Ryan Tubridy has been an RTÉ fixture for over 20 years, but his appearances before two Oireachtas committees over a six-hour marathon are history-making even by his standards.
He’s here, of course, to help disentangle confusion around his finances, RTÉ's sponsorship, the deal with Renault and the issue of a mystery invoice sent to anonymous UK companies.
But it also quickly becomes apparent that Tubridy has come to Government buildings to remind us that, cancelled or not, he remains the master of a cheesy aphorism. The Tubstalk overfloweth throughout his testimony before the Public Accounts Committee and the Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media Committee.
“My relationship with the children of Ireland is so important to me. I want them to be happy,” he tells the PAC when the subject of the Late Late Toy Show is raised. Later, he informs the politicians, “When you’ve been publicly cancelled the way I’ve been, it’s not been easy”.
He saves the finest for the final hour of his gruelling afternoon testimony to the media committee. “Yes, the salary is enormous,” he says, “But this doesn’t affect my soul”. Kendall Roy couldn’t have put it better. Tubs has, in real-time, turned into a character from Succession.
Tubridy’s work as a presenter has two settings – super-jaunty and hyper-sincere. Nobody wants jauntiness from one of Ireland’s best-paid broadcasters, so the hyper-sincerity bubbles up.
There is, Tubridy says, “a fog of confusion” over his remuneration (he is flanked by his agent Noel Kelly, also grilled at length). He speaks in the grave tones he typically deploys when interviewing a politician or trying to get a child on the Late Late Toy Show to say something nice about Ed Sheeran (concealed inside a nearby Wendy house).
Soon, though, he turns Total Tubs and opens the spigot by talking about “decent citizens taking my shoulder and my elbow”. The citizens, we gather, are shaking his hand rather than trying to rip his arm off in outrage.
By the afternoon session, Tubridy is visibly tiring. That cowlick hair has wilted, and his face has started to sink into itself. There are jowls where, just that morning, no jowls existed. The colour palette has meanwhile expanded to include the new shade of “Tubridy grey”.
As telly, it isn’t exactly riveting. It doesn’t help that Kelly becomes the dominant voice, with Tubridy deferring to him on financial matters. Soon, it’s the Noel Kelly Experience.
Barter accounts, invoices, travelling roadshows for Renault – it isn’t that your eyes glaze over so much as your soul begins to shrivel. What started as Tubridygate becomes a Bizarre Tubs Triangle – a maze of speechifying, denials and saccharine verbiage.
Violins strike up now and then. “It’s hard to leave the house,” explains Tubridy. Later he says: “I don’t know if any of you have been cancelled before, but let me tell you, you don’t want to be there.”
By the final curtain, Tubridy is a drooping facsimile of the more enthusiastic figure he cut that morning. He’s tired – the eyes red, the mouth pursed. But he seems to understand the old days are over and that, should he return to Montrose, it will be as a much-diminished presence. “Talent” with a tiny t.
“It’s all changed now,” he says. “And rightly so. If I do go back to RTÉ, which I hope to, it will be a whole new world order.”
