PAT KENNY s been getting a fierce hard time from newspapers. It isn t a new phenomenon: it began in earnest with the piece(s) Eamon Dunphy did in the Sunday Independent some time ago, which resulted in Kenny taking a libel action against the paper. Some of the stuff that was printed then and subsequently about Kenny was just downright insulting and abusive constant references to him as Plank Kenny and to his Kenny Live programme as Kenny Dead.
Since he s moved to the Friday night slot in RTE, taking over the Late Late Show from Gay Byrne, the level of hostility towards him in the media has broadened and intensified. He s become the print media s favourite whipping boy, constantly on the receiving end of a withering level of criticism, of a kind that would break the heart of a stoic.
Even Hot Press got in on the act last issue with a piece by Nell McCafferty that was oddly conceived as if Kenny could properly be singled out to take responsibility for any and all of RTE s failings, and in particular for what Nell perceives as the station s shoddy treatment of women. You might have no beef with much of the detail of Nell s observations, and still feel as I did reading the piece that visiting the associated bile on one individual was entirely misplaced.
Amid all the rumpus, I ve been wondering: can the programme really be as bad as everyone is suggesting? I m not a regular viewer generally I go out on Friday night, as I did throughout most of the Gay Byrne era. However I ve seen the Late Late Show and Kenny Live often enough to know what we should be entitled to expect.
So I took a look at Pat Kenny s Late Late Show over the past couple of weeks. Now maybe what I saw was unrepresentative but there was great television here. A couple of weeks back, Stephen Roche appeared, to defend himself from accusations of doping. It may have been painful to watch, and sad, but it was also riveting.
I thought Pat Kenny handled what was a difficult situation intelligently and well, with none of the one-sidedness that Gay Byrne was often prone to for example in his treatment of Bishop Eamonn Casey s girlfriend, Annie Murphy. (Incidentally, I was struck by one overwhelming feeling, watching Stephen Roche sitting beside David Walsh from the Sunday Times: that there is a time when it is better for a journalist, who has made money out of a subject as David Walsh has from Stephen Roche, to step back and leave a story which damns that subject to the opposition. The Conconi story was being covered anyway given the friendship which existed between Roche and Walsh, and the extent to which Walsh profited from that why not leave the story to Paul Kimmage, or whoever, for dignity s sake?)
The same Late Late Show had an item on crime which was kick-started by an interview with Paul Williams from the Sunday World but which really hinged on the presence in the studio of the mother of a teenager, gone missing in suspicious circumstances and presumed dead.
Paul Williams fed us the usual line about the streets being over-run with desperados, but there was a heartbreaking quality to the mother s appeal a genuine human dimension that left all the surrounding waffle in the shade. Again, this was somewhat messy, but nevertheless very good television.
Last Friday, the programme featured an interview with a very interesting character. He is a traveller. He is also gay. He is Irish, living in England, and he is a university graduate. His story is fascinating and poses all sorts of fundamental questions about culture and identity that were effectively explored on the night. It helps, of course, when you have a genuinely engaging subject in this case a guy who is hugely thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive and likeable. But again, Pat Kenny handled the item with considerable skill, asking the right questions and allowing the interviewee to convey the nuances of his story well.
Now there may be a lesson for the Kenny team in the success of items of this kind: it might well be that the show is better, with Pat Kenny in the chair, dealing with serious subjects. With his background in current affairs, he s well able to see the angles and is used to digging them out. Bearing that in mind, it s up to the producers and to researchers to deliver the kind of stories with popular appeal like the Roche interview, which was clearly a coup in which Pat Kenny shines.
There are other ways in which the presentation of the Late Late Show might be improved. The set does create an unnecessary barrier between Pat Kenny and his guests it s only looking at this and at Letterman and Conan O Brien that you realise just how quietly effective the set-up on the original Late Late Show was.
But on the basis of what I ve seen over the past few weeks, Pat Kenny is currently doing well. And one thing for certain, on this kind of showing, he certainly doesn t deserve anything like the level of abuse and hostility sometimes highly personalised that he and the show have been subjected to.