After months of speculation, Pat Kenny and Eamon Dunphy are ready to compete for viewers. They tell Kathy Sheridan how they intend to do it
I didn't start it, Miss. It was him. I know you said not to please him by answering back, but he came at me again . . . Eamon Dunphy's rivalry with Pat Kenny may not be the Clash of the Chat Shows as it has been billed. It sounds more like Bart Simpson, the picture of injured innocence in The Truce. And there is a truce. In theory, anyway.
Dunphy says the latest skirmish began with "a little frisson" over a sideswipe by Gay Byrne. "I was very upset about it. We had young people in the business, starting out, and here comes this legend - and he is a legend - and he's kicking the shit out of them. So I give him it back. Then comes a phone call, initiated by RTÉ, saying if this gets overt it's going to cause a problem. I said I didn't make it overt and I'm prepared to draw a line. So no more slagging RTÉ.
"And I'm abiding by the truce . . . But next thing the RTÉ Guide comes and Pat's away there."
Kenny's interview in this week's RTÉ Guide does seem a tad stuck on his rival, calling broadcasting a hobby for Dunphy - "if it goes pear-shaped for Eamon he'll write another book about Gazza or something" - but a career for Kenny. Kenny also declares there are people, such as John Hume, who wouldn't be in the same room as Dunphy.
Kenny is exasperated. "I gave five minutes to the Guide about Dunphy and two hours about other things. I didn't think they would so bias the interview about one particular topic when there was so much more that we talked about." It's difficult not to sympathise. He's in the hapless position of trying to bat the relentless spin trickling from the other side all summer while familiarising himself with a new production team and trying to dream up a new Late Late Show. None of this frantic activity, he insists, has anything to do with meeting the Dunphy challenge.
The dramatic staff turnover is the result of three researchers getting promotions - a tribute to the success of the Late Late and its consistent position at number one, says Kenny. Brian Hayes, his outgoing executive producer, had announced he was leaving before any mention of competition. And the set was worn out, having been manhandled in and out for nearly 40 shows last year.
"So I can understand how some would put a spin on the Late Late scurrying to meet some new threat to its dominance, but all of these things were in train, it's bizarre," he says as one of his fabulous Weimaraner dogs chews frantically on a plastic flowerpot in the leafy, child-centred garden of his home in Dalkey, Co Dublin. His mobile rings with a familiar melody. Isn't that . . ? "Yeah, it's the Beatles' Help!", he says deadpan.
The next day Dunphy sits in his tasteful Ranelagh home with his daily reading matter - the Racing Post, the Daily Mail and The Irish Times - at his feet and the Hutton inquiry on the television. Entirely relaxed. It's harder to fulminate about things these days. "I find the older you get the more sides you see to everything, and it's a pain in the butt . . . . You get a bit more introspective as well as a bit more charitable." He fulminates once, and it's over Byrne rather than Kenny.
"Gay Byrne attacked us viciously." But he said there wasn't enough room for two talk shows - and maybe he's right. "What he also said was that TV3 had made a mistake, and they'd be 'scalded' by the experience and that they'd have to move us to another night. And that would be right, he said, because Friday night was for The Late Late Show.
"But Friday night is not for The Late Late Show. Friday night is for the viewers to make their own mind up, and we should have shows at all levels. Implicit in Gay Byrne's remarks was that this monopoly should continue regardless of the quality of the programme and that anyone who had the audacity to take it on was going to be scalded. I don't agree with that.
"This is costing TV3 €2.5 million. We are creating employment, we are bringing new, young people into the business with original ideas and something different. And I don't think it's right for a legendary veteran broadcaster with enormous influence to try to get into the heads of TV3 executives. I would wish any new venture, every start-up, good luck, and I don't think he should have been putting the boot into any independent production company. A man of his stature should have said good luck to them - but no. It was a bit mean."
Mean? Did Dunphy not describe Kenny as a waste of taxpayers' money? "No. I never said that Pat Kenny was a waste of taxpayers' money. I said Gay Byrne was a waste of taxpayers' money. He's getting a €200,000-a-year retainer to stop him working for anyone else. And he's 69."
Dunphy considers himself lucky to have been able to tap into the vast salaries on offer to Irish presenters while attacking the "vast amounts of money the RTÉ stars get for presenting programmes in a monopoly. It was RTÉ that started the money machine for star broadcasters - in a monopoly". As for the current Late Late, in his new charitable mode he confines himself to describing it merely as "dull, banal, lazy monopoly broadcasting".
