It was just another Saturday night on Kenny Live and your host was chatting to B*witched, the teenage pop stars who suck on ice pops in their videos and warble about rollercoasters and boys and stuff. Pat Kenny's hair was neatly combed, nonchalantly sprayed with just the right amount of lacquer and his make-up perfectly applied. Despite being fiftysomething, no one can say Pat Kenny can't get down with the young people.
Girls, he said, with what almost passed for a laddish grin playing about his lips. Girls. I've just come back from Australia and did you know the paws of Koala Bears are exactly like a human's fingertips. The girls, God love them, didn't know whether to giggle or gag. It was a perfect Alan Partridge moment and Kenny plays him so well.
Kenny is the most powerful broadcaster in Ireland, according to the RTE Guide, and it says volumes for the station that its broadcasting giant could effortlessly fill in for Steve Coogan's comic creation, the tacky, cheesy, fictitious TV presenter, Alan Partridge. Next week he fulfills a long-held ambition to claim Friday night television for himself, replacing Gay Byrne on the newly revamped Late Late Show. In Alan Partridge-speak: "Knowing-me-Pat-Kenny, knowing-you-the-biggest-TVaudience-it's-possible-to-get-in-thisrelatively-tiny-market. Aha!" Well that's the plan. If Kenny is to match Byrne's audience he will need to persuade about 200,000 more viewers than watched Kenny Live on Saturday nights to tune in to see him step into the veteran broadcaster's shoes. Kenny's producer on the Late Late Show, Colm O'Callaghan, acknowledges the enormity of the task: "Gay Byrne was an institution and we are under no illusions about that," he says. Kenny himself admits it will be a challenge.
Kenny begins this new stage in a long and varied career as the second choice of the RTE decision-makers, according to one informed source, who confirms earlier reports that it was comedian Patrick Kielty who was at the top of RTE's weekend viewing shopping list. "RTE wanted Kielty on either Friday or Saturday night at any cost," he said. "If Kielty had wanted Friday night they would have jumped at it and left Kenny Live in the Saturday night slot. But he said No, so Kenny got it."
This is denied by Kevin Linehan, Head of Variety at RTE, who says that the talks with Kielty ended before it was decided to retain the Late Late Show format. "We did explore other avenues when looking for a presenter but we came to the conclusion that Pat Kenny's mix of skills and experience were best suited to the Late Late," he said.
The first few weeks of the new show will be crucial, and to give Kenny the easiest ride possible, the programmes preceding the Late Late on RTE1 will encourage a big audience, while over on Network 2, the schedule offers very little to switch over for. The new Saturday night show will not begin until October, giving the Late Late a clear run at the weekend audience for several weeks.
Meanwhile, the show's backroom team (basically the Kenny Live team with just one original Late Late researcher, Wil Hanafin) is busy ensuring a line-up that will cause a stir. Optimum interviewees are Charlie Haughey. Or Bishop Casey. What is more likely - and more in keeping with Kenny Live - is that they will try to wow the new audience with some kind of major international star.
"If he hadn't got the gig he would have been devastated," says one colleague of the man who has long been openly obsessed with when Gay Byrne would retire. "But the real reason he wanted the slot was that he had been working six days a week for so long that he wanted to be able to spend more time with his family, to be able to go away for the weekend or to go for a few pints with his mates on a Saturday night."
So, to whom it concerns, here is your host Pat Kenny, the working class son of an elephant keeper who became famous courtesy of those old-fashioned traits: talent, ambition and hard work. If he wasn't where he is now, he would be a chemical engineer or college professor, employing the same precision and high standards in the laboratory or lecture hall as he does in the studio. He is not used to failure, which is why it must have irked him so much that Gay Byrne stood in the way of his ultimate ambition for so many years.
He grew up in Infirmary Road, close to Dublin Zoo, and was educated by the Christian Brothers - he was a diligent student, leaving school with top marks and winning a scholarship to study chemical engineering at UCD. He spent 1968 in Atlanta, Georgia after gaining another scholarship to study thermodynamics there. Returning to Ireland, he took up a lecturing post at Bolton Street College in Dublin but auditioned for RTE in 1972 and - he never fails - was plucked from 500 applicants to join Montrose.
At RTE he quickly made a splash, heading up a number of innovative current affairs and music programmes including Night Bus, Week in Week Out and Public Account. His first TV appearance was in a children's show which Kenny is not proud of, but it was "only seen by mums and kids, thank God," he said at the time, showing early promise in the how-to-offend-your-audience stakes.
On radio he emerged as "a crisp, competent and extremely talented" performer, according to a fellow radio veteran. His popularity was enhanced by his bachelor-about-town image; once when an interviewer asked him how he managed to look so perfect, he replies. "I can't help it". On Today Tonight, he honed his image as a serious broadcaster, but when, in the 1980s, a chance came for a chat-show he jumped in, motivated by bigger earnings and the prospect of becoming an even brighter star.
The ill-conceived show failed, but over the past 15 years he had married his wife Kathy (they live in Dalkey with their two children) had his own morning radio show Today with Pat Kenny and presented Kenny Live, a show that garnered around half the share of the viewers every Saturday night. The personal life of this broadcasting institution took a blow this summer with tabloid revelations that he had fathered a child with another woman before he had met Kathy. The news, thankfully, was greeted by the general public with a bored "so what".
Among TV critics, the general consensus is that Kenny is a stiff and uncomfortable performer on the box. "Hopefully he will move about a bit more on the Late Late," said one. "It might make him more relaxed." Despite his position in RTE, one colleague said he was "very insecure, very jumpy and very sensitive to criticism . . . being seen to be number one is vitally important to him".
He was prepared to take a libel action against Eamon Dunphy, who penned an article about him - and that ended up costing the Sunday Independent a rumoured £70,000 when the case was settled out of court. Dunphy hasn't changed his contentious views. "He is not taken seriously by a lot of people," he says. "It's as though he wants to be one of the lads when he is really the class swot."