I see Pat Kenny has been under fire from some of my colleagues for his stewardship of the institution formerly known as the National Fireside. But, in their efforts to blame the Late Late presenter for a decline that is both inevitable and unstoppable, they miss the point. The Late Late is finished, not because it has a different presenter, but because of its changing audience.
When I heard about the failed attempt last year to get the Northern comedian Patrick Kielty to take over from Gaybo, I was visited by the certainty that, in a cabinet in RTE, there is a memo which goes something like this: "If the contribution of Gay Byrne was to the modernisation of Irish society, that of his successor will be to usher in its post-modernisation."
A postmodernist, incidentally, is someone who doesn't give a toss about anything. In television terms, to be "post-modern" means the ability to run up and down steps carrying a microphone, asking "wacky" questions of the audience. Mr Kielty, who is world-class at this, turned down RTE's advances because the Late Late does not have enough "street cred".
And so, it was back to Plan A. For three decades, RTE management had been anticipating the moment when Gay Byrne would depart to grow chrysanthemums in Donegal, but they relaxed thinking they had Pat Kenny up their sleeves. In recent years, contemplating the societal changes they credit themselves with having initiated, they allowed complacency to give way to mild panic. More and more, Gaybo and Pat came to seem like the same generation.
Readers over the age of 40 will recall a previous time when it was fashionable to say things like: "Do you realise that 50 per cent of our population is over 25?" The last time this question was in vogue, even I was in that lucky quotient. The phrase went into mothballs for a while, but it has returned with a vengeance particularly acute for those of us who now find ourselves at the wrong end of the indifference curve.
THIS has presented RTE management with a problem. As with virtually every organisation in Ireland, the managers of RTE are fogeys of various ages, mostly middle-aged and old. These fogeys desire, above all, to hold on to their positions of power and influence. The trouble is, you have all these Young People poncing about out there and Christ knows what they'd be thinking about. All we know is that they like comedy, drink, head-banging music and drugs that make them jump about uncontrollably.
Pat Kenny was partly right when he said that, following Gaybo's departure, the Late Late should have been "parked". In fact, it should have been clamped, towed away, stripped down and incinerated. He is only beginning to discover how right he was. It is not possible to supply a version of the Late Late for 2000 and beyond. The ethos of the Late Late, up until recently anyway, implied some level of concern about Irish society.
Mostly, of course, talk about its influence was humbug, but there was at least a sense that watching it implied some level of interest in what was going on around you. For the Late Late to prosper it was necessary for the audience to believe Ireland was something more than a piece of ground on which various activities - work, drinking, sex, driving BMWs - might take place. But nobody will ever again care as much about Ireland as those of us who wasted our youth talking about it, and no future presenter of the Late Late will long survive by tolerating anything resembling social concern.
The true change in the Late Late's context has much to do with the disconnected nature of Irish youth, for which the fogeys' desire for control is largely responsible. For more than two decades, the same generation of media controllers has remained at the helm, utterly resistant to the idea of power being devolved to a new generation; the result is a younger generation with a sour-grapes attitude both to power and civic responsibility.
To retain credibility as a Young Person today it is essential that you know as little as possible about issues of public importance. Knowing the name of the incumbent Taoiseach is a dangerous give-away. Those of us who remember Barry Desmond, the Littlejohn brothers, and even Liam Skelly, had better keep our mouths shut if we want to avoid being laughed into our imminent irrelevance.
Last Friday's item about the Glen of the Downs protesters more or less made my point. The attitudes and public energies of these young people could hardly be more different from most of their contemporaries. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. This isolationism is visible also in their intensity and unpleasantness: it is as though their anger, as much as it is about trees and roads, is about the failure of anybody else to care as much as they do.
The fogeys of RTE have not given up on replacing Gay Byrne. Being fogeys, they fail to appreciate that life after Gaybo is not going to be anything like it was before. The idea of "replacing" him comes from a delusionary belief in continuity, the antithesis of postmodernism. They think it is simply a matter of unscrambling the codes to reveal the new formula for talking to a new society. While there was a time, coinciding with the heyday of the Late Late, when TV had something to do with "society talking to itself", it is no longer possible to talk without irony about television having an "impact" on something as ludicrously obsolete as "Irish society".
Most Young People don't give a toss about "Irish society", still less know why they should spend their Friday nights watching it being impacted upon. Neither do they believe television has any business conducting "debates". Television is there to make you laugh, to sell you things, to dull the ache in your left temple, to keep boredom at bay and to sober you up for the next party.
This condition, which once we would have called apathy, has been created largely by the fogeys' determination to devolve use of the media without devolving power. To maintain fogery in power, the coming generation of fogeys is to be given fame without influence, celebrity without substance, and to be allowed "on television" but not to put it to any use. This suits the young fogeys fine. Those of us with half a brain should get ourselves a library ticket.
jwaters@irish-times.ie