10 Gay Byrne

When, at the end of the twentieth century, Gay Byrne retired as host of The Late Late Show, his departure was attended by a predictable avalanche of commentary focused on his contribution to the ‘modernization’ of Irish society. Reading account after account of how Gay Byrne had led Ireland out of the depths of Stygian blackness, it was difficult to keep stifling the yawns. For anyone reading such treatises would have been driven to the conclusion that, were it not for Gaybo and his Late Late, the people of Ireland would have been incapable of boiling an egg or operating a flush toilet. And not merely was The Late Late essential to our ability to stand unaided on our hind legs, but it was always unmissable.

In fact, The Late Late 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 you could be sure that nobody would talk about anything else except what had 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 was subsequently ‘remembered’. 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, in the beginning 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 modernization employed to propel us forward from the ignorance of pre-television Ireland. It then became the main springboard used to catapult us out of a mythical and distorted version of our past, which had been 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’ by making the past seem as revolting as possible.

It is even taken half seriously by some people, that, as the Fine Gael TD Oliver J. Flanagan once jokingly put it in a Dail speech, ‘there was no sex in Ireland until Teilifis Eireann went on the air’. 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. Declining fertility rates in recent decades suggest that people started having less sex from about the time The Late Late Show went on the air.

A researcher on The Late Late once related 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 precisely what this item entailed, and they responded with claims that this 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 a 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 most ‘traditional’ parts of Ireland, in 1966, that people sometimes took their clothes off before going to bed together, 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 the issue as a major moral confrontation, and the story was a front-page lead on Sunday and Monday. On the night of the programme, only three people rang the station to complain about the broadcast, 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 this person was the secretary of the Bishop of Clonfert. Only through the intervention of the media did the event become one of the groundbreaking episodes in the creation of modern Ireland. 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 ensue about the decline in moral values or some such nonsense. This suited the agenda of the modernizers 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 ample mouths of some of the more ridiculous of our public figures. 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 particular 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: if it was, we would today be able to perceive their utter tedium and banality.

So, when we talk about the importance of Gay Byrne’s contribution to Irish society, we should be a little more specific. The change was not so much in the reality of Ireland as in the public perception of it. The change was that we began to say what was going on, in public, on live television, rather than simply thinking it or muttering about it among ourselves. The change was in the nature of talk, rather than in the nature of events. Those who celebrate the influence of The Late Late are celebrating themselves and the success of their particular agenda.

And, yet, nobody could look back at the vast span of Gay Byrne’s broadcasting career and declare him an uncritical proponent of modernization in the crude sense that some of his eulogizers have implied. Gay Byrne was and is a complicated man, a broadcaster who was driven first of all by the desire to make interesting radio and television programmes. He did not, as is now suggested, set out to manipulate the material of a society in flux in order to bring about change more rapidly than would otherwise have occurred. He would also be the first to propose that some of the ‘opening up’ he is credited with facilitating has had as many baneful consequences as beneficial ones.