THE GAY REAL BYRNE
BY THE PEOPLE WHO REALLY KNEW HIM
IWORKED on The Late Late Show for 10 years and then moved to present a programme of my own, which I viewed as a step up. After I left I’d meet Gay around RTE and he’d look at me sadly and commiserate with me about the fact that my career had gone down the toilet. In Gay’s world the acme of success for a broadcaster was The Late Late Show and there was nowhere to go but down. My mother agreed with him; her social currency with the neighbours plummeted after my departure. And who was I to argue with two of the most important people in my life at the time?
Last Tuesday night on The Late Late Show we celebrated the many facets of Gay and heard about his unique skill, his sense of fun, his comic timing, his nurturing of talent, his political nous, his courage, his fearlessness, all qualities he had in spades, all qualities he displayed week after week as he presented his three hours of live TV without autocue, hardly resorting to notes, mixing the deeply serious with the entirely frivolous and switching with ease from one to the other, bringing the audience with him every step of the way with rarely a false note. Possibly the greatest broadcaster ever.
From the day I started working with Gay, to the present, people had only one question. What is Gay Byrne really like?
Here is what I know.
Yes he was tough. During my 10 years anyway. The team was made up in those days of five researchers and it was our job to either come up with ideas or to follow through on Gay’s. If you had an idea — it could be a celebrity guest, an ordinary person with a great story to tell, or a hot topic for which you put together a panel — you had to sell the idea to Gay at the weekly meeting.
This was in the days before the internet, before the proliferation of PR people, before Irish people became comfortable baring their souls to the world. So it involved being up with everything and everyone throughout the country. We did, of course, have the occasional celebrity from abroad, or an author flogging a book, but Gay really rated you if you came up with a controversial item and put together a panel of people with opposing views on an issue of the day and who were on fire to talk about it. So we, the researchers, as individuals, competed — albeit silently, even perhaps unconsciously — to come up with ideas and people week after week.
And Gay didn’t make it easy. In the 1980s there was a serious rift between PAYE workers and farmers, with the workers claiming that the farmers paid no tax. I suggested a whole show on the topic and Gay agreed but only on condition I would get a farmer who would admit he didn’t pay tax. It took months but I eventually succeeded. The farmer, who has since passed away, did — reluctantly — come clean and his fellow farmers were livid, but Gay was right; it was the match that ignited the debate and made for great television. My colleagues all came up with similar ideas — on death, the islands, fashion, the Travelling community, alcoholism, divorce — and found good people to take part and then Gay wove his magic and created groundbreaking television.
Doing shows like that were hugely risky on Gay’s part — if it hadn’t taken off, the ratings would have taken a nosedive.
When something worked, Gay had the ability to envelope you in a warm glow. Such was his charisma that the chief effect of the success was to give you the desire to do even better next time.
Cock up and it was a different story. You’d know on the night that you had messed up and you quaked for the weekend until the post-mortem which took place at the beginning of the working week. Only a few words would be said, in sadness rather than in anger; it could be a guest whom you had oversold as great and who ‘died’ on the night; it could be wrong information that you had given him about the guest, whatever, it was usually carelessness, and if you had any sense you would strive not to do it again. He was rigorous about facts and he expected you to be too.
The Late Late Show season ran from September to May and it was unheard of to take a weekend off for a friend’s wedding or family occasion. And you didn’t mind. As a team we were completely immersed in our season of programmes and they came first. The working week was a grind, the fear of not coming up with good items ever present but the adrenaline on the night itself was addictive, and the high after a good show with Gay in great form better than any night out with friends. He was, of course, a fantastic storyteller — nobody better when he was on form.
And outside of the office he was always a good laugh and had ordinary-person interests. He decided one year he’d like to learn to swim so Maura Connolly, his legendary special assistant, set up lessons in a pool near RTE after work one night a week and several of us joined up. We were a motley crew — Gay’s radio producer John Caden, the psychiatrist Ivor Browne and playwright Hugh Leonard — and seeing your boss splashing about in the pool demystifies him somewhat.
