Its Too Late Late To Stop Now

DRIVING INTO RTE on a dreary Monday in early December, a dog-eared Chinese curse came to mind: May you live in interesting times. If you believe Diarmuid Doyle and Mary Ellen Synon's respective pieces in the Sunday Tribune and Sunday Independent from the previous day, the future looks very "interesting" for RTE and Pat Kenny's Late Late Show crew.
Quoting figures compiled by the Media Bureau agency, the Sunday Tribune reported an audience loss of up to 40% in certain RTE programmes, with even old reliables like Glenroe, Fair City and Crimeline in trouble. However, it was the regular whipping boy Kenny whose picture graced the papers, and the post-Gay Late Late Show which was singled out for the most attention, with numbers reportedly down some 23% compared to last November (that's 199,000 viewers).
Notwithstanding the old adage about statistics and lies, such surveys do raise a number of questions. Are we witnessing the arrival of TV3 as a serious contender, followed by Digital TV doom for the national broadcaster? And is RTE a panicked station, laying off staff, axing two of its three Later shows and, most worryingly, trotting after TV3's dog-and-pony weather agenda?
Well, for Kenny and co., all the doomcrying was obviously balanced by the success of the first Late Late toy show under the new regime, precipitating the best reviews of the season (particularly Brendan O'Connor in the Sunday Independent) not to mention viewing figures which breached the magic million mark. Caught between such crosswinds, it was an obviously tired but buoyant Pat Kenny who took a seat in the RTE canteen on a very blue Monday . . .

Amongst others, The Sunday Tribune has been sounding the knell of doom for RTE of late. How seriously is the national broadcaster taking this?
I can't speak for RTE, but from my point of view, our own ratings in any given part can be from 50% up to 65% of the share, and although it would be down somewhat on Gay's ratings, Gay didn't have to contend, say, with TG4 in its revamped form or particularly TV3 last year. And, I mean, if you add even a channel for typists, a channel for computer nerds, they all take a little bit, they chip, chip, chip away, so inevitably the market leader is gonna suffer disproportionately to anyone else.
Two weeks ago, for example, we had an average 54% of the audience share over the entire two hours. Network 2 had 12% and TV3 had 12% for movies, both of which started before we came on air, by half an hour. We can't really attempt to fight that unless we decide to move back to nine o'clock as a starting time, 'cos once you're sucked into a movie, if you watch a half an hour, you're gonna watch the rest.
So between three channels, there was 78% of the audience taken care of, which only left 22% for UTV, BBC2, etc. - and that included Kelly and Graham Norton, both of whom are talk show formats - so, although I wouldn't like to be complacent, I think we're doing, under the circumstances, very, very well.
So I don't panic about it, but I do think that the days when you can get a million viewers, week-in, week-out, irrespective of what's on offer on other channels, are probably gone. You will get a million viewers for the toy show, you will get a million viewers as Gay did last year for the Omagh programme, or as I did, say, for Garth Brooks on Kenny Live. But you get those because the very definition of a special is that it's special, and you expect to do the big numbers. But next year with digital television, there's going to be more fragmentation - that's the reality.
It could be said that RTE is making the classic mistake of the market leader defining itself against the competition, particularly in enlisting younger weathermen and women in order to compete with TV3's "performing weathercasters".
The weather thing is a bit difficult, because quite clearly, looking at other channels, you don't have to be a weather expert to tell the weather. We know people like Ulrika Jonnson, who knew nothing about the weather, went on to carve herself out quite a good professional career - up to Miss World, when I think it may have foundered, however temporarily!
You know, it's like Tomorrow's World, you get Peter Snow or whoever it might be, Craig Doyle, it doesn't mean they know everything about the computer they're talking about, or about astronomy or biology or whatever, but they can sell it, and that's their job as television presenters. I mean, I'm no toy salesman, but I do the toy show. And I think therefore you can have people who are not qualified meteorologists to deliver good weather.
I think the way RTE went about it, or how it was interpreted, was that we were going for "babe" weather rather than anything else. I mean, on Network 2, where the whole emphasis is on youth, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense that your weathermen or women would be middle-aged. So I can see why they would do that. Equally therefore, if you were going to put non-weather people reading the weather on Network 2, to disbar them from RTE 1 wouldn't make sense either. But the best situation, where we have, if you like, scientific weather on radio, would be a healthy mix of the two, and for various reasons, that kind of negotiation broke down. I mean, it definitely was shooting-in-the-foot time.
But it was an unnecessary fuss. There was this portrayal of "babe" weather, and of course the new people are educated and articulate but they're not "babes". I mean, they are attractive young people, full stop, but they're not exactly the stuff of Miss Ecuador.
Weather aside, is there anything on TV3 you would watch?!