It might be in decline - the viewing figures show it to be down 300,000 from its peak - but, as Kenny points out, despite the increased competition and the fact that more people have the money to get out on a Friday night it still pulls in nearly half the available audience. "When The Late Late Show ends up as number-one programme most of the weeks from Christmas 2002 to summer, and out of the top 100 programmes 30 of them are Late Lates, you know there is a huge appetite for what we do," says Kenny.
And what about Celebrity Farm, an agricultural Celebrity Big Brother whose participants will be revealed on the Late Late on Friday? Is that designed to save Kenny, as one headline had it? "We're just launching the thing. It's an RTÉ notion to get into the autumn schedule with a bit of fun. I just laugh . . . . All that stuff about a so-called battle for the stars, I was reading that when all the team was on holidays and thinking, what battle? If you'd phoned the Late Late office at that stage you'd have got no answer. I don't know whether it's all been made up or someone is spinning. The process of hiring a new team isn't even complete."
Dunphy's take on the statistics is different, naturally. "They show that 56 per cent of the people watching television on a Friday night are not watching the Late Late. The profile of the show is quite old, biased towards women. Only one in every 10 men aged between 15 and 44 watching television on a Friday night is watching the Late Late. If we got two out of those 10 we'd be in business."
So how does he propose to go about it? In staggeringly similar fashion to Kenny, by the sound of it. It will be about the guests, "really interesting guests".
Both eschew the chat-show trend, the one-liner-cracking comedians such as Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross, for whom the guests are merely props. "I will be a host and facilitator," says Dunphy. "In too much of radio and television the presenter or host is trying to prove that they know everything and trying to be the wise guy." (Kenny says: "The Late Late is issue-driven, it's about the guests, not the presenter.") So has Dunphy found a way to reinvent the talk show? "No. I think people will criticise it for that. They'll be saying, where's the originality, what's new? And the answer is there will be very little that's original. But, in my experience of watching television, quality is in short supply."
He accuses RTÉ of running the Late Late by formula. "It's about how they get the big numbers and the young demographic. So EastEnders has a million viewers or whatever . . . So you get the soap star and the calculation is that everyone who watches the soap will watch the Late Late. I think that's cheap. I think it's easy. I think it's insulting to the audience. But that's where they've got. They're not only doing that, they're doing the Celebrity Big Brother . . . . The celebrities are Twink, Mikey Graham, Steve Collins, Mary Kingston and probably Brush Sheils. So that's it: they're going down there and we're going to go up."
Dunphy believes there's a gap in the market for "a strong, intelligent talk show that doesn't go into that headless-baby, soap-opera thing", he says. "And a show that's Irish. We're employing 12 people in our own independent production company - all very different, young, brilliant - and what they produce for me is amazing. If this thing falls down it will be because I'm no good."
Kenny simply says you have to recognise who's watching - a lot of men are in pubs on a Friday and their wives are at home, like it or not - and hope to have something for everyone. Dunphy believes Kenny lacks the "personality or charisma to do talk the way he's trying to do it". Kenny has grown immune to the critics and the charges of being wooden, lacking spontaneity and all the rest. He puts it down to the ease of writing "knocking copy" and to the fact that he is perceived as part of the establishment by young journalists, straight out of college, who were only 10 when he presented the Eurovision Song Contest 15 years ago and probably weren't even born during his long-haired days.
"I couldn't do my job if I was to say I'm useless on television or I shouldn't be there . . . . You know that old saying about not being able to fool all the people all of the time? Well, the audiences obviously accept me doing what I do, whether it's Kenny Live or The Late Late Show. And in 15 years, between the two shows, I think I might have been out of the top 10 TAM programmes no more than half a dozen times. So obviously, whatever it is that I do, it works - and if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Dunphy admits that when he pitched his talk show to TV3 six months ago he also put it up to Cathal Goan, RTÉ's incoming director-general, stipulating Friday as the night he wanted, in effect pitching for Kenny's job. "Yeah, it was audacious," he grins. "Cathal Goan is an extremely nice man, and it was all very good-natured. It should give Pat Kenny great comfort that he laughed us out of the building at our audacity. But if we'd like to do another chat show . . ."
