After a summer of wall-to-wall coverage about Patrick Kielty’s imminent arrival as the new host of The Late Late Show, based at least in part on the premise (not dispelled by RTÉ management) that the programme was the flagship and pinnacle of Irish broadcasting, we are now seven shows into his first season. So how’s it going?
First, Kielty is excellent. He has a rapport with the audience, a stand-up’s talent for the ad-lib, a general likability and obvious intelligence. The only area in which he seems a little lacking is in one-to-one interviews with the likes of Carl Frampton, the boxer, or Juno Dawson, the author, when he appears reluctant to ask awkward questions. Not that his predecessor did much of that either.
Everything else, unfortunately, feels a little off. The unsatisfactory spatial relationships of the set mean presenter and guests still need to contort themselves to look each other in the eye. And the camera choices too often lag a beat behind what’s happening on set.
With four segments and three ad breaks over 90 minutes, the pacing is also odd, with the final item in particular often feeling rushed. That isn’t helped by the new diktat requiring multiple guests to be on air together whenever possible. The Late Late has always aspired towards the style of its American counterparts, and this ad-heavy format does that, but not in a good way; the American shows have higher production values, tighter scripting (there’s a reason they all went off air during the writers’ strike) and a different calibre of guest.
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The guests remain a problem. If reports are to be believed, the departure of Jane Murphy, the programme’s executive producer, just four weeks into the new season was due to disagreements over guest policy. Some sources suggested tensions between Murphy and Kielty, while others reported Murphy was unhappy about interference by RTÉ’s head of entertainment, Alan Tyler, who insisted on the last-minute replacement of the CNN journalist Donie O’Sullivan by the 2 Johnnies on the season opener, on September 15th. There are also rumours of internal grumbling within RTÉ about the hiring of a UK celebrity-booking agency to secure some bigger names.
Whatever the truth of all this, the guest list is still uninspiring. If it continues in this vein, Ireland’s standing army of comedians will be so depleted that by January they’ll have to introduce conscription. It may be a sign of jitters that the new policy of not flagging guests in advance was jettisoned so the nation could be alerted to the impending appearance of the Belgian action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme, who has rarely troubled the box office since the 1990s. Pairing him with the soccer legend Liam Brady added to the sense of randomness that has never been far away this season.
Unsurprisingly, ratings have declined from a bumper audience of 830,000 on the first show of the season to 432,000 on October 20th (a tough evening, given that 500,000 viewers were watching Argentina play New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup semi-final on RTÉ2; if Ireland had been playing that night, the Late Late might have recorded its worst-ever figures). Were the number to settle around 400,000-450,000, matching what Ryan Tubridy was achieving in his final season, that would be a win for RTÉ. If the downward trajectory continues, alarm bells will start ringing. All of this is being watched closely by the advertisers who spend between €3.5 million and €4.7 million a year on the show, not counting sponsorships or The Late Late Toy Show (which brings in €1 million on its own).
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Will the new format bed in successfully? The plan seems clear: ditch the personal-tragedy stories; play to the host’s strengths by emphasising comedy skits; keep it zippy. If they sort out the staging problems it might even work. But it isn’t The Late Late Show, which in all its incarnations, from the bishop and the nightie to the lockdown specials, had a particular type of Irish bagginess, a willingness to let the item breathe a little (sometimes too much).
There’s not much point in mourning its passing. The old-style, long-form Late Late had run its course. The question remains, though, whether RTÉ has the resources, the technical firepower or, most of all, the guests to make this new one work.