Ehhm . . . away football. I tend to listen to Gabriel Egan's commentary, because I think Gabriel is a very fine commentator. I'm not sure that TV3 have their presentation up to speed yet. I mean, I'm no carper about TV3. I lament, I suppose, the fact that they aren't a little more homegrown, because I think it would be great for everyone in RTE at the moment to have another serious player in home production, so that directors, producers, writers, presenters and researchers would have another place of employment.
In terms of television, TV3 does very little in the way of commissioning programmes. Maybe when they build their audiences to a pitch where they're making serious money . . . I mean they're losing money at the moment as you know, they'll continue to lose money even under their own plans for quite a long time. They were very clever, they set very unambitious targets for audiences, so therefore they always reach them. Other stations in the past have made the mistake of hyping themselves up in order to persuade advertisers to spend money, and then they end up giving the advertisers rebates back. That's no good.
But TV3 set very low targets, and they always meet them, so then you go back to your advertisers and say, "We promised you X, we delivered X plus ten per cent" everyone's happy. Very clever. But until they reach the audiences routinely, they won't really have the money to plough back into a lot of home produced programmes, so there isn't really a market yet, and I'd love there to be opportunities for, y'know, if people are screwed around by RTE, they can go to TV3 or vice versa.
The lack of decent arts coverage on RTE is frequently bemoaned - and now John Kelly's Later is facing the chop.
There's a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth within the arts fraternity who might have contributed routinely to John Kelly's arts programme. I mean, I talked to John about it and I told him, y'know, "Don't worry about this, I've been through these cuts probably four times in my life in RTE, and generally people who are talented end up being busier than they ever were after the cuts happen". These things are cyclical. These programmes don't seem to me to be terribly expensive programmes, so I can only presume they want to use the technical resources for other things.
But can I just say that I never watched the programme, generally speaking, because it was on very late and I'm up at half six every morning. It'd want to be something reasonably special for me to stay up and watch TV at that hour of the night. If I go to bed, I'd read a book in preference to watching TV, just to turn off, as it were. TV's too much like work.
The consensus holds that you made things difficult for yourself by not simply moving Kenny Live to the Friday night slot. Because Gay was genetically linked to The Late Late, viewers now think of it merely as Kenny Live with a different title.
I think it's going to take time. It's well known that I was reluctant to do the Late Late Show. I was the only one of the main presenters who didn't throw his name in the hat when Gay's successor was being touted for, and there were two reasons.
Number one, I had Kenny Live which I had done for 11 years, and it was very successful, getting very big audiences against terribly good competition on Saturday night, and also against a background of a variable starting time last year. I mean, they messed around with the schedule, they had a children's movie early on, and whatever duration that was, that determined the starting time of Winning Streak, therefore the starting time of the news, therefore the starting time of Kenny Live. On one occasion we went on air at five to ten. So, I mean, it was hugely disrespectful to the studio audience who came in at half eight, but that was a problem we had every week, and in spite of that we got huge audiences, so I was quite proud of Kenny Live, which the prophets of doom had been predicting the end of since its first season in 1988.
I was anxious to move to Friday, I made no secret of that, and to develop Kenny Live into the areas which interest me, the current affairs/debate kind of things that I would've done lots of when I was doing the old Today Tonight programme, but could never do because Gay was doing those on a Friday night. It was a mutual - corporate and Kenny Live - decision that we wouldn't go down that road. But it was the intention that when Gay retired we would expand Kenny Live to embrace all of those things, and so there would be a natural successor to the Late Late Show that would keep Gay's audience and bring on board the Kenny Live audience.
We wanted it to be more pacey - none of our interviews would tend to be longer than half an hour, whereas Gay could do an hour with somebody sometimes. We just felt that, for a younger audience, you can't actually do stuff at the pace that the old Late Late Show used to like to do.
So what changed your mind?
RTE told me that they were going to keep a Late Late in one form or another, and they wanted me to do it, and I thought about it - I thought long and hard about it, and then, talking to people from overseas who had heard of The Late Late Show because it was seen on Channel 4 for some years, I thought, "Okay, it has an international dimension, it's the oldest chat show in the world, there's only been one host, and they're asking me to be the second". And I decided it was the way to go. Not without huge reservations and regret that Kenny Live had to die, but once I made the decision that was it.
Because I took most of the Kenny Live team with me, they were in shell shock, having regarded down-the-corridor as the enemy, in, I have to say, the friendliest way, not in the way it's often characterised in the press. And we became the enemy with one stroke of the pen.
You cancelled the radio show on the morning of the Toy Show. Why was that?
There were two reasons for that. Firstly it was going to be a very long day, but secondly I had no voice on Thursday night and woke up with no voice on Friday morning, and I was getting very worried as the day wore on.