What makes Dunphy's bravado remarkable is that he failed miserably in both of his previous television-presenting ventures. And, Dunphy being Dunphy, he is the first to admit it. The Weakest Link? "It was Anne Robinson's format, a brilliant woman, so clever, so sardonic, shot beautifully by the BBC, broke out like a rash across the world," he says.
"And I wanted easy money, thought I'd have a two-week shoot, take the hundred grand, go off to France and drink wine. It was hell . . . . And the contestants - I kept seeing this woman from Cork, her first time on telly; I knew all her family would be watching - and I was supposed to put her down and boot her off. I didn't have the stomach for it. I knew the first day, I knew I wouldn't be able to do it. It was a big, big mistake."
The Premiership? "The mistake with that is that I was reading off autocue - and we won't be doing that with the talk show. The Premiership is a peculiar format; it was stifling. Bill O'Herlihy is a real pro, but I'm not a professional television presenter. There's a huge degree of acting, of projecting a persona, and Bill is brilliant at that . . . . I couldn't do it, I can only be me.
"So we've built this show around my personality. No autocue, no starch, as it were. I think Pat Kenny's problem is that he's basically not an actor either. He is quite a serious guy who is good at his homework, a very good radio presenter, very good at getting on top of his brief."
So what is going to pull in viewers to his new show? "What I think I can bring to this is personality and the ability to go, on the one hand, from interviewing Roy Keane to, on the other, Peter Mandelson." Dunphy admits that after the two pilots the main complaints were that "there wasn't enough of the 'mad Eamon', that there wasn't enough of the character. I think it's because I wasn't saying f*** and they thought I was too polite, hadn't the courage to confront people. They said that about The Last Word [the news magazine he used to present on Today FM\] too. But you're there to elicit information from people, and when you've great contributors you don't need this mouth".
The word is that Keane will appear at some point, although not on the first show, as will Mandelson; Keane's former teammate Eric Cantona is being worked on. The first show, Dunphy promises, will feature "a brilliant, instantly recognisable female guest - American, in the entertainment business". He wants "achievers" on the show, stellar guests with books - Tony Blair, Bill Clinton or Alastair Campbell would do nicely - and is also keen on one-issue programmes.
But the real battle is for stars. A rumour is that TV3 wanted Conrad Gallagher, the celebrity chef, but that RTÉ got him - for a vast amount of money. The wildest guess puts it at €20,000. RTÉ is known to have contacted public-relations companies, offering to "pay big", plus all expenses, for any stars coming to town. "We have no money to do that," says Dunphy. "We'll pay a fee, a couple of hundred. If a guest is plugging something we won't. That's the norm. But I think if it emerged that RTÉ is creating a market here, where they have licence-payers' money and we only have our own, that would be a worry. Because if the BCI [Broadcasting Commission of Ireland\] want competition, well, they must have a level playing field - and that wouldn't be, in my view.
"But this is not a whinge. What this is about is originality of thought, quality of people, quality of ideas, the shape and texture of programmes, that mix of light and shade, mix of human interest and current affairs . . . . And we've won some as well. We've stolen big guests on them - they don't know they've gone yet."
It's the essence of Dunphy that he will nonetheless be on the cover of the RTÉ Guide next week. He says he doesn't blame Kenny for saying the things he did - although John Hume, let it be known, spent an hour with Dunphy on The Last Word and sang Raglan Road into the bargain.
"I had been tough on Pat Kenny in a piece and, by implication, libelled Kathy [his wife\] as well, although that wasn't the idea. So they wouldn't have any reason to think I was the most wonderful person in the world. But it's professional rivalry. I don't take it personally, and I don't suppose he does."
And does Kenny like Dunphy? "I don't know him well enough to like him. Our paths generally don't cross," says Kenny. "I had a problem, and I sorted that out with the Sunday Independent and that was the end of it. Of course we would be rivals for guests, but it's nothing personal. People forget that I had Eamon on the Late Late last year, with a protracted interview about his biography of Roy Keane."
Dunphy says: "To be fair to Pat Kenny, all I know about him is that he's a thoroughly decent fellow and conducts himself perfectly well." He can't leave it at that, of course. "I went on his show because Roy wouldn't do it, and I stood in for him. I think Roy took exception to the easy ride McCarthy got on it."
And if things don't work out with the talk show? "I'll go off and do something else". Kenny was right about that one, anyway.
Next Friday: The Dunphy Show begins on TV3 at 9 p.m.; The Late Late Show returns to RTÉ1 at 9.30 p.m.
