If you go to the Wikipedia page for RTE’s flagship weekly entertainment show, the Late Late, you’ll get a brief glimpse, in paragraph two, of the dominant media force that it once was. “It averages 650,000 viewers per episode and has consistently achieved RTÉ’s highest ratings”, the online encyclopedia tells us, speaking, clearly, in the voice of an author from the all-too-recent past.
By contrast, if you go to RTE for their figures for the most recent episode, as our friends at the Daily Mirror did, you get a different story:
RTE’s weekend ratings reveal their flagship Friday night show saw an average audience of 381,000 viewers tune into RTE One and RTE One + 1.
This is 30,000 less than the previous Friday, which had an average audience of 411,000 viewers tuning in.
We’re a long way from an average audience of 650,000 these days. To put 381,000 viewers into context, that’s about 7.5% of the Irish population of just over five million people. We’ve come a very long way, in a very short time, from the days when the Late Late Show was a collective national event every Friday evening. It’s not even achieving RTE’s highest ratings at the moment: Tommy Tiernan and the Rugby beat it into a firm third place, this past weekend.
The reasons for this, to be fair, are not all RTE’s fault. The chief culprit, no doubt, is the general shift in society away from live television (with the notable, and therefore priceless to broadcasters, exception of live sports) in favour of on-demand viewing, streaming, and internet consumption.
Nor should it be said that the Late Late Show is suddenly incapable of drawing an audience: Big flagship events like the Toy Show, and the abominable valentine’s special, still seem capable of getting people to watch. It remains one of the very few commercially viable propositions that RTE has, which almost certainly was a factor in some bright spark’s decision to pitch a stage musical version of the Toy Show, and a further factor in nobody having the brains to point out that only the clinically insane would pay for tickets to watch a stage musical version of the Toy Show. RTE didn’t seem to understand that their viewing figures for the Toy Show are driven by children, who mainly want to see cool robots, rather than parents who genuinely love the Billy Barry kids.
What we can say though, is this: What was once one of the dominant cultural institutions in Irish society is suddenly in real, and steep, decline. And RTE, it must be said, doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do about that.
One of the biggest threats to any organisation is siege mentality. This manifests itself in the case of the Late Late Show thusly: People like me are never likely to watch the Late Late Show, and are likely to sneer at it and tell people that we don’t like it very much. The producers and staff on the show are likely to take this somewhat personally, given human nature. They are likely to listen less to their critics, and more to their fans: Fundamentally, humans are much more inclined to regard praise as legitimate than they are criticism.
As such, when they see somebody saying something like “it was so inspiring to see Mary Robinson talking about the work of the Elders on the Late Late Show” they are more inclined to give weight to that than they are to give weight to the person who sees Mary Robinson on the Late Late Show and switches away, having heard each of Mary Robinson’s opinions several hundred times since the early 1990s. Thus, the very problems which are turning viewers away get ignored in favour of the nice and kind people who remain loyal viewers.
This is one of the reasons why you’re likely to see, on a given Friday Night, three lads from Belfast in Balaclavas talking about rapping their way to a United Ireland and a Palestinian State. It’s not that the country has much interest in that sort of thing, it’s that the remaining loyal Late Late viewers are less likely to complain than those of us who switch it off or, in my case, don’t turn it on to begin with.
The other problem, from what I can see, is that the new host just hasn’t worked out. Patrick Kielty is by all accounts a very fine fellow and a nice man, but the ratings do not lie. The public, in this first year at the helm for him, just isn’t buying what he’s selling. From the various social media clips I’ve seen, I suspect this is because of how similar in demeanour and tone to his predecessor he is. Rather than taking the opportunity to shake the show up after Tubridy’s ignominious departure, they’ve doubled down on his oh-so-sincerely-appealing-to-the-better-angels-of-our-nature style. The result, unfortunately for Kielty, is that he feels like Tubs lite rather than his own man.
In any case, none of this is to be particularly mourned. The days of the Late Late Show dominating the culture were not good for the country in any case, placing as they did immense cultural and political power into the hands of a few RTE producers and their host, who were able to (and often did) use that power to try and influence the public according to their own preferences. A population tuning out of RTE is a population that will think more for itself. The decline of the Late Late is something to be welcomed from a cultural perspective, if not, it seems, from the perspective of those who want something light to watch on Friday nights in return for their television licence.