Do you think that was a psychosomatic reaction?
No, I still have the cold. The whole house had it. So I just took some decongestant and tried to say as little as possible until rehearsal time, and the voice came back. And I think adrenalin had a lot to do with that. But I was visualising the headlines: "Toy Show Shocker! Kenny . . ."
"Kenny Croaks!"
Yeah.
Frank McCourt's appearance on the show was obvious headline material. However, certain newspapers termed it a set up, and claimed that audience members were invited in to put forward tough questions you yourself weren't prepared to ask.
No, I mean, of course we invited yer man in, of course we did. He's a well-known critic of Frank McCourt. I mean, I can ask Frank McCourt all the questions I like, but I'm not passionate about Limerick, I'm not from Limerick, so you look for someone who is passionate about the subject and is going to jump up and down.
In a way, Frank McCourt was never better than when he got involved in that dogfight. If I was to defend accusations that Frank McCourt's Limerick was not a true picture etc., no-one's going to believe that, I'm not going to be credible. If someone was saying the same about the Dublin that I knew, or if I detect humbug anywhere, I'll have a go.
But we felt that Frank McCourt would rise to the challenge, which he did, he was great. And I realised how tough a guy he is - you don't have the upbringing he did and go to New York and the Korean War and pull yourself up by the bootstraps to do what he did, through the public school system as a teacher with the toughest gurriers in the world, not to have a touch of steel there. And when yer man had a go, out came the streetfighter McCourt and you suddenly realised where this man is really coming from, so that was great.
When that guest got into accusations of necrophilia, surely you must've been inwardly rubbing your hands at the controversy being generated?
Well, you want conflict, you want sparks to fly. What we are up against is people's compressed memories of anything from 10 to 37 years of The Late Late Show. People have memories of all the high points and the embarrassments and all the rest of it. And we've only, as we speak, 14 shows under our belt, and we're not going to have that many historic moments in the first 14 weeks. I would ask to be judged, maybe, if I last that long, after three years. At the moment I think it's fair to say that the team is feeling its way, I'm feeling my way.
Despite a fair degree of respect for your skill as a broadcaster, the most common criticism of your TV persona is that you're uneasy with celebrities.
I think they (the critics) forget how long I've been at this job, all the things I've done. I mean I've done every single job bar sports commentary that one could possibly do, and every time I've made a change, people said, "What's that radio DJ doing on Today Tonight?". I do that well, and then when I move onto Kenny Live I get: "He's very good at current affairs, but he'll be useless at this". Then it's: "He was very good at Kenny Live, but he won't be able to do the Late Late Show". And I just don't know why they . . . do they think I would be around this long if I couldn't do the job? I just find it astonishing.
But much of the flak has been aimed at your personality rather than your professional skills.
I have this philosophy. Father Eddie Fitzgerald, who was on a couple of weeks ago, is dying of cancer, and he said his resolution is to avoid toxic people. Now, a lot of the critics in my view are toxic people. It can't be good for the soul to be dishing out the kind of bile they dish out every week. And knocking copy is the easiest kind of copy to write.
But I avoid toxic people, that's my new year's resolution for the millennium. If you start carrying the chip on your shoulder, you're bearing a grudge against somebody who doesn't even know it. So they're walking around footloose and fancy free even though I'm grudging against them, so why should I bear the grudge? It's only gonna hurt me, it's only gonna make me toxic if I worry about it.
Like, one of the critics was particularly nasty to me in the Sunday Times, (after my) having welcomed him into my home and exposed my family to him, which I wouldn't want to do ever again, because he was two-faced to me. He referred to "Pat Kenny's sleazy Late Late Show". This was pointed out to me by somebody the day after the Sunday Times appeared. And I just thought to myself, y'know, The Late Late Show is The Late Late Show, and since it's not the show that's sleazy, he's actually calling me sleazy. And I don't really want people like that in my life, so I will avoid that paper. I don't want my children to pick up a paper that would describe their father as "sleazy". And that's the only thing you can do, you try to protect your family.
I'm a big boy now, I can put up with the slings and arrows, but I really don't think that other people around me should have to put up with that kind of thing. So if I get the culture section of the Sunday Times, it goes straight in the bin. I just won't read it, end of story, no matter what other good things might be in it. And if he was to write for another newspaper, I would have to do precisely the same thing.
Does the Alan Partridge tag bother you?
It's a bit like Dustin and I, y'know: "Us turkeys must stick together". I love that kinda thing. At the end of the day, if I was pulling in audiences of the level, say, of Good Grief Moncrieff or Don't Feed The Gondolas, like, very small, I would start to lose self belief and say, "Well, maybe I am Alan Partridge, maybe this is not working". I mean, the Alan Partridge thing, I just laugh at that. As long as the ratings are solid, that's fine. I mean, I'm not broadcasting to a narrow Dublin 4-ish set of critics. The day you try to please the critics is the day you probably start getting it wrong with the public.
