RTÉ has lost an asset in Ryan Tubridy but a good career probably awaits in Britain

Ryan Tubridy – who will not be returning to RTÉ in the wake of this summer’s payment scandal – has been on a jaunt around London’s West End this week. All perfectly innocuous until Piers Morgan – the British firebrand journalist who walked out of his lucrative Good Morning Britain gig in a huff over Meghan Markle – posted a photo of Tubridy on X (né Twitter).

“The sacked presenter club!” Morgan wrote. “Great to see Ireland’s biggest TV star Ryan Tubridy in London today, and excited to see what he does next.” And with that, whatever vague rumours circulating about Tubridy’s potential move to the city gained a lot of momentum.

After weeks of protracted press attention – and terrible amounts of pearl-clutching at all the alleged deceit and impropriety – perhaps the mood is changing. Just days ago Pat Kenny defended his former colleague on the front lines: the scandal was “an avoidable mess” and Tubridy has been “tarnished by RTÉ”, he said.

Now that Tubridy is teasing a move across the Irish Sea, the realisation might dawn: RTÉ has lost an asset, but a good career likely awaits in Britain. That he might succeed in London media is not erroneous suspicion but a likelihood.

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[ What next for Tubridy? Will Newstalk come calling or could he go back to the BBC? ]

But what, exactly, is the milieu that Tubridy might be walking into? There has been plenty of hand-wringing over the doomed fate of so-called old media – print newspapers and magazines, traditional 6pm news broadcasts, all manner of radio. But UK radio listening remains remarkably high, with 89 per cent of the population tuning in at least once a week. We might like to think of the radio as uniquely dominant in Irish life, but the comparative listenership figures hardly differ. Even as the spectre of the podcast looms, reports of radio’s imminent death have been vastly exaggerated.

Without the shackles of Montrose smugness, perhaps Tubridy can be more himself

In television, two new outlets are seeking to disrupt the traditional conservatism of British broadcasting. GB News (boasting modest ratings) and Rupert Murdoch’s Talk TV (boasting less than modest ratings) both lean right, are comfortable with the shock-jock school of presenting, and take inspiration from their American counterparts. It is easy to look from afar and baulk at the slow Fox-News-ification of Britain’s media, but that is not exactly what’s happening. Britain is not America. The channels are minor-interest at most. And the BBC – which at once provokes more ire and generates more adoration than RTÉ – is a good stabilising force.

Tubridy’s hypothetical move would make him no anomaly. Plenty of Irish stars have made their mark on British airwaves. Limerick man Terry Wogan may be the pioneer, but Clondalkin-born Graham Norton is a national treasure in England too. Craig Doyle and Laura Whitmore are mainstays on the screen. With perhaps the exception of Wogan, this genre of Irish-cum-Anglo broadcaster are typified by their clean, mid-Atlantic style. Perhaps some even supplicate their Irishness to appeal to a broad church of British viewers. Accent aside, Norton would hardly seem out of place on the American late-night talkshow circuit.

The opposite is true of Tubridy. Eccentricity is a highly rewarded social trait in Britain: think about former Tory MP and co-host of the wildly popular The Rest Is Politics podcast Rory Stewart, or the doyens of BBC Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg, Stephen Fry, Elton John and – yes – Boris Johnson. Tubridy – wordy, eager, cerebral, folksy – ought to translate to British radio as these men do. The source of their appeal lies precisely in their esotericism. And now without the shackles of Montrose smugness, perhaps Tubridy can be more himself.

So Tubridy ought not suppress his Irishness. But there is an inverse danger: it is easy to fall into a classic trap of Anglo-Irish antagonism, to exaggerate the cultural differences between the English and Irish, to allow historical enmity to colour all interactions. It is true that the British media in the wake of Brexit was not particularly well disposed to Ireland (though we are no saints either). But this is not the character of the British media writ large. And more than that, this cultural antagonism is rarely of interest to people who live here in the UK. Wogan never indulged, nor does Norton. Irish people living normal lives – my cousin who has just moved to Clapham, my oldest schoolfriend who now lives in Hackney – pay little heed either.

Good media relies on authenticity and any foreign-born host needs to strike a careful balance: to be careful not to adapt so much they come to sound like an institutionalised BBC host 25 years into their tenure, but to assimilate enough, to understand who you are speaking to. But the key to London is that it is a city of immigrants. If the move happens then Tubridy will be charting a well-worn course. Not just after Wogan and Norton. But the writer behind Bad Sisters, Sharon Horgan. Meath restaurateur Richard Corrigan has just opened a new venture on the roof of the National Portrait Gallery. London has long been a natural host for Irish talent.