Patrick Kielty prepares for Late Late Toy Show debut, as RTÉ flagship recovers from behind-the-scenes clashes

Everyone who was lucky enough to win the raffle for tickets for The Late Late Toy Show will arrive at RTÉ on Friday night to be corralled into a waiting area before entering a gadget-filled Christmas wonderland of a studio. The waiting area is an anonymous, corridor-like room with floor-to-ceiling windows down one side, overlooking what is left of the broadcaster’s Donnybrook campus.

There’s not much here. Just a fridge where the audience’s preshow beverages will be waiting and a noticeboard displaying the Late Late Toy Show child-protection guidelines, which run to several pages. On a break from preparing for his regular Friday-night gig and this monolith of a television programme, Patrick Kielty walks in wearing a blue jumper and that familiar cheeky smile. We sit facing each other across a desk. It feels a bit like a job interview, but anything like that is long behind the Co Down man, who landed the biggest job in Irish television early this summer, following Ryan Tubridy’s decision to step down after 14 years as host.

Having presented 10 Late Late Shows so far, Kielty is under no illusions about the importance of the one that’s happening this Friday night. The Toy Show is a thoroughly Irish institution, albeit one with a global reputation and an audience among the diaspora. Kielty remembers a few years ago being backstage at a television show that his wife, Cat Deeley, was presenting in Los Angeles. The head of Fox quizzed him about this homegrown spectacle. “You’re Irish, aren’t you?” Kielty drawls, imitating the big shot who collared him. “Can you talk to me about the Toy Show? It’s like a phenomenon. Do you think it could work here in America?”

So how is Kielty feeling in the run-up to the biggest gig of his season so far? It is, he says, a good-news story. “You’re in the middle of the biggest party this country ever throws. It’s a national event; there’s nothing like it in the world. So if you can’t enjoy that then there’s something wrong. There’s still a responsibility there. But it’s exciting.”

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He can’t offer much detail about the show’s content, even though he has been wheeled out today to talk to the media about it. “There’s a Toy Show office and the door is locked,” he says. “I’m hosting the show and even I have to knock three times to get into the room.” He grins as he confirms that he is being “tortured” for Toy Show tickets by all-comers, “from boys doing work on the house” – he and Deeley, who has been presenting This Morning, the flagship British daytime-TV show, are having their home in London renovated – “to people I can’t name who work on TV to random people who think I might just have some on my person.”

He has only ever changed his phone number once and jokes that the Toy Show ticket torture “was nearly the second time”. He likens it to the clamour for tickets for the All-Ireland Final “when you’re playing in the match”.

How’s he dealing with it? He smiles. “Look, there’s about 20 WhatsApp messages on my phone that haven’t been answered. I’m just not engaging.”

Frustratingly, Kielty is allowed to say little about what viewers should expect by way of themes or costumes or dance numbers. “I definitely will be ditching the normal suit. The costume department have been working hard – there’s been the odd inside-leg measurement. There’ll be singing, I’m dancing, so let’s see,” he says. “I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. That’s what’s terrifying.”

His sons with Deeley, Milo and James, are seven and five, “so really in that Christmas sweet spot”, but he’s not sure they’ll be coming over from London to see Daddy transform into the nation’s newest Toy Man. “It’s baby steps. I don’t want them to think that’s my job every week, that I’ve got a hotline to Santa Claus. That won’t help with the tidy-your-room conversations.”

Few could doubt that Kielty will be a natural on the Toy Show: the 52-year-old has the comedy chops, the charm and the energy to make the institution his own. A more intriguing conversation is the wider evolution of The Late Late Show, which has long occupied a singular, almost sacred place in Irish television. For six decades the programme has been up there with the weather and the Catholic Church as a topic Irish people never tire of discussing. As one Irish television insider puts it, “The weather is now global; the church is irrelevant. If we don’t have The Late Late Show to give out about, are we even Irish any more?”

The show’s reputation has been shaken in the past 12 months, first with the failure of Toy Show the Musical, the stage production that RTÉ mounted last Christmas, which lost the broadcaster just over €2 million, and then, soon after Tubridy’s departure, a summer-long RTÉ scandal about payments to that presenter.

[ Toy Show the Musical: Behind the curtain of the RTÉ ‘flop’ that left children in tears over cancelled shows ]

When Kielty took over as host, 830,000 people tuned in for the first show, in which he addressed RTÉ’s dirty linen in his opening remarks and welcomed the former president Mary McAleese as a guest. He has been deemed a success as host by commentators, even if the line-ups, particularly the recurring three-person panels of assorted celebrities, have come in for criticism.

