, 'Price Tag'.”

Price Tag, indeed. Go gcuire Seán Ó Sé an dea-chath fós, go gcasa sé a amhráin go binn go bráth, agus go mbronntar an ómós atá tuilte do lá breá éigin gan moil.

Team Micheál or Team Tubs: Who Are Fianna Fáil Really?

An exasperated journalist remarked on the Tonight with Vincent Browne show last year that it was a mystery to her how anyone, ever, votes or voted for the Fianna Fáil party.

This question has stuck in An Spailpín’s head since. Because there are two mysteries here: the first is the journalist’s original question, just who people this entity known as Fianna Fáil, and the second is why isn’t their identity known to a political reporter with a major national newspaper?

Fianna Fáil has governed this country for three of every four years of the party’s existence. While this may change at the next election, it has been a fact until now that there has never been a constituency in the state without at least one Fianna Fáil TD since the party’s first election to Government.

How can someone aspire to expertise on Irish politics and have no idea either who votes Fianna Fáil or why they do so? Is it not like being a chef and never having seen a chicken?

Do parallel Irelands exist, with no interaction between them? The world of the Vincent Browne panel fretting over inequality in their south Dublin demesnes, and the world that elects Fianna Fáil governments, year after year? Where do they cross over? Do they cross over at all?

Irish politics is a mass of contradictions. Ireland has never elected a socialist government, yet the public service is huge. How did this happen? If policy doesn’t drive Irish elections, what does? If you wish to be involved in politics, how do you decide which party to join? James Lawless describes the typical Fianna Fáil spear-carrier on his blog, but he does not point out why these GAA people and meals on wheel people and so on join FF specifically and not Fine Gael, or Labour, or Sinn Féin, or one of Richard Boyd Barrett's (many) groups. Is it simply tribal?

The comedians who perform as Après Match appeared in character on The Late Late Show before Christmas. Barry Murphy appeared as a character called Micheál, whom many would see as the archetypal Fianna Fáil backwoodsman. But he wasn’t the most Fianna Fáil-y person on the Late Late that night. Not by a long chalk.

If bloodlines count for anything in Irish politics – and they always have so far – the most Fianna Fáil person on the Late Late Show that night, or any night, was your host, Ryan Tubridy. He is Fianna Fáil on his father and his mother’s side. His maternal grandfather, Todd Andrews, was one of the founding architects of the party. His brother is a councillor and two of his cousins are TDs. How much more Fianna Fáil can you get?

In what way does the Fianna Fáil ethos manifest in Ryan Tubridy? Tubridy comes from a current affairs background professionally, and to have missed current affairs discussion in his private life growing up would surely have been impossible. It would be like growing up on the land and never hearing of headage. But the popular image of Fianna Fáil in the media is of Micheál the Backwoodsman – it is not of urbane, smooth, Dean-Martin-listenin’, finger-clickin’, pints-in-the-Bailey drinkin’ Ryan Tubridy. But they are both said to be Fianna Fáil the same way a trout is said to be a fish.

Is Team Micheál or Team Tubs the real spirit of the party? Or does Fianna Fáil exist a bridge between these demographics, neither one extreme or the other, like a half and half latte and pint of stout? What common interest do they campaign on? Do the Tubridys of the world get shouted down at meetings in the smoke-filled rooms by the Micheáls? Or do the Micheáls pump the wheels while the Tubridys ride the bikes?

There is a doorstopper history of the Workers Party on sale currently. 688 pages. Where are the histories of Fianna Fáil, the single most influential Irish political party since the foundation of the state?

Dick Walsh wrote one in the mid-eighties which is out of print, out of date and probably not that good in the first place. Pat Leahy, political correspondent of the Sunday Business Post, wrote a gossipy recent history called Showtime, but didn’t try to join the dots on the stories that he was told about what where all Irish politics are decided – behind closed doors. The peculiar attitude to the notion of collective cabinet responsibility with regard to the setting of the budget seemed worthy of further discussion, to say the very least of it, but it raised nary a flag. Extraordinary.

We are told that the nation is heading to an election that may be a watershed in the history of an Ireland that has taken her place among the nations of the Earth, and it seems we really don’t know for whom we’re voting. Fianna Fáil’s struggle to not be wiped out is one of the stories of the election, and yet we don’t really know who Fianna Fáil are – Tubridys, Micheáls, or someone else again entirely. There’s at least one writer in a national newspaper who badly needs to find out. To say nothing of the rest of us.

