"Ray is doing very well but he's met his match up there," said Cork woman Helen Byrne, soon after the first-time presenter had been foolhardy enough to invite the Sydney Rose - who works in television - to comment on how their chat had gone.
Foolhardy because she had already pointed out kindly that while a joke of his was very good, "you practised that in rehearsal today."
So naturally when asked by Ray D'Arcy about the interview, she said she felt that her end of it had gone all right but that he could do with a few pointers.
There may have been repeated references to "Gaybo" last night but they seemed oddly out of kilter in what looks like a new era for the Rose of Tralee.
And while the Kildare Rose might have joked about her job in a bookies and performing Irish dancing at weddings and conferences, once the honours experimental physics graduate began to explain casually how a nano was a thousand times smaller than a hair, you knew any presenter would mess with these women at his peril.
Meanwhile, the 30 escorts assigned to look after them regard laden pockets as a small price to pay. Last year's Escort of the Year, Gearoid Corcoran, a (proverbial) engineer from Cork, pulls out safety pins, plasters, tissues, Strepsils, gold-coloured lip gloss, two cameras, a pair of scissors. . . His trophy is at home in "the good room" courtesy of his mother but "the lads" gave him "an awful doing for the year". Yet he's back and looking supremely happy.
This year's Smart Telecom Escort of the Year is Padraig Staunton, director of a marketing company. It may be significant that for his Rose, he carries a "mini-pharmacy" as well as nail files, needle and thread, jelly insoles, oil control tissues
In an engaging warm-up, D'Arcy had asked the crowd to treat him like a "long-lost cousin or brother" and they took him at his word. So did the Roses. What ensued was authentic banter of a kind that - compared to Gaybo's day - teetered on anarchy. "He comes across as one of the lads," said an organiser. "Maybe we've found our man."
If they have, it's not before time. Despite an effort to create a buzz around the town, the crowds in the afternoon sun yesterday were a mere shadow of what Tralee once hosted in August.
One businessman said that last year's festival was a "disaster and this year is no better". What the organisers perceive however, is a new family-oriented festival, a pleasing contrast to the drink-fuelled blow-out "with lads comatose in the gutter" to which the old festival had descended.
So visitors will find little of the old bacchanalian spirit. What they will find instead is a karaoke rig outside Penneys from which might be heard a punishing rendition of My Way, and stalls selling everything from knitting wool, soothers and crepes to customised registration plates and temporary tattoos.
Near them, a distinctly unfestive Pat Power is standing forlornly beside "De Shop St Ceilidh Band", a bunch of cute, musical puppets which he has been hauling around Ireland for 30 years. After all these years, a "snotty" woman, he claims, has just ordered him to move, "something about insurance". "It's no wonder the Rose of Tralee is going down," he says.
A few yards away, the Wolfe Tones are blasting away from the Sinn Féin Chiarraí stall in The Square, where the fare celebrates Irish rebels in the form of prints, photographs and leather bits and pieces. The postcards while a tad moth-eaten are distinctive. One shows Martin Ferris waving a tricolour above the legend "Living the Revolution".