It started on The Late Late Show
His Late Late Show was the country’s fireside viewing while he was at the helm, and his radio show was an often intimate, almost confessional, forum.
A whole country broached taboo subjects under his gaze — contraception, homosexuality, drugs, the role of the Catholic Church. And yet, Byrne always remained a man somewhat apart, a facilitator more than a participant. As an interviewer, he’d always ferret out the true personality of whomever he was talking to — most notoriously with Pádraig Flynn in 1999. Byrne is pure show business in a way that stars today, in a much more personality-driven media age, simply are not.
But maybe, just maybe, these self-revelatory times that we live in have impinged on Byrne. He is, after all, touring a in show that is all about him and his career. Does he feel a certain impetus to share his true self with an audience that has shared so much with him? “There’s a little bit of that,” he says. “There are elements of that in it. Things that I didn’t feel I could say at the time. There are funny stories, the stories behind things, this, that or the other.”
Byrne does share certain specifics of his past in the show, like how he met his wife, Kathleen Watkins, on Dawson Street in Dublin. But he refuses to be drawn on many of the show’s details. The stories, he says, “are all bound one with the other. In isolation it doesn’t really work”.
He continues: “I always said that was the problem for this show from the beginning. If you see Christy Moore you have an idea what you’re going to get; if you’re going to see Daniel O’Donnell you know what you’re going to get. The problem is, you’re going to see Gay Byrne — doing what, exactly? They know I don’t sing, they know I don’t play the piano. I don’t dance, I’m not a comedian, so what do I do? Some thought it was a Late Late Show for one night, or like the radio show, or a lecture on 50 years of RTÉ. So, it is very hard to describe. I just come out and tell people about what I have done, the people I have met, the things that happened and so on.”
Byrne hasn’t had trouble bringing in the crowds since an earlier version of the show had its first outing at the Gate Theatre in 2011. He has been critically acclaimed too, for his stage presence and his ability to weave a tale. Byrne is a natural storyteller, and, he says, the debut performance was completely off the cuff. “Well, it was on my mind for quite a while that I wanted to do something like this, and the only way to try it out was to do it. The whole show was in my head. I had nothing written down at the time; I just went for it. It’s not the same show now. We added a reading by Kathleen, and an interval. We forget to take an interval; that was a bad idea. People like an interval.
“We have been lucky so far,” says Byrne. “We did six shows last year and we’ve been back to the Pavilion in Dun Laoghaire for a second time, and in Bray for a second time. Everywhere has been booked out and there has been a genuine pleasure with the show. They enjoyed it.”
“I’ve always been tied to RTÉ and Montrose, because I was live on the air every day for 40 years. I was completely tied to it. There was no opportunity to go out around the country and visit other places. So we were in the midlands last year, now we are doing Waterford and Ballymaloe in Cork, and Thurles. We’re getting more and more inquiries. We don’t want to do too much, but we’ll see how we go.”
* Gay Byrne – Live is at the Ballymaloe Grainstore, Cork on Thursday. Phone 021-465155 or see ballymaloegrainstore.com
