54 December-January 2014
political g uests. Tubridy also has his daily
slot on 2FM, though he never seems quite
as comfortable with celebrity culture as
O’Connor, whose second job is his high-
profile spot in the Sunday Independent
where he edits Life Magazine.
For this issue, Village looked over the
2013/2014 season of the ‘Saturday Night
Show’ running from September 2013 to
May 2014, drawing up a list of 128 g uests
who appeared on the show, but broadly
excluding singers who didn’t sit to talk to
the host. Predictably, the ‘Saturday Night
Show’ is a TV show about television. So, if
you like television, or more particularly
Irish television, you may like it.
For more than a decade the Sunday
Independent has given O’Connor free
rein to troll the nation. He’s dropped
some spectacular clangers over the
years, including his exhortation for peo-
ple to plunge into the property market
in September 2007, just as prices went
off the cliff, and his resolute defence of
Bertie Ahern long after most had decided
that the former Taoiseach was living in a
nasty alternative reality.
O’Connor’s broadcasting career began
with a stint on the comedy show ‘Don’t
Feed the Gondolas’ with Seán Moncrieff
as host during the 1990s, followed by a
spell as a judge on the RTÉ talent show
‘You’re A Star’, and two years as host of
the TV3 show ‘The Apprentice: You’re
Fired!’ O’Connor’s ‘Apprentice’ was a
ratings success despite its low produc-
tion costs. The producers could film two
shows in an afternoon and still compete
in the ratings with RTÉ.
The synergy between O’Connor’s
television career and his Sunday
Independent column and editorship
of celebrity magazine Life encouraged
the paper to campaign for O’Connor’s
installation as a talk show in his own
right. O’Connor’s move to prime time
came in 2010, when Pat Kenny’s deci-
sion to vacate the ‘Late Late Show’ caused
a reshuffle at RTÉ, which moved Ryan
Tubridy from his Saturday ‘Tubridy
Tonight’ show over to the ‘Late Late Show’
on Friday nights, leaving an empty slot on
Saturday nights. RTE initially pitched a
Brendan O’Connor-fronted show against
the slicker Craig Doyle, with O’Connor’s
show proving the more popular, partic-
ularly in the Sunday Independent, and
he was invested as the regular host in
2011.
After three seasons of interviewing
celebrities with nothing to say beyond
promoting their products, O’Connor
decided to ramp up the seriousness quo-
tient, as he interviewed Barry Egan, the
chief celebrant of celebrity at the Sunday
Independent. Egan gazed down the couch
at O’Connor and asked him how it feels
to interview celebrities and soap stars
every week. “I love it”, said O’Connor,
going on to explain that the show would
try to avoid the ‘PR rollercoaster’. “Some
people only want to talk about their prod-
uct. It’s like if I came in and kept going on
about the ‘Saturday Night Show’ is com-
ing back on Saturday night at ten to ten,
don’t miss it and all that”, said O’Connor,
brilliantly satirising the onanism of the
celebrity editor being interviewed by his
own celebrity features writer while talk-
ing about the narcissism of celebrities.
Of course, being a scion of the Sindo, it’s
not entirely clear if O’Connor was being
tongue-in-cheek.
Watching a Saturday-night talk-show,
viewers aren’t expecting the parade of
politicians and other worthies who pop-
ulate daytime and weekend radio talk
shows, and only three politicians fea-
tured during the entire season we looked
at: Mary Mitchell O’Connor, who was
talking about fundraising for breast can-
cer; the now-retired Mary O’Rourke; and
Joan Burton, another surprising Sindo
favourite, talking about her ambition to
become leader of the Labour party.
The clever strategy of avoiding the
PR rollercoaster turns out to be entirely
aspirational, and the workaday formula
turns out a lifestyle-oriented list of TV
people and celebrities, chefs, sports
stars, authors, stylists and comedians,
though the show does have a good share
of ordinary people, who make up about
15 per cent of the guests.
