Evolving media - Tools to help us build a new society

Tonight’s celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Late, Late Show reach back to a different time.

Evolving media - Tools to help us build a new society

We’ve often been told that the past is a different country but looking back across that half-century, Ireland seems more a different planet than a different country.

Gay Byrne, The Late Late Show’s founding father, so often seemed like one of those early American wagon train captains portrayed by John Wayne or Kirk Douglas, leading enthusiastic if bewildered pilgrims through a wilderness to their imagined promised land. He cajoled and prodded, making Ireland less afraid of the world that had probably outstripped a pre-EU and determinedly insular Éire. Though he was sometimes groundbreaking — sometimes catty and horribly judgmental too — he had a ready and willing audience, an audience increasingly ill at ease with the orthodoxy of their day. He was the right person at the right place and at the right time to play a central role in reshaping this society. Essentially, he replaced the pulpit, so fierce in moulding the citizenry of this country — or, as we were collectively known, the flock — with Studio 1 in Montrose.

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