Ratings have since inevitably flattened out, hovering around 400,000-450,000 for subsequent programmes. The raucous annual Late Late Show Country Music Special, which was right up Kielty’s boreen, reached an audience of 568,000, and ratings have continued to compare favourably to Tubridy’s final season. (Kielty’s Late Late is, mercifully, half an hour shorter than The Late Late Show of old, a new running time that in any assessment of the figures has to be taken into account.)

The programme has been beset by rumours of tensions behind the scenes between RTÉ’s head of entertainment, Alan Tyler, and The Late Late Show’s former executive producer. Jane Murphy, who oversaw the relaunch of Kielty’s Late Late (and was one of the people behind the ill-fated Toy Show the Musical), left after four episodes with no explanation given. That she was awarded the Late Late gig had raised some eyebrows around RTÉ, a hotbed of Toy Show the Musical-related schadenfreude. It’s worth pointing out that Toy Show the Musical always had the full support of the organisation’s top brass. One source, a veteran of Irish television, says senior RTÉ management “drank the Toy Show the Musical Kool-Aid; they gargled it. They thought it was invincible.”

The source says it is a testament to Murphy’s production pedigree that even “with her fingerprints on Toy Show the Musical, she was still deemed the best person to take the helm of the Late Late when Patrick Kielty was appointed”.

Since taking on Late Late duties in 2019, Murphy and her team were also responsible for the reinvention and rejuvenation of the programme during what might now be called the Tubridy glory years. She navigated it through the choppy waters of Covid-19, when many viewers turned to the Late Late as a sort of port in the pandemic storm – also donating millions of euro to its charity fundraisers during those seemingly endless locked-down weeks.

[ Hugh Linehan on Patrick Kielty’s Late Late Show: The host is excellent. Everything else ... not so much ]

Tyler, a former BBC executive, was appointed RTÉ’s head of entertainment in May. Like Murphy, the Scot has an impressive production pedigree. His BBC credits include hits such as Strictly Come Dancing and All Round to Mrs Brown’s. But in 2011 he was also one of the people behind Don’t Scare the Hare, a bizarre Saturday-night gameshow in which contestants had to navigate tasks without frightening an animatronic hare. Tyler said at the time that it “cleverly captures the spirit and fun of interactive family video games that has been sweeping the nation”. But it didn’t appeal to viewers and was hit by technical problems that included an out-of-control robot that kept banging its head against the studio walls. The show was cancelled after only three episodes had aired.

Don’t Scare the Hare aside, Tyler is the man who landed Kielty for the Late Late and persuaded RTÉ management that the comedian was the best man for the job. The hire went down well with viewers – and even social-media naysayers seemed pleased. Tyler, who has worked with Kielty before, on a range of UK TV shows, deserves recognition for pursuing the presenter when others might have thought he was out of reach.

“It is to Tyler’s credit that when finding a new presenter they looked outside the car park. The response to that opening show would have been very different if another face from the canteen was the presenter,” a source says.

Tyler has also been cultivating new talent in RTÉ and opening up slots for new shows that are “by and large” working, according to the source. On the other hand, “to say his management style is causing headaches would be an understatement”. The source also says Tyler has been described as “the best and worst thing to happen to RTÉ in years”.

Until this season The Late Late Show had, perhaps uniquely at the broadcaster, the freedom to chart its own course. Multiple sources say that, as head of entertainment, Tyler is much more hands-on, sitting in the gallery during transmission and being heavily involved in decisions about content. One source says that as soon as Kielty arrives in RTÉ each week – sometimes on a Monday, sometimes in the middle of the week – he is “shadowed” by Tyler or a colleague. “The micromanaging is off the charts.”

Jane Murphy declined to speak to The Irish Times about her departure. Tyler was also unavailable.

RTÉ says the relaunch of its “flagship entertainment show“ was “of course overseen by the group head of entertainment, music and comedy, working with the Late Late Show team. It’s particularly important with such a long-running show that we take a fresh look at what the audience wants for their Friday nights with their new host. Part of this process involves the programme team asking itself challenging questions and challenging conventional approaches.”

One source familiar with the way that relationship played out says Tyler and Murphy are both strong personalities and “there wasn’t room for two gunslingers on that show”. Murphy was used to the autonomy that previous Late Late producers had enjoyed. There’s a view that the programme is more than a piece of entertainment television and so shouldn’t report to the entertainment department, which otherwise makes the likes of Dancing with the Stars and family gameshows.

