RTÉ brings online comedy stars to RTÉ2, hoping their fans come too

After an extended hiatus on the RTÉ2 comedy front, a group of Irish comedians known and loved for distributing their videos on social media will soon bring their skills to the public service broadcaster’s screens.

Michael Fry, Seán Burke, Justine Stafford, Emma Doran and Killian Sundermann will feature on No Worries if Not!, a television sketch show starting in September, marking a resumption of sorts in RTÉ's recognition and promotion of rising talent.

There hasn’t been a similar showcase on the channel since Republic of Telly ended in 2016. “That’s where our conversation started. We said we needed another Republic of Telly, in that we need a vehicle for young comedy talent,” says RTÉ director of content Jim Jennings.

Indeed, RTÉ is billing the show to advertisers as a “noisy, fast-paced” combination of Republic of Telly, The Fast Show and Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave. The series, “designed to create virals week after week”, will include “supersized versions” of some of its main contributors’ “classic bits”, alongside “a whole slew” of new sketches and characters, plus a wider cast of diverse comedic voices.

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Jennings says more comedy is “in the pipeline”, with new RTÉ group head of entertainment and music Alan Tyler given a brief to bring in fresh names to RTÉ2. “It is going to take a while, but we are committed to doing more.”

Comedy is risky, he says. “You have to try a lot of things and you have to stick with it, because some of it won’t work and some of it is an acquired taste.”

As a result, comedy development on RTÉ2 was a casualty of funding pressures on the broadcaster, which has almost €100 million less to play with than it did in “the old days”, before the recession and rise of online advertising giants.

The return to a sketch show format is certainly better late than never. Pandemic lockdowns might have been light on laughs overall, but as Stafford noted at RTÉ's new season launch event on Thursday, it was a rich period for the phenomenon of the (often solo) online comedy video.

With the stars of No Worries if Not! having amassed many fans, all thanks to their own ingenuity — and several already boasting reliably hilarious recurring characters — the bigger risk to RTÉ would surely come from ignoring this talent, not from putting it on air.