THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: PAT KENNY: PAT KENNY DIDN'T watch Ryan Tubridy's first Late Late Show. Or, at least, he didn't watch it on the Friday night; didn't join the one and a half million people who settled on their sofas with their cups of tea and expectations, writes SHANE HEGARTY
That Friday a fortnight ago, Kenny was instead to be found at the local pizzeria, with his wife Kathy and a group of friends. It wasn't a sour move, but simply a way of emphasising just why he has walked away from the role. "Why give up Friday nights on The Late Late Show," he ponders, "to watch The Late Late Show?"
He caught it instead the next afternoon, an incongruous experience of viewing the Late Latein daylight after pretty much everyone else had seen it, talked about it, read about it. He felt separated from the show, partly because he was watching it after the fact, as a piece of the recent past rather than an unfolding event. There was no fizzle of live television. And there was something else missing. "I had expected in some way to feel some proprietorial sense over The Late Late Show, and I found I had none. Because when I said goodbye, it was the end of a process that had gone on for many months in my own head. Of talking to Kathy and rationalising it and wondering if I was right or wrong. When I announced it on air I knew immediately I had done the right thing. Immediately.The weight lifted off my shoulders was enormous."
A week and a half on, Kenny sits in the Radisson SAS in Stillorgan. The Irish rugby team is wandering around, and he’s already said hello to a couple of them. He’s also identified an empty function room for us, where we sit below a giant chandelier, with a view across the lawn. A window bangs open, so he closes it. “Wouldn’t want that breaking.”
And then he settles into the conversation, seated at an angle. Maybe this reads too much into it, but if the table was absent it would resemble a pastiche of a chat show set.
We're here to talk about the future – he starts a new current affairs show, The Frontline, on Monday night, in the old Questions and Answersslot – but much of the conversation inevitably focuses on the job he's just left. The Late Late Showdefined him in the public consciousness. It probably always will. Ten years, more than 350 shows and a lot of stick at times, so that when you ask him for his memorable moments and he names the likes of Michael Caine, Michael Bublé, Rod Stewart and Ian Paisley you know that there are a lot of people out there who think of less glorious encounters. Maybe they think of the nickname "Pat the Plank", attributed to Eamon Dunphy in the run-up to a nasty collision that would prove Pat was more teak than plywood.
Kenny, though, is affable and enjoyable company. There’s a self-confidence that doesn’t mutate into cockiness. He appears to be more Radio Pat than TV Pat, which is in keeping with what many of his critics have said about him – that he’s an easy target when on air but easy to warm to off it.
HE LOOKS ASfresh as any 61-year-old has the right to – easily a decade younger, in fact. He played squash until 10 years ago, when the knee gave up on him and he had to stop. "That, believe it or not, was more of a wrench than giving up The Late Late Show." He still plays a little tennis, does a bit of swimming, hops on a friend's boat occasionally and walks the dog on Killiney Hill. "I could still do with losing a few pounds, though."
He is adjusting to the new flow of his week. The days still begin with Morning Irelandand often a spin to work on his BMW C1 motorcycle, one of those with a roof on it and a radio that he turns up loud so he can hear it through the din and the helmet. "So when I'm stopped in traffic, I have the people beside me wondering, am I deaf or something?" The week, though, no longer climaxes on Friday night, and the previous routine of a 3am home time, sometimes followed by a scan of the papers until his eyes grew heavy enough to send him to bed until late on a Saturday.
There were a couple of motivations for his departure from the Late Late. He wouldn't have quit if his mother had been "alive and well", but her death last year following Alzheimer's disease came at a time when he was reassessing his path. He had wanted another year as host, but when talking to RTÉ he knew the chance of a Monday night show wouldn't be there again.
He recalls a conversation he had with Gay Byrne, maybe 17 years ago, when the two were sharing a car back from the Mary of Dungloe festival, and Kenny remarked to Byrne that he must be dying to get back to The Late Late Show. "And he said 'No, I'm dreading it'. And I said why. And he said, 'Well, I've interviewed everybody and if I haven't interviewed them I've interviewed people likethem'."