As one source puts it, “The Late Late Show should report in to a higher being – the director of television; definitely an editorial department. It seems that in the rush for glory associated with getting Paddy [Kielty] there were two incredibly strong flavours in the mix, both with very strong views on how the show should be made, one with a long history of making the show and the other one the boss. If you go up against the boss you generally don’t win.”

The source says it was clashes about guests that ultimately led to Murphy’s departure. On the first show of the season Donie O’Sullivan, CNN’s Kerry-born reporter, had been booked for the show but was replaced, at Tyler’s insistence, by the 2 Johnnies.

“Alan Tyler is smart and has a great track record, but I suppose if you’re looking for a weakness it’s the outsider sensibility. Anyone who knows Irish television would tell you that Donie O’Sullivan was a better booking than the 2 Johnnies,” he says.

RTÉ points out that “Alan lives and works in Ireland. The idea that his nationality impacts his professional ability is at best ill-informed. Experience of other markets brings only benefit to Irish audiences.”

There’s also the fact that, for programmes such as the Late Late, the show producers start with on a Monday can change rapidly during the week. “You are fighting fires,” a source says. “The 2 Johnnies were available and put in front of them. In a way, having a fairly average line-up on the first show was smart, because that first show was the star of the show. But if you wanted to pick an incident that best exemplifies the difference between Tyler and Murphy, Donie vs the 2 Johnnies was it.”

RTÉ says that the Late Late “continues to deliver content that is entertaining, important and quintessentially Irish” and that it’s delighted “audiences have connected so strongly with the new host and new iteration of the show”. It adds that all of the programmes Tyler has commissioned or relaunched, including Love in the Country, The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In and Rose of Tralee, “have attracted big audiences to competitive slots and connected very strongly with target audiences”.

Back to the Late Late waiting area. This is not Kielty’s first rodeo. He is canny enough to neatly evade questions about these tensions behind the scenes. He says he has never worked on the Late Late before so can’t compare this season to any other. He points out that it operates in similar ways to other shows he has worked on. He cautions against comparing Late Late Show eras. “We’re now in a time of 24-hour rolling news and of talk radio. By the time that the show comes on air on a Friday night, a lot of those conversations have been hashed and rehashed,” he says. “And so, as a production, you know, you’re very much sitting there going, ‘What can we add by Friday night?’”

The choice of guests on recent shows – Tony Blair’s former adviser Alastair Campbell and Katriona O’Sullivan, the author of Poor – may suggest that the programme has now bedded in, perhaps becoming something closer to Kielty’s original vision that it should be like the nation’s parlour.

Many regard The Late Late Show as an agenda-setting programme that should be protected. “It’s the crown jewels,” says one source, who also expresses a concern that higher-ups at the broadcaster have been distracted by the fallout from Tubsgate, which now encompasses the cutting of up to 400 jobs that RTÉ announced this week.

In the past, although perhaps not so much with Tubridy – who announced on Thursday that he has moved to London to present a weekday programme on Virgin Radio UK – important and engaging debates have raged on The Late Late Show around topical, newsworthy issues. Smart and well-informed, Kielty is well able for challenging discussions. There was a hope among some observers that his version of the show might have ushered in a few more of those water-cooler moments, but that has not been the case so far.

“I mean, where are those great Late Late Show rows?” a source remarks. “The rows this season have all been in the office.”

That might be so, but on Friday night any remaining workplace tensions will be put to one side. The prize available to Kielty, as he heads into his first Toy Show, is to become the second-best Late Late Show presenter in the programme’s long and storied history – no shade on Kielty, but even he’d probably accept that Gay Byrne will never be bested.

As Toy Show hosts, each of the previous three presenters had his own style. Byrne, in his Christmas jumpers and slacks, spoke to children as though they were his usual guests. “He talked to them all as if they were Billy Connolly,” Kielty says fondly. Pat Kenny, he assesses, was all “facts and science”, while Tubridy took the programme to all-singing, all-dancing heights. What will Kielty bring?

“I think my take on it has to be the joke’s on me…The kids are the star of the show,” he says. One of his best and earliest memories of watching the Toy Show as a kid is of seeing Byrne squirt a water pistol into the audience. That’s the kind of atmosphere Kielty wants to create. “It’s that thing where the kids are in charge. Coming in and doing your first show, my whole feeling is, you know, okay, guys, how do we do this? That’s what I’m hoping for. There’s a lot of moving parts and lots of best-laid plans on the night, but I don’t think you can try and make it too polished. You’ve got to roll with the punches. And go and have fun.” Just don’t bother asking him for tickets.

The Late Late Toy Show is on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 9.35pm on Friday, November 24th