Making a bland exit

TV REVIEW: The Late Late ShowRTÉ1, Friday; Tubridy TonightRTÉ1, Saturday; Britain's Got Talent TV3 and UTV, Saturday; Capital D RTÉ1, Thursday

WELL, SUMMER is here, so it’s time to crawl out from under the box-set, abandon the couch, unchain oneself from the dusty LCD and squint at the sun. The mass migration of RTÉ television presenters, which proclaims the changing of the season with more veracity than the call of the cuckoo or the sight of a lonely swallow, has begun, with both Pat Kenny and Ryan Tubridy saying goodnight, goodbye and God bless to their lucrative sinecures and loyal audiences for the last time.

Kenny exited The Late Late Show with a paternalistic dignity, and, although there was a somewhat self-conscious gravitas to his parting (as if he were the custodian of a national treasure which was about to be passed to slippy fingers), he was warmly effusive about his production team and long-serving crew. With his pretty wife blinking back her tears as she lingered by his shoulder, emotion battled with logic on Kenny’s well-cut face (logic won) as he signed off. And, as the camera panned over his dewy-eyed team, one got the sense that whatever Kenny may lack in light-entertainment charisma, he probably makes up for in being a hardworking team player.

Anyway, he has made a damn good decision. His past TV life and morning radio show are a testament to his undoubted ability to engage with current affairs, and it will surely come as a relief to the man that he can squeeze out of his party dress after 10 long years and slip into something a little more comfortable.

IF KENNY’S last hurrah displayed a measured avuncularity, Tubridy showed no such restraint. Throughout his last broadcast, the man seemed fired up at the prospect of slipping into Pat’s cooling seat. And, really, who can blame him – always the bridesmaid, his live Saturday night show has suffered from a distinct lack of excitement when it comes to the guestlist. The line-up for the last Tubridy Tonight was no exception, gaping like a cheap blouse over a sunburnt décolletage.

The show began with what appeared to be a dramatically surgically enhanced David Hasselhoff, spray-tanned to within an inch of his suspiciously lustrous hairline, his conversation easily usurped by his more passionate and colourful shirt. Meandering through the subterranean complexities of life as a former Baywatch star, he and Tubridy eventually fell into a cosy bitch about the paparazzi, with Hasselhoff sounding somewhat more nostalgic than aggrieved.

“The Hoff” was quickly swept away to make room for the chirpy and dependable Marian Keyes, an author seemingly never without a 600-page blockbuster to promote. Although the latest one is still in the hands of her editor, she gamely, albeit prematurely, filled the Tubs’s couch while every other celebrity in the country was nursing a hangover from Kenny’s bash the night before.

In the cup-runneth-over stakes, there was also Kian Egan of Westlife and his newly acquired wife, Jodi Albert, the couple drawing a riveting pen picture of their recent nuptials in the “tropical paradise” of Barbados.

“The wedding represents who we are,” said Kian, before failing to illuminate us any further on just who they are by explaining that some of it took place in a garden and some on a patio.

Des Bishop briefly lifted proceedings with a gutful of profanity and his entertainingly obsessive deconstruction of the Irish psyche. “Irish people can only be happy in retrospect,” he said, having observed that throughout the boom everyone was harping on about how we had “lost something” and, now that we are all skint, we’re miserable that we truly have lost something (pension, life savings and jobs come tripping off the blackened tongue).

So, as some bloke unpeeled 94 T-shirts from his back over in a corner of the studio (thus breaking a Guinness world record for “T-shirt wearing”, an unwittingly poignant statement about the show’s lacklustre nature), Tubridy, “with a heavy heart and a spring in my chest”, said farewell, describing his time at the helm of the show as “a very, very beautiful odyssey”. Right so.

FACT IS, regardless of whom Tubridy might have managed to shake from the celebrity sack for his last show, the schedules were burning up on the rival channels, with both UTV and TV3 screening the final of Britain’s Got Talent and reporting peak-viewing figures of more than 19 million.

Britain’s Got Talent is a phenomenon, the latest jewel in the crown of reality TV, mass escapism on a quite incredible scale. With many thousands of men, women, children, singing transsexuals, tap-dancing dogs and burly farmers with acrobatic wheelbarrows queuing up to do their party tricks for Simon Cowell and his sidekicks (the dull and fatuous Amanda Holden and the duller and immeasurably more fatuous Piers Morgan), this particular talent contest makes Cowell’s other TV juggernaut, The X Factor, look positively highbrow.

This year’s romp threw up one particularly newsworthy contestant, Susan Boyle, a strong singer from Blackburn, West Lothian, who (supposedly) staggered the three judges at her initial audition by having the audacity to create a beautiful sound out of her unvarnished mouth despite her shaggy eyebrows and sagging waistline. There followed a well-choreographed media frenzy, involving an unprecedented number of hits on YouTube, an appearance on Oprah, a couple of newspaper articles alluding to the fact that she had been deprived of oxygen at birth (a condition probably not half as life-threatening as media saturation in middle age), and ultimately a reported “emotional breakdown”.

Boyle didn’t win on the night, coming second in the final to Diversity, a dance troupe from Essex who truly were pretty spectacular and who will now pocket the £100,000 winner’s cheque and entertain the Queen at this year’s Royal Variety Performance. Among the also-rans were a couple of amusing and chubby Greeks in blonde toupees, taking the mickey out of Michael Flatley, and a weeping child ballerina/soprano/Julie Andrews wannabe with a pert ponytail, shaken equilibrium and an ambitious mother.

No matter how exploitative or degrading the entire caravan may be, or how many blokes it encourages to pick up bricks with their earlobes, there is just no arguing with this brand.

In these days of accumulating strife, we are parking our woes in front of the banality of reality, and if some breakdancing octogenarian spinning on his aquiline nose can help one shake off the blues, well, who am I to turn up my nostrils?

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Electric city - A scoot round the capital with Cassin in the driver's seat

The hot weather has brought with it a couple of unpalatable knock-ons: beaches clogged with the detritus of our picnics, and grown men parading around the suburban streets looking like overgrown toddlers in stripy T-shirts and baggy shorts, their sunburnt knees resembling the crowns of tonsured monks bent in prayer.

On a more positive note, however, the long-running Capital D, a magazine programme from RTÉ's news and current affairs department, examining various aspects of city life, was out and about in the blazing sunshine this week.

Taking a gently entertaining look at some of the capital’s sexier cars and their equally alluring drivers, presenter Anne Cassin (as elegant herself as a long summer evening) shot around some of Dublin’s more desirable locations, among them Killiney (looking Mediterranean) and leafy, red-bricked Ranelagh. She chatted to an actress in her nifty Fiat 50, a pianist both wearing and driving a Mini, and a young entrepreneur in her drop-dead gorgeous mint-green Nissan Figaro.

With the sun still obliterating the heavens, Cassin then headed off to meet some decorous and awfully good-humoured chaps at a vintage car rally in Dublin’s Marlay Park, before exploring the capital’s readiness for electric cars, which the Government is planning to have one in 10 of us drive by 2020. Suffice it to say that, despite such an unambitious target, we would be more prepared for a fleet of Martian spaceships whose engines run on unicorn milk than we are for a handful of drivers tootling around in electric cars looking for somewhere to plug themselves in.

Capital Dis a confident, well-produced and eclectic show which gives a voice to Dubliners, a sharp but entertaining point of access for those grappling with the issues and quirks of city life. It's a current worth plugging into.