Unfortunately, to qualify as an ordi-
nary person on a television talk show, you
generally need to have undergone some
life-changing tragedy in the form of an
execrable illness or the unexpected or
impending death of a close family mem-
ber. That’s the trade-off: most ordinary
people only share their tragedies in public
once. Most celebrities share the intimate
details of their private lives with the gen-
eral public as often and as vacantly as
possible in exchange for wealth, fame
and influence in the form of a rotating
presence on the small screen.
The phenomenon of reality television
and its attendant celebrity especially
rising/falling celebrity permeates the
‘Saturday Night Show’.
Not that celebrity culture is anything
new. From the eighteenth century, edi-
tors and reporters looked for publicly
recognisable figures whose exploits
would sell papers. The travails of jockeys,
boxers, actors, comedians and criminals
were closely followed and reports on the
style and fashion worn by women from
high and low society also shifted papers.
With the rise in their turn of cinema,
radio, television and the web, the plat-
form for celebrities has expanded. The
hierarchy is well defined: the top celebri-
ties appear on the most-watched shows.
Rising or declining celebrities thrill to
invitations from early morning or mid-
afternoon talk shows.
It’s 25 years since the strike by the
Writers Guild of America inspired a pro-
ducer at Fox Television to send cameras
out with the LA police force. Digital edit-
ing allowed producers to lash together
MEDIA BRENDAN O’CONNOR
Only three
politicians
featured
during the
entire season:
Mary Mitchell
O’Connor, Mary
O’Rourke; and
Joan Burton
“
toenail-retracting TV
December-January 2014 55
clips from vast amounts of footage. The
show, called ‘COPS’, became a smash hit
and spawne d cou nt les s im it ations a round
the world. A second wave followed with
the theme of ‘Big Brother’.
Once the premise of cheap and cheer-
less reality shows had been established,
a cascading multiplication of genres fol-
lowed: shopping shows, property shows,
beauty or fashion-makeover shows, fit
families shows, masterchef type shows,
people locked together in a house, iso-
lated together on an island, or isolated
in a jungle setting.
Little did celebrity culture realise that
it spent 300 years awaiting the rise of
reality TV.
Film franchises like the ‘Hunger
Games’ draw on the premises of real-
ity television. US production companies
have elevated reality television to a
finely honed formula that morphs from
season to season, and is now closer to
augmented reality after producers real-
ised that scripting the shows keeps the
shock/schlock value high. (The voice of
Bill Hicks, 20 years dead, returns: “Here
is ‘American Gladiators’! Here is 56 chan-
nels of it! Watch these pituitary retards
bang their fucking heads together and
congratulate you on living in the land of
freedom”.)
When O’Connor brought the Irish
redneck comedy of the Hardy Boys to
the ‘Saturday Night Show’, the audi-
ence looked completely baffled, but
O’Connor was on to something. The rise
of redneck reality television cashes in on
that potent cringe-generating mixture
of embarrassment and fascination that
Americans feel for their southern coun-
terparts. Watching poverty television,
we’re relieved that although things are
bad, we’re not yet eating roadkill.
Redneck reality shows like ‘My Big
Redneck Family’ or the highly-ranked
‘Duck Dynasty’ have toppled the charms
of the Kardashians and the ‘Housewives
of Miami’, and repo TV is also big. Shows
like ‘South Beach Tow’ take the for-
mula forward by using actors to create
the scenes, which producers claims are
based on ‘real stories’ [sic]. Another repo
show, ‘Lizard Lick Towing’, counters by
boasting that its reality television fea-
tures real-life situations. Repo television
is huge, and will surely arrive in Ireland
soon with families having their cars and
homes repossessed live on television,
perhaps with narration by angry right-
wing television presenters.
The true home of this genre is the
TruTV cable channel which reaches 90
million Americans and a vast interna-
tional audience. These aren’t obscure
shows. They make unimaginable profits,
are produced by the biggest media com-
panies in the USA, and you’ll find them on
most cable packages in Ireland.
So it’s not a shock to find that the
‘Saturday Night Show’ opens its couches
to media personalities and other celeb-
rities from the world of reality TV. It’s
all about the magic of television, where
by dint of getting onto television, you’ve
got every chance of staying on television,
even as a D-list celebrity careering down
through the talk show hierarchy.
The most popular guests in order of
ranking are: media personalities, non-
celebrities aka unfortunate ordinary
people, journalists, singers, sports
stars, chefs, stylists and comedians.