Boss yes, but something of a father figure to the team too. I was on contract when I first joined The Late Late Show and knew the salary I received was less than some of the RTE staff people and I mouthed off about this at various times in the office. To my embarrassment I arrived at my desk one day and found an envelope stuffed with notes (£300 as I recall) and a little note to say he noted I was worried about money and I wasn’t to say anything to anybody but hopefully it would help. Needless to say I insisted he take it back but I was so touched. When any of us were taking financial risks, like moving to a bigger house, I know he worried about us and would always advise financial caution (and this was before Russell Murphy). It was a strange anomaly — he was so risk averse on our behalf and yet willing to take such risks professionally.
He was very generous and often wrote us thank you notes and gave us nice gifts and cash bonuses out of his own pocket at Christmas. And, of course, there was the annual Late Late Show lunch, which continued long after he retired. Up to and including this year he’d have us all round to his home for a gorgeous lunch with Kathleen and his lovely daughters Suzy and Crona.
The Late Late Show was always in the news when I worked there, with constant criticism of our ‘disgusting’ discussions, but we had our moments of glory and Gay shared it all. When he won a Jacobs Award he presented each of the team with a Waterford glass honeypot.
One of my favourite parts of the working week was the briefing sessions with Gay. It was common practice to write up our research notes and an introduction to the guest or panel, but he liked us to talk through the item first, to explain who would say what and when, and he liked us to give it to him in the exact words that the guests had said everything to us — so basically we acted out the items for him. Sadly, he did often say the pre-enactment was better than the live event.
Another thing I loved was his warm up. The vast majority of talk show hosts have comedians to do the warm up but Gay did his own, and it was a joy to watch. He said the same things every week to the audience — explaining the ad breaks and their possible need to go to the toilet — ‘if you gotta go, you gotta go’. If they heard something that might be funny he told them to “laugh like bloody drains, even if you don’t get it, work it out on the way home”. And he usually knew by their reaction to his warm up whether they were going to be a good audience or, as he said, like lumps on a log. We all had to be at the show on the night to look after our guests and if I didn’t have anyone to look after I just loved to be in studio watching him, doing the warm up. Even though I knew it off by heart, I always found myself laughing again at all his corny jokes. I loved being present at the show itself too, where anything could and would happen, because let’s face it, he was the original sh*t-stirrer, a rabble-rouser.
One of the lovely things about Gay was the way he pushed the team out of our comfort zone and encouraged us to take part on air. He sent me to Medugorje, and had me report back on ‘miracles’ and the visionaries, he made me be a guinea pig on a reflexology item exposing my fat toes to the world, he had me on talking about giving birth, when he heard me saying after I had my daughter that I would never go through labour again it was so horrific. And that was 30 years ago — long before it became fashionable to blog about your birth journey. No one engaged with those topics in those days except Gay. Christy Moore’s mother was also on the panel and the actress Kate Thompson. Given the time that was in it, there was a bishop on that show too and I found it a bit inhibiting talking about pushing out a baby in front of the celibate cleric and I probably wasn’t quite as frank on the night as Gay would have liked.
The big example of Gay giving us our chance on air for me was the toy show which I presented for about five years. It was phenomenal work — sheer physical work unboxing and putting together all the toys and then playing with them, endlessly weeding out the ones that were tricky and likely to fail on the night. People said Gay hated the toy show but he just hated when things went wrong, although he usually made entertaining TV out of that too. And there was no one like him with the kids we brought in to try the toys.
His favourite part of the toy show was the kids’ books section — ironic that his darling Kathleen went on to have phenomenal success with her Pigin books.
Presenting the toy show with him probably gave me ideas beyond my station and after 10 years I left to present first a fashion programme called Head to Toe followed by an arts programme presented by his great friend Mike Murphy and finally Check Up ,a medical programme. I asked for his advice at the time of leaving and he told me that before the show every Friday when we thought he was having a nap in his dressing room, he was in fact going through every step of that night’s show, what he would say, what the guests would say, visualising it all from beginning to end.
Years later I joined the Sunday Independent and at my instigation he wrote an occasional log for us. I got great pleasure in that role reversal. Sadly, I never had to reprimand him about anything. Every bit of copy was pristine and, yes, he was often controversial in his views.
Despite all my years of knowing Gay — and I’m proud to say we continued to meet and make each other laugh — there was always something unknowable, something elusive, about him.
And that was his magic.
‘He was, of course, a fantastic story teller — nobody better’