45 Ryan Tubridy

Somewhere, deep in the pancreas of RTE is a memo which goes something like this: ‘If Gay Byrne’s contribution was to the modernization of Irish society, that of his successor must be to its postmodernization.’ Since there is dispute among cultural commentators about the precise meaning of the term, we should perhaps declare that an Irish postmodernist is someone who doesn’t give a shite about anything. In television terms, it is someone with a talent for running up and down steps carrying a phallus-shaped microphone, asking ‘wacky’ questions of the audience.

RTE, like most organizations in today’s Ireland, is run by fogeys of various ages, mostly the older variety, who desire, above all, to hold on to their positions of influence. But there is a problem: all these Young People are drifting about out there and feck knows what they’d be thinking about. All we know is they like comedy, drink, Internet chatrooms, headbanging music and drugs that make them jump about uncontrollably. Obviously, whoever would inherit the mantle of the Great Gaybo should be someone with some clue about what makes them feckers ‘tick’. The fogeys’ objective was to give the younger generations influence without power, so that fogeyism could remain in control until well into the third millennium.

Pat Kenny was half-right when, before he took it on and spent a decade driving it into the ground, he said that, following Gaybo’s departure, The Late Late should be ‘parked’. In fact, it should have been clamped, towed away, stripped to its chassis and melted down for scrap.

The ethos of The Late Late, up until the end of the second millennium, implied some level of concern about Irish society. For The Late Late to prosper, it was necessary for the audience to believe that Ireland was something more than a piece of ground on which various activities – work, drinking, dancing, sex – might take place. But nobody will ever again care as much about Ireland as the post-emergency generations who wasted their youths talking about it, and no future presenter of The Late Late could possibly tolerate the level of hype which Uncle Gaybo, acting as Father Confessor to this obsessive generation, brought to bear on the subject.

There was a time, coinciding with the heyday of The Late Late, when it was possible to talk without irony about television having an ‘impact’ on something called ‘Irish society’. Now it is not possible to talk without irony about anything. To retain credibility as a Young Person today, it is essential that you know as little as possible about issues of public importance. Knowing the name of the incumbent Taoiseach, never mind the names of his predecessors, is a complete no-no. Young people today don’t give a blogger’s fart about ‘Irish society’, still less know why they should spend their Friday nights watching it being impacted upon. Neither do they believe television has any business conducting ‘debates’. Television is there to make you laugh, to sell you things, to dull the ache in your left temple, to keep boredom at bay and to sober you up for the next party. This condition, which once we would have called apathy, has been formed largely by the fogeys’ determination to devolve use of the media without devolving power. To maintain fogery in power, the coming generation of fogeys is to be given fame without influence, to be allowed on television but not to put it to any use. And this suits the young fogeys fine.

Ryan Tubridy is the answer to the old fogeys’ wet dreams: a young fogey who is interested in the rewards of television without caring much about its power. He is a kind of postmodern Gaybo in that he has the patter down pat and much better than Pat.

Even before he got the job, Ryan Tubridy talked about not wanting to have ‘long-winded current affairs debates’ on his Late Late. Then, in the next breath, he insisted that he was a serious guy. Tubridy is extremely bright, in the sense that he has a sharp intelligence and a natural curiosity. He is extraordinarily, genuinely, likeable, and this allows him to get away with things almost nobody else could. His personality conceals how hard he has worked to make himself look like a natural. He also knows something about stuff – politics, books, movies, celebrity fluff – but perhaps not enough about anything to be really lethal. On the debit side, he seems far too concerned about what people think of him, especially people of his own generation, most of whom he seems to think brighter than himself. This creates a wariness of depth that causes his hoe more often to merely scratch the surface of things, where Gaybo’s cut deep and sure. This tendency has emerged in his very first programme, in an interview with the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, when Tubridy seemed more interested in asking hard questions than getting interesting answers.

In his very first show as Late Late presenter, in September 2009, he interviewed Brian Cowen, on the defensive after a rough fifteen months as Taoiseach. It was, on the surface, an uncompromising interview. Tubridy asked several are-you-still-beating-your-wife questions. Was he sorry for anything? Would he apologize for his mistakes? Was that an apology or not? Cowen was asked about NAMA and Bertie’s perfect timing and whether he, Cowen, actually enjoyed being Taoiseach. Did he ever wake up and ask, ‘Why me?’

But often it seemed that Tubridy was asking questions for the sake of asking them, rather than for the answers – as though he wanted above all to avoid the accusation that he had dodged putting his man on the spot. A potentially car-crash question about the Taoiseach’s drinking came wrapped up in a standard ‘what-do-you-say-to-those-who . . .?’ formulation, with Tubridy fingering a Sunday newspaper for already raising the issue, and then all but apologizing for asking. Was he, he wondered aloud, annoying Cowen? Maybe, he mused just as Cowen started to answer, it was too personal a question? It was impossible to avoid the suspicion that Tubridy seemed to want to retain Cowen’s affections more than he needed to get real answers. And yet, the ostensible impression was of a tough interview in which Cowen was asked things he hadn’t been asked before.

The core problem with Tubridy is that he seems to be aware mainly of the prestige and celebrity status of his position as Late Late host, as opposed to having a sense of the meaning and importance of the show as a cultural lever. He wants to be an Irish Letterman, but without any sense of what, other than imitation, this might involve. Tubridy always wanted to be a broadcaster, but it is as yet by no means clear what he wanted to be a broadcaster for. There is no sense of a mission, other than to be ‘on the radio’ or ‘on the telly’, saying stuff. He is extremely good at it, at effecting an impersonation of a great broadcaster operating at the centre of his society, but he has yet to discover what he wants to do with that power.

In this he is quintessentially representative of his generation, which is fascinated with the cultural mechanisms it inherited but unable to put them to any use. Tubridy will never become the greatest Irish broadcaster of the twenty-first century by coasting in the slipstream created by the giants who preceded him, never taking anything seriously enough to seem ‘uncool’. He may go on being able to fake it for a while. But unless, while that red light glows, he engages with the stuff of the society – the very things that, glancing towards his gallery, he dismisses as ‘long-winded’ – he will never be anything but a magpie who picks up fascinating thoughts, looks at them in wry wonder and throws them away. And in a while it will show. Nobody will be able to say what the problem is, but one day people will begin to mutter that Ryan Tubridy, who once seemed so promising, has become sooo yesterday.