RTE news anchor ends up making the news as video goes viral
The dapper newsreader is no stranger to the odd gaffe on air but his most recent one on Wednesday night may be the one to send him viral and make him a star across the world.
Nobody told poor old Aengus that he was live on air for his 10pm news bulletin, so the plain people of Ireland got a full view of him self-applying a little bit of make-up so he looked fabulous for his audience.
This was followed by him proceeding to fix his tie before word comes through his earpiece from the producer that he is, in fact, live on air. What follows is an hilariously pained facial expression from the presenter before a somewhat angry exclamation of: “What?”
Rather than taking it in good spirits, the killjoys at RTÉ spent much of yesterday trying to remove the footage from various websites on the grounds of copyright.
However, as with all things that go viral, you cannot stop their spread on the internet super-highway and the footage has joined the list of great Mac Grianna gaffes.
Just last month, the experienced broadcaster had extreme difficulty getting through a report on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. So much so, in fact, that at one point he pauses and says: “I’ll try that again” before giving up and asking the person in charge of the teleprompter to “just go back to the very start of that”.
Even before that, Mr Mac Grianna had made his first foray into on air gaffes with a classic pronunciation error, struggling to get over the rather difficult surname of Chelsea owner and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
After a number of failed efforts, the newsreader finally gets the name out and, to show he is a man with a sense of humour, even manages a little chuckle to himself before the end of the report.
If he keeps going like this, Aengus might one day be as famous as Jean Byrne. Now there’s a thought.