The advent of Irish tabloid culture is a subject which affects everyone within the media. Relatively recently, you were the victim of a tabloid "exposé" concerning your having a daughter from a previous relationship.
I don't talk about it. I think the only thing you can do with those kind of things is dignify them with silence. There's no point in going down that road. I think that there's probably going to be an increased tabloidisation of Irish society. I had a discussion this very morning on this subject with Patricia Casey, the psychiatrist. And her conclusion, which is one I agree with, is that all these stories are seven day wonders.
But in your case it was old news, as if the new tabloid culture facilitated a climate where papers now had a license to delve back into the past to uncover something which wasn't even current, never mind in the public interest.
I didn't think it was anybody's business including theirs, and that's where I leave it. I just don't talk about it. 'Cos even to criticise them is to put a spin on the story, so I just don't dignify it with any comment one way or another.
Do you think you've ever crossed the line in terms of tabloid TV?
I dunno. We've never paid anyone huge sums of money to come on and talk about their lives. In terms of Alison Brown, Gary Glitter's, eh, person, I found her very interesting, because before we agreed to have her on, we made our inquiries, and having read the judge's summing up in that case, I was appalled at how he invited the jury to consider that there are 14 year olds and there are 14 year olds. Publicans all over this land, he said, have difficulty in sorting out which 14 year olds are actually underage, and I invite you ladies and gentlemen of the jury to consider what kind of 14 year old this was. This was a girl wearing braces on her teeth and was quite a child at 14. And I felt that she was very ill served by the British judicial system so I was happy to give her a platform.
I know some people may not have found it interesting, but having had Gary Glitter on, if I had known he was someone with 4000 pictures of young naked girls on his computer, I would not have let him within 50 miles of the RTE studio. So in a sense, by having her on, I was trying to undo an injustice I felt I had done to the Irish public by inflicting on Kenny Live a sleazoid like Gary Glitter.
I mean, Diarmuid Doyle and other people who have suggested it was sleazy television should think long and hard about why you put someone like that on. We certainly did. It wasn't gratuitous tabloid television, it was actually to try and make up perhaps for something that had happened in the past. It certainly wasn't titillating, there was no graphic detail at all. I mean, she told us about Gary Glitter - not on air - while they were on holidays, he would be using his telephoto lens to snap pictures of naked little girls around the pool. It's horrifying to think that pictures like that can end up on the 'Net.
Speaking of voyeurism, one of the more interesting RTE series of late has been RTE Uncovered, in which Clare McKeon exposed her working methods in a way that reflected rather unflatteringly on herself and her staff, and in which Charlie Bird voiced opinions about RTE that many were surprised were broadcast.
They were on a Friday night, so I was always in rehearsal. I saw a bit of Charlie Bird where he was coming back to RTE disconsolate because he hadn't got a scoop. I didn't really see any of the others.
There was an approach to Kenny Live last year to do the programme, and, as it happened, I'd moved onto the Late Late Show anyway, but we refused to do it. I felt that you shouldn't demystify a process too much, it's like a conjurer showing their tricks. I just can't see the logic in it, I think it damages the product.
I don't know whether it damaged Charlie Bird, or whether it damaged Clare McKeon, but there was nothing in it for us. It wasn't going to promote Kenny Live, it was only going to promote the programme RTE Uncovered. There was nothing in it for me to do it, so why should I do it?
Do you think there's an element of selling out your staff in it?
Look, I don't think she was honest. Anyone who tries to tell you that when the cameras are rolling, they don't know they're rolling, is talking nonsense. Of course they do. It's not as if they had a camera hidden up in the lightbulb. The crew is walking around the place! So all you saw was a bit of campology. People campin' around for the cameras.
Now maybe it was real, but I also think those phone calls, say, in Clare McKeon's case, researchers on the phone, it is grossly unfair to the people at the other end to film the conversation without their permission. And if they had their permission, the phone call was not genuine anyway. I just believe it is artificial. I didn't see the point of it.
What's your idea of good TV?
Horizon. Tomorrow's World . . . although I don't want to sound too nerdy. Friends, although I'm very disappointed in the new series. Inspector Morse. Don't tend to watch weekend televison, obviously. I love Have I Got News For You and They Think It's All Over . . . I just wish there was more time. The one thing I would say, and I've said it every year: in the year 2000 I've got to make more time, I've got to de-commit to things. I find that it's hard to say no to things, whether it's something for charity or within RTE or just obliging an old friend. It's always, "It'll only take half an hour". It never takes only a half an hour! n