ANALYSIS:A HUMBLING prospect and an opportunity that comes along "once in a generation" was how an apparently shellshocked and exhilarated Ryan Tubridy described his appointment as the new presenter of Ireland's longest running chat show, the Late Late Show, writes HILARY FANNIN
Tubridy (35) is a scrawny-necked lightning rod, whose energy and professionalism have seen him burn through the tangled briar of Montrose to emerge as one of the highest-paid and most visible faces on national television.
The grandson of a prominent Fianna Fáil TD, Todd Andrews, he began his RTÉ career at the tender age of 12, reviewing books for the children's magazine programme, Poporama.
Returning to the national broadcaster after graduating from UCD, he has since made impressively rapid strides through the organisation, both on radio and television.
Bounding swiftly over jobs as a lowly runner on the Gerry Ryan Showand as a reporter on the Pat Kenny Show, the perennially grinning "young fogey" (a moniker that adheres to the man with the same tenacity as his well-cut suits) eventually ended up with his own morning weekday radio programme, the imaginatively-named Tubridy Show.
His career as a television presenter, which ran in tandem, was equally fast and furious, taking in various high-voltage television gigs, such as The Rose of Tralee, en route to the sub-Letterman-esque Tubridy Tonight.
This live Saturday-night talk show is now set to fold up its tent after three more shows, concluding its giddy, somewhat lightweight lifespan and waving goodbye to its 500,000-plus regular viewers at the end of May.
There are, apparently, plans afoot in RTÉ to produce a home-grown entertainment to replace Tubridy’s Saturday chatorama, but whether this will be another talk show remains undecided by the powers-that-be around the shiny boardroom tables in Donnybrook.
For Tubridy's sake, it would seem like a sensible decision to revamp some sort of Generation Game-type show for Saturday-night couch-surfers and leave whatever oxygen remains around the chat-show format (with its reliance on a wilting celebrity line-up) for the Late Late– this town just ain't big enough for the both of them, as the song goes.
Whatever about injecting a tincture of Botox (in the guise of Tubridy's immense confidence) into the middle-aged old dame that the Late Late, at 47, has become, the question needs to be asked whether, rather than undergoing reconstruction, the show shouldn't instead be put out to pasture.
Those halcyon days of Gay Byrne unravelling a coiled and dangerous condom, like a medicine man revealing a hissing python, to an audience agog with his daring, are long past. As with the family rosary, or the Saturday-night bath shared with a bunch of muddy siblings, it would be reasonable to assume that we have moved on from needing a ritual weekly meditation on the state of the nation.
Interestingly, however, against a backdrop of unprecedented digital television penetration (almost 60 per cent of Irish homes now have satellite television, with access to around 500 channels), this past season of the Late Latehas seen, with an average audience of almost 682,000, more people watching than at any time in the 10 years since Pat Kenny took over the top-rating show in 1999. Staggeringly, almost one million viewers tuned in to see the recent pre-recorded interview between Kenny and Roy Keane.
Announcing Tubridy as the limber king of RTÉ’s castle has given Montrose executives the opportunity to drop a few hints about changes the show’s audience may anticipate when it hits our screens again next September. Entertainment mixed with social discussion will remain the core of this flagship’s content, but – hold on to your hats – RTÉ is also promising to “harness Tubridy’s enormous strengths”.
Tubridy himself says he would “love to bring a bit more dialogue back to television”. He favours Michael Parkinson over Jonathan Ross, and has also said that he would be reluctant to get involved in “big, long-winded current affairs debates”.
Tubridy, as Kenny before him, is an unadventurous choice, and it seems unlikely that, under his auspices, the show’s latest incarnation will be radically different from anything that has gone on before in Studio 4. In truth, given the increased viewing figures, RTÉ is hardly going to fix it if it ain’t broke.
There is, however, a canny, pin-striped acumen at work under Tubridy's at times goofy exterior, and one imagines that he will be an enthusiastic and compliant worker in the Late Latemachine, which involves a daily office routine researching and planning with series producers Larry Masterson and Brian Hayes.
So the Late Late Show, almost old enough to be his mother, will live to see another season. No longer the nation's sniffer dog, it has matured somewhat dully into a faithful old retainer, shuffling after us with yellowing memories and gamely attempting to keep abreast of the news.
“This is an iconic television programme that has been the cultural wallpaper to my life growing up,” Tubridy has said. But somehow, the phrase “cultural wallpaper” sounds about as much fun as watching paint dry.
Hilary Fannin is the Irish TimesTV critic