Women make up about 40 per cent of the
guests, which is not bad by Irish stand-
ards though it still has some way to go.
A quarter of the guests over the 2013-
2014 season are RTÉ regulars such as
Gerald Kean (‘The Restaurant’, ‘Celebrity
Bainisteoir’), Norah Casey (‘Dragons’
Den’, ‘Norah’s Traveller Academy’) and
Bill Cullen (‘The Apprentice’). Then there
are the TV chefs and celebrity chefs,
which seem to be one and the same thing:
Marco Pierre White, Nevin Maguire,
Kevin Dundon and Darina Allen.
There’s a cosmpolitan chunk of non-
RTÉ celebrities including Dr Leah Totton
(UK ‘Celebrity Apprentice’), Vincent and
Flavia (‘Strictly Come Dancing’) and
Dr Christian Jennsen (‘Embarrassing
Bodies’); and from the USA trainer Jessie
Pavelka who crossed over to UK reality
TV with ‘Motivation Nation’. Actors from
‘Love/Hate’ and ‘Coronation Street’ fill
out the guest sofa. It seems obvious in ret-
rospect that ‘Love/Hate’ filled a gap that
reality television couldn’t reach, though
it’s surely out there in the future some-
where: reality TV shot from the point of
view of criminals.
That cultural cliché the song contest
has thrived on reality TV, which means
that Jedward earn themselves more than
one appearance on ‘Saturday’. That Louis
Walsh never showed up seems like an
oversight. Perhaps he was unwell his
night. Sports stars, who are also celeb-
rities (and often now “celebrity brand
ambassadors”), are one of the pro-
gramme’s favourite guest categories,
with rugby players dominant.
O’Connor has produced some scoops
on the ‘Saturday Night Show’, including
the first TV interview with Pussy Riot
members following their release from
Russian prison in December 2013. The
interviewer and interviewees did have
something in common: O’Connor enjoyed
a brief career as a singer parodying a
priest, while Pussy Riot rose to fame
with a performance of a punk prayer in
a Russian church.
Accompanied by a male inter-
preter, the women arrived on set, with
O’Connor kissing each of the three on
the cheeks. The interpreter explained
that as O’Connor offered to greet each
of them with a kiss, and Nadja had
declined, a compromise was reached
where O’Connor would kiss both men and
women. After this awkward interlude,
O’Connor begins the interview with: “So,
girls...” and continues to address them as
‘girls’ throughout, oblivious to the poli-
tics of this century, and the last.
When one of the women admits mixed
feelings about sitting on a couch in a TV
studio talking about “reformist” activi-
ties, O’Connor interjects to apologise for
the “capitalist running-dog bourgeois
couch” and promises to make available
a bed of nails the next time. Look it up on
Youtube and experience the bed of nails
for yourself.
One episode not to be found on Youtube
is the early 2014 appearance of Rory
O’Neill, better known as drag queen Panti
Bliss, which generated the storm that
was Pantigate when O’Neill alleged that
certain journalists were homophobes,
resulting in RTÉ paying out damages to
the named journalists.
O’Connor’s defender-of-the-powerful
act along with his role of attack dog for
the Sindo makes him one of the candi-
dates for the currently vacant editorship
at the paper.
One wonders what will become of the
Brendan O’Connor / Barry Egan / Sinéad
O’Connor love-in now that regular guest
Sinéad has pronounced that she’s join-
ing Sinn Féin, enmity of which has long
been a Sindo requisite and O’Connor
identifier?
O’Connor has had a hand in making
the paper as venal as it is. It’s hard to
see him being able to keep his ‘Saturday
Night Show’ slot while taking on the edi-
torship of the Sindo, although O’Connor
has hinted that he does see some kind
of natural progression from Saturday
nights.
Ryan Tubridy should be feeling nerv-
ous. And not just about the more talented
Ray D’Arcy. •
US production
companies
have elevated
reality
television to
a finely honed
formula that
morphs from
season to
season, and
is now closer
to augmented
reality after
producers
realised that
scripting the
shows keeps
the shock/
schlock value
high
“