Ryan Tubridy to Host the Late Late Show

The really astonishing thing, of course, is that The Late Late Show has lasted as long as it has. The very fact it survived under Gay Byrne for thirty-seven years is amazing in itself. But once Byrne retired, RTÉ realised that the brand was so enormous that it simply couldn’t be discontinued. The Late Late Show was drawing in far too much money to even contemplate the idea of Byrne taking it away with him on his new motorcycle.

And so it has marched on, presented by Pat Kenny, for ten years. Ten years! An Spailpín Fánach does not know anyone who enjoyed Pat Kenny’s Late Late Show, and yet the viewing figures were consistently huge. Ten years, and never been kissed.

The Irish nation sat at home in their hundreds of thousands every Friday night, during the most prosperous times the country has ever seen, to watch Pat Kenny pretend to be interested in what some B-list bimbo on some C-list English soap had to say about where she buys her shoes, her take on Martin Heidegger and the influence of phenomenology on his metaphysical theories, and why she loves Mamma Mia!

One of Gay Byrne’s countless gifts was that he had an endless appetite for this sort of stuff. Yes, he delighted in guests like Sir Peter Ustinov or Billy Connolly, but he was equally happy whenever Tom O’Connor popped over from the mainland, with limp jokes about golf sweaters. Deep in the hidden heart of him, is it the case that Gay Byrne was never as happy in his life as when he was interviewing Ken Dodd and the Beatles for Granada TV in the early 1960s? Was everything downhill for him after those impossible peaks?

How Pat Kenny must have despised the countless interviews with someone like Andrew Sachs’ grand-daughter, and her three charming friends. Pat Kenny, whatever else you may say about him, is no daw; RTÉ did a heart monitor survey once in the eighties to see what effect the cameras going live had on their presenters, and Kenny’s never flickered one single beat. Remember him on Today Tonight or doing the elections in the early 1980s, with the hair sprayed in place, and the steely silver specs, grilling Jim Kemmy or Martin O’Donaghue?

What a fall from that to “former EastEnder Letitia Dean talks to Pat about the effect being in the soap had on her life, being at her fittest at 41 and her current stint in the stage version of High School Musical in Dublin.” The horror, the horror.

Gay Byrne seemed to be interested in everybody, even if he wasn’t. That was one of the reasons why the famous Mike Murphy hidden camera sketch was so funny – it was astonishing to see Byrne lose his cool. Whereas Pat Kenny struggles to hide his boredom or his contempt. When Kenny tore up the entry of that lady in a competition who wasn’t impressed with her prize the writing was on the wall. Kenny is returning to current affairs now, and he’ll be much more at home.

And so Ryan Tubridy takes over. Every generation, perhaps, gets the Late Late Show it deserves. It is appropriate that Pat Kenny presented the Late Late during the property boom that is now devouring its own tail – Pat Kenny, who fought the battle of Gorse Hill, and ended up paying over one million Euro for one fifth of an acre of ground.

It’s hard to know what Tubridy will do with the Late Late. Miriam O’Callaghan was the obvious choice. She had the current affairs experience with Prime Time, and her very successful summer chat show proved that she could do light entertainment as well. And yet Tubridy has got the gig instead.

The most successful period of Ryan Tubridy’s career was when he presented a breakfast show on 2FM. He succeeded the Rick and Ruth show, and was succeeded by the incumbents, both productions that make Tubridy’s time seem like Jack Charlton’s reign as Irish soccer manager – gilded fore and aft by what went before and what came after. The rest of Tubridy’s output seems something of a mixed bag, making it hard to judge what the new look Late Late Show will be like.

What Tubridy will do with the Late Late Show is limited by the enormity of the Late Late Show itself. It is as much a part of the nation now as the All-Ireland final or Tayto crisps. What is more certain, however, is that Tubridy is very much of his time. A lot of people were hot and bothered about Kenny’s Late Late GAA tribute. One would almost wish for the GAA to celebrate 126 years next year, just to see what Ryan Tubridy would make of it.

For better or worse, Ryan Tubridy reflects who the Irish are now, and is the person to whom the majority of people aspire. The funniest thing that An Spailpín read in the speculation about who would take over as host of the Late Late Show was a squib in Irish language newspaper Foinse that Mairtín Tom Sheáinín Mac Donncha, presenter of Comhrá on TG4, had emerged as a dark horse candidate. Whatever else happens, Tubridy’s Late Late will not be anything like Máirtín Tom Sheáinín’s might have been. Whether that is a good or bad thing we’ll just have to wait and see.





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