As Pat Kenny applies his makeup for the 46th season of the world's longest-running chat show, there's little chance of it recapturing past glories, writes Hilary Fannin
'To whom it concerns . . . it's The Late Late Show." September - kids cleaned up, uniforms optimistically spruce; it's that time of year when venerable institutions reopen their doors after a long wet summer and we get back to "normal", whatever your particular brand of normal might be. For Pat Kenny, presenter of the national broadcaster's flagship show, the longest-running chat show in the history of television, it means an extended day on the RTÉ campus every Friday and the 46th season of The Late Late Show to plough through.
Beginning as a late-night summer filler in 1962 in the hands of a young Gay Byrne, the Late Late was, for a good stretch of its more than 40 years, the cultural hand we held as we grew from being an introverted, devout state in a chilly field on the outskirts of Europe to our current quixotic mix of multi-racial, four-wheel-driving, double-income, divorceable smoothies, clutching our designer eyewear on the way to the bottle bank, our tarnished rosary beads languishing somewhere in the back of the drawer. There was a time in the halcyon Late Late days when social change appeared almost to be driven by the programme's agenda, when the national pulse was discernible in the beat of the opening titles' drum, and when, having angled the bunny's ears and thrown slack on the fire, we crowded around our sets on a Saturday night to watch our truculent little island defrost before our eyes. At least that's what we were doing in my corner of suburbia.
Byrne and The Late Late Show are inseparable in the public consciousness. From 1962 until his retirement in 1999, Gaybo (barring one season when Frank Hall was at the helm) maintained what appeared to be an effortless grip on the live show. As presenter and producer, his ease was, of course, the result of stringent preparation and a committed production team. "Roll it there, Colette," he would say proprietorially when a video clip was required, and it was his inclusive presentational style, letting his audience know that they were watching a live event (and, often, if a show was particularly chipper, allowing it to run beyond its allotted time), that added a frisson to our viewing. But Byrne was not a missionary; he was simply a talented broadcaster who had no hesitation in pushing boundaries to make entertaining television. So we watched in our thousands, complicit, outraged, scornful or fascinated as, between musical turns and opportunities to win a family hatchback, he unrolled a pioneering condom or encouraged his guests to unravel our indifference or expose our fears or simply challenge our assumptions on any number of topics, from Travellers' rights to legislative equality for homosexuals to the bloodied North and the blight of institutionalised paedophilia. It's unlikely that Byrne saw himself as being some liberalising trailblazer, but he was the ringmaster at one hell of a circus.
FLICKING THROUGH THE Late Late family album unearths a well-thumbed selection of memorable moments. Among the most incendiary was the all-time favourite, "the bishop and the nightie", when back in 1966 the Bishop of Clonfert, Thomas Ryan, condemned the show as "filthy" because a young woman, when asked by Gaybo during some Mr-and-Mrs-type quiz what colour nightie she wore on her wedding night, replied with gentle insouciance that she might not have been wearing one at all.
Desperately innocent stuff when one fast-forwards to 1991 to find a tight-lipped Byrne interviewing a defensive but dignified American, Annie Murphy, who quietly told him in the course of a hostile interview that during the early 1970s she had had an affair with Eamon Casey during his time as Bishop of Kerry and that they had a son, Peter, to whom Casey gave financial support. Her remarkable divulgence resulted in Casey's removal from office. In the same vein, although one might say without the same element of astonishment (the words "dog" and "street" spring to mind), gossip columnist and journalist Terry Keane, on Byrne's penultimate show in 1999, chose to "reveal" her long-standing relationship with former taoiseach Charles Haughey, a disclosure which sent the Boss scuttling into hiding and did no favours to the vixenish Keane. And, in 1992, Britain's then secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, unwisely allowed himself to sing Oh My Darling, Clementine on the show shortly after seven Protestants had been killed in the North by an IRA bomb, a desperate faux pas which ultimately ensured his replacement.
The farrago of guests goes on: Oliver Reed turned up sloshed, Padraig Flynn popped in to talk about the difficulty of managing on a salary of £100,000, and a skilful Gerry Adams turned a frosty reception into a personal triumph. Not all the shows were so momentous, however; let's not forget that it was Byrne, after all, who unleashed Boyzone on us.
AT THE END of his tenure, before he could be dragged into a new millennium by Montrose, Byrne bowed out and, to mark the occasion, Bono and Larry Mullen gave the steward of the show a shiny new Harley Davidson to ride into his retirement.
Byrne's inimitable qualities were his ability to ask the questions that we, from the safety of our sofas, wanted answered, and his deftness in negotiating tough shows, such as the Omagh special, without turning the participants into lurid fodder.
When he eventually departed to his eyrie on Dublin Bay, the fear that his personal style was so closely linked to the format as to make a change of presenter, and therefore the show itself, untenable, proved not unfounded.
After much speculation as to who the new host might be (with Byrne understood to favour Joe Duffy as his successor), Pat Kenny, presenter of the unctuous and rather more staid Kenny Live, predictably inherited Gaybo's warm throne. A pleasant but self-conscious and often fussy host (who, despite gallant attempts at relaxed banter, looks as if he is in the throes of mechanical meltdown), Kenny's fusty imprimatur soon wiped out any remaining traces of the more adventurous old ways, and what we currently watch is Kenny Live Mark Two swimming around in the Late Late's baggy old trunks. Gone are the giveaways that saw the perspiring audience go home dragging hampers of breezy soap and soapy chocolate; gone is the banquette of guests invited to remain on the studio floor to participate in the debate; gone in fact is the debate.
What we have now is a genial and often deadly dull chat show just like all the other dull and genial chat shows that proliferate across the schedules, with Kenny's pre- publicised guest-list just another appointment page in the great celebrity Filofax. Occasionally, when he and his production team appear to become conscious of some abandoned purpose, their attempts to compensate can be questionably sensationalist, as when Joe O'Reilly (subsequently convicted of the murder of his wife, Rachel) was allowed to confidently enjoy the limelight while his devastated mother-in-law, Rose Callely, sat unable to look at him.
WHERE KENNY CAN'T be faulted, though, is in his resilience. When, in 2003, it was announced that Eamon Dunphy was to host a rival show on TV3, Dunphy's personal insults and bullish confidence about finally finishing off the Late Late ended in the verbal pugilist retreating to his corner in round one, worn out by Kenny's tirelessly dogged professionalism.
As Kenny prepares to go back to school, however, the nerves must be kicking in. He has been unable to repeat the unprecedented success of the early decades of a unique institution, when the show consistently topped the ratings (it now holds a steady and respectable place "near the top", according to RTÉ's publicity department).
But really, you can't shoot the messenger. Byrne got out just in time: the days of a nation taking its emotional temperature with a televisual thermometer are over and we no longer need to look to a chat-show to impose a coherent narrative on our lives. Our satellite dishes are swinging, we are inundated with choice, and we no longer want the old bedtime stories.
Kenny does have one trick up his sleeve for round 46 (his ninth in the ring): he's got a new set. More solid and structural, apparently, with Kenny slap-bang in its centre. So, something to look forward to after all: a new box for a tarnished old toy.
TheLateLateFile
Why is it in the news?
The longest-running chat show in the history of television kicks off its 46th season on Friday, with Pat Kenny at the helm for his ninth year
Most appealing characteristic:
Comfy familiarity
Least appealing characteristic:
Comfy familiarity
Most likely to say:
"Never mind the content, feel the set"
Least likely to say:
"The fat lady is about to sing"