So Kenny vowed to himself to get out before he ever reached the point of dread. "I was looking forward to coming back, in a sense looking at the top of the mountain. I don't know if you've ever climbed Lugnaquilla, but when you're going up Lugnaquilla you think you're at the top and as you reach the brow of that hill another one appears, and it keeps on repeating and repeating and eventually you get to the top. And that's the way The Late Late Showis. It's 37 weeks of fairly intensive work, especially when you're doing a two-hour current affairs programme every day. You're looking at that mountain. And you want to do it, but you know it's going to be hard. So, that's how I always felt. But I vowed I'd get out before the point where I dreaded going back. And I think my timing was very good in that regard."
His timing was superb. It ambushed the nation, on his terms, not allowing the gossip to precede it or conspiracy to overtake it. It was a moment of self-assurance that matched any of his best moments on the show.
As for criticism, maybe it bothers him but he has a gift for deflecting it, laughing it off. He sees it coming, knows exactly what will be thrown at him, and he hardly blinks. “I learned. I learned. I used to be hyper-sensitive to criticism. People throw Seinfeld, ‘Seinfield’ at me [he mispronounced the US comedian’s name throughout an interview]. But that was only a slip of the tongue on a frenetic Toy Show,” he insists. “If I look back at 10 years there may be a handful of so-called gaffes. I think that’s not bad after nearly 400 shows. And that people keep referring to the same things means there aren’t that many.”
But what about his apparent struggle with popular culture or comedians, compared to the straighter interviews? A Pete Doherty interview, for instance, during which constant questioning over drugs and Kate Moss ended with the singer asking Kenny if he could name even one of his songs. Kenny couldn't. "The criticisms over Pete Doherty are generally from people who are big fans of Pete's music and his poetry. But for the general audience there were two things that interested them. One, Pete's drug-taking. Was he drugged or was he not, on the show? And secondly, Kate Moss and his relationship. There was also his open admiration for Shane McGowan. And they were the three areas that I hit. And then he asked me did I know any particular song. Well, I think it would be naive in the extreme for him to think that someone like me would actually be queuing up to see [Doherty's band] Babyshambles." He laughs quietly. "However unlikely it would be that I would watch Coronation Streetregularly, because I wouldn't have time, I might occasionally see it. But the likelihood that I would be in Whelan's or somewhere watching Pete Doherty is remote."
He had seen Doherty some time before that on a Channel 4 documentary about alternative poets, and thought he was "absolutely brilliant", more than the "personal shambles" he had presumed him to be. "I was awestruck by the quality of his work. Now that doesn't mean I was going to approach him for The Late Late Showin a particular way. I wasn't capable of embracing him as a fan and sometimes you can't do that because it's not real. Saying, 'I love your work, it's awesome'. If you don't feel that, you shouldn't say it."
Did the sometimes personal nature of the criticism ever affect him? "I don't know. I used to read nearly everything. Now Kathy goes through stuff and I tell her, don't bother because that was last week's show anyway. This week's show is a different show." Besides – and this is the understandably standard RTÉ response to criticism of the Late Late– it was number one in the ratings. If that had changed, then there would have been "real soul-searching".
Outside the hotel window, the Irish rugby team practises line-outs on the lawn. Kenny marvels at the height they get, reacting to each throw. “There we go. Whoops. Did you see that lift? Whoops. That’s fantastic.”
We talk about coverage of his wages, and whether broadcasters are worth it. His defence takes in the uncertainties of the freelance life, the need to pay agents and accountants, the pressure of ratings, and that, by his estimate, he fronted a programme that “brought in over €100 million in advertising, that ain’t bad. Seven million in sponsorship. Multiples of millions in ancillary revenues. Now that’s a pretty good equation. I don’t know if people think that’s worthwhile . . .”.
