Let us hope that finally, after the recent orgy of navel-gazing about the alleged influence of the Late Late Show, we have heard the last of the bishop and the nightie. Let us hope that we have heard the last of the banal socio-analyses which suggest that, had it not been for Mr Gay Byrne and his show, we would be incapable of boiling an egg or operating a flush toilet.
Gaybo is gone. We will survive. The Late Late may or may not continue. It doesn't matter. The Late Late is/was a talk show, no more and no less. The most remarkable thing about it is that it ran for 37 years, 36 years longer than it would run if it were starting today. Maybe it is time for a little judicious revisionism.
We are led to believe that the Late Late was not merely essential to our ability to stand on our hind legs but was always unmissable. In my experience it was never any good except when you didn't see it. You could sit week after week watching a monotonous parade of mediocrities and then, Lent over and your penance completed, the one week you skipped out to the pub, nobody would talk about anything else except what happened on the Late Late.
This suggested that either you were unlucky to always go out on the wrong nights, or the Late Late was never as scintillating in reality as it was subsequently remembered. I suspect the latter. It was afterwards, in the days following certain shows, rather than on the screen on Saturday or, later, Friday night, that the legend was created.
Of course, until relatively recently nobody expected the Late Late to be anything other than a mildly diverting talk show. Its "importance" was not an issue until the 1980s, when it was adapted as part of the apparatus of modernisation employed to propel us forward from the Stygian blackness of pre-television Ireland. It then became the main springboard used to catapult us out of a mythical and distorted version of our past, deliberately caricatured to provide the maximum quality of propulsion. Since reality was much more complex than this caricature required, it was necessary for those who sought to bring about certain changes in Irish society to manipulate the evidence so as to increase our desire to "progress", mainly by making the past seem as uninviting as possible.
It is even taken half seriously by some people that, as Oliver J. Flanagan once jokingly put it in a Dail speech, "there was no sex in Ireland until Teilifis Eireann went on the air", i.e. that the forces of darkness had the nation by the short and curlies in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. In truth, there was far more sex in Ireland before the Late Late, if only because people had nothing else to do in the long evenings. The relevant fertility rates over recent decades suggest that people started having less sex from about the time Teilifis Eireann came on the air.
A researcher on the Late Late once told me how, when he compiled a selection of the programme's greatest hits for some anniversary or other, he was afterwards assailed by people wondering why he had not included the episode known as the bishop and the nightie. He asked them if they knew what this item entailed, and they responded with claims that it was one of the seminal moments in Irish television history. Yes, he said, but do you know that in the episode of the bishop and the nightie there was no bishop and no nightie?
All that occurred on the screen on the night in February 1966, when this stirring tale of modern Ireland unfolded, was that a woman, taking part in a light-hearted party-game based on the Mr and Mrs format "borrowed" from another TV station, when asked what colour nightie she had been wearing on the night of her honeymoon, replied "none", before quickly adding "white".
It can hardly have been news, even in the more "traditional" parts of Ireland, in 1966, that people sometimes took their clothes off before going to bed, but this did not prevent the Bishop of Clonfert from immediately contacting the Sunday newspapers to inform them that he would be preaching a sermon in Loughrea on the following day in which he would denounce the Late Late Show as immoral and request his flock not to watch it again. The newspapers insisted on presenting this as a major moral confrontation, giving it front-page lead status on Sunday and Monday.
On the night of the programme, only three people rang the station to complain about the item, and two of these were exercised because the idea had been ripped off from another TV network. Thus, only one person in the country felt sufficiently morally outraged by the item to pick up a telephone and complain, and that was the secretary of the Bishop of Clonfert. Only through the intervention of the media did the event become one of the ground-breaking episodes in the creation of modern Ireland.
There is a clinical name for this condition - False Memory Syndrome - which is what has led us to believe that the Late Late was "important". Something banal would be said on the show, and some publicity-hungry cleric or county councillor would make it into a federal issue. A "national debate" would then ensue about the decline in moral values or some such nonsense. This suited the agenda of the modernisers because the impression was thus given that they were hard at work confronting the dark forces, when in reality nobody but a handful of lunatics was in the slightest bit bothered. The Late Late did not, as is suggested, "open up" Irish society; what it "opened up", more often than not, were the mouths of some of our more ridiculous public figures.
The next most "infamous" incident occurred just six weeks after the bishop and the nightie programme, when a student referred to the Bishop of Galway as a "moron". Big haw. Hold the front page. They did. Behold the quality of intellectual debate which brought this modern Ireland of yours into existence. Apart from these two episodes, both of which occurred 33 years ago, most people would be hard pressed to name more than one or two memorable items out of the whole 37 years. Thus, if we are to judge from what we "remember" about it, the alleged "influence" of the Late Late Show was all over and done with within five years of first going on air.
Indeed, the bishop and the nightie affair was regarded as such a seminal feature of Ireland's socio-sexual development that, in the late 1970s, when RTE was spring-cleaning its vaults, that programme, along with virtually all other Late Lates over the previous two decades, was wiped. It is probably just as well for those seeking to elevate the importance of Gaybo and his show that nothing of these supposedly earth-shaking episodes is preserved: had they survived, we would today be able to perceive their utter tedium and banality.