But it also brings in the fact that stepping out of a studio does not mean being off duty. “Look at what people have to do. They have to sell their souls. They have to become public figures. They are everybody’s property. And they pay a price for that and the only way you can pay them back for that is in monetary terms. There is no other way of recognising what people give up: their family privacy, their freedom to walk down the street unaccosted. And they give it up willingly, but it’s the only recompense besides the job.”
He doesn't go shopping with his daughters any more because it takes too long ("It's one of the delights that I'm spared."). They are 14 and 16 years old and he's enjoying the extra time he can spend with them over the weekends, although his decision to leave the Late Laterevealed something when "they said you used to have the coolest job of any dad in our school, now you don't. And that was something, I never knew that, they never said it to me, that what I did was cool or that I was a cool dad or anything like that. So now I'm decidedly uncool." In print, that fits neatly with the idea of Kenny as a nation's embarrassing dad figure, but in person his sincerity wins out.
HE WAS RAISEDin Dublin, the son of Connie and James, the elephant keeper at Dublin Zoo. That place, he says, was his "playground as a child". And he starts talking about elephant husbandry then and now: ("In my father's day, he was the bull elephant in a way, he was the boss . . .") and the joy of riding an elephant on to one Toy Show.
Young Pat had no ambitions for a job in the zoo, seeing that the money wouldn’t be enough to get him through life successfully, so he gained a scholarship first to secondary school, and then to UCD, where he studied chemical engineering, working on the North Sea pipeline during the summers. “I didn’t even know what kind of job I was looking for, because the nature of what I might have done – brewing, chemical manufacturing, explosives manufacture, various industrial processes, maybe pharmaceuticals – if I had done electrical engineering, I might have ended up working somewhere like the ESB. I was always messing around with electrical things when I was a kid. I shocked myself more times than my parents ever knew.”
He might have been a civil engineer. “I mean I just love the built environment, I will stop at a construction site and just watch that going on for half an hour. Other people will have a glimpse. I’ll stand there and look and see what kind of processes are at work.”
He began his broadcasting career in the days when radio signals emerged from the GPO, where he would announce concerts and plays and whatever else needed doing. His turning point as a broadcaster came after presenting the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest, which he took some persuading to do, but found the challenge of 300 million viewers too irresistible. He could see that current affairs broadcasting was changing too rapidly for RTÉ to afford. Where it was sending back tapes from foreign destinations, ITV had Sandy Gall live with the Afghan Mujahedeen. So, he went into entertainment and Kenny Live, although it was partly to make up for a chat show that he'd had a go at before and was "ghastly for loads of reasons".
And on Monday, he comes back to current affairs again with The Frontline. It will be audience-focused, with "no particular format" and a bit of satire, although he admits that's notoriously difficult to get right. That's as much of the future as he's thinking of. "I've always allowed my body to tell me when things should change. I don't have any intentions of slowing down for quite a while. I do believe people, if they can, should work for as long as they can and as long as they're doing something meaningful," he says. "And the day I start my day, with all due respect, doing The Irish Timescrossword with my breakfast, and Sudoko for lunch . . . I mean I love doing both, but it's not what I want to do with my day." He takes a subtle glance at his watch, so it seems time to wrap things up. But when the tape is stopped, he doesn't move, Instead, the conversation continues, taking in a few subjects including parenting, mutual acquaintances, and his admiration for US chat show host Jay Leno.
He ambles through the car park, chatty and open. He seems in no particular hurry. When he shakes hands and heads off home, I realise that I've been in his company for just over two hours. The length, in fact, of a Late Lateshow. And it hasn't dragged at all.
BORNin 1948, his father was elephant keeper at Dublin Zoo
TURNING POINT:The 1988 Eurovision Song Contest, which moved him away from current affairs into entertainment, and ultimately led to replacing Gay Byrne as host of The Late Late Showin 1999
WHAT'S NEXT:Continues his daily RTÉ Radio One show, but now fronting The Frontlineon RTÉ1 on Monday nights