“WELL, GOOD MORNING, we are live from the top of the tower looking out at drizzly, grey, beautiful London city and beyond.”
Ryan Tubridy made his return to the airwaves this morning with the inaugural episode of his new weekday radio show, simulcast across Virgin Radio in the United Kingdom and Q102 in Ireland between 10am and 1pm, Monday to Friday.
After beginning his new show with Pride (In The Name of Love) by U2, Tubridy spent the first few minutes explaining himself to English listeners who may be unfamiliar with his oeuvre.
He called himself a “political anorak,” a “bookworm,” and a “nerd” who loves Star Trek. He wasted little time before launching a broadside against the Amazon Kindle and opined about the importance of physical books, at one point saying: “I love the spines. They’re my friends.” Just in case anyone was worried that Ryan Tubridy would no longer be Ryan Tubridy after six months off air.
While doing his utmost to contextualise himself in the minds of his new listeners, Tubridy did not explain the circumstances that led to him taking up this new post. RTÉ’s secret payment scandal – which centred around undeclared payments to Tubridy to the tune of €345,000 between 2017 and 2022 – didn’t get a mention across Tubridy’s first three hours as a presenter since he last hosted his RTÉ show on 22 June last year.
It was immediately clear that the show’s simulcast across two countries will present a tricky landscape for Tubridy to navigate, for now at least. In the first 20 minutes alone, he found himself explaining The Late Late Show, Galway’s promenade, and the Phoenix Park (which he described as “Ireland’s version of Hyde Park”).
Cultural touchstones that are second nature to the Irish half of his audience are unlikely to land as well with English listeners, and one gets the sense that there is much more work to be done in order to bridge the gap.
It was a nervous start to life at a new station, to be sure. The 50-year-old stumbled a few times on the WhatsApp number that listeners could use to text in, and even told the audience that his producers had told him to slow down a little during the ad break. As Tubridy said himself, he’s the “new boy at a new school,” and the jitters certainly did not escape notice.
During the first hour, Tubridy evidenced his broadcaster credentials by giving a backstory of his friendship with Russell Crowe ahead of a phone interview with the Australian actor. Crowe’s intercession undeniably did some heavy-lifting for Tubridy, with the actor asking him what he’s reading (he’s reading JK Rowling’s crime series), helping out with in-jokes about how white Tubridy’s legs are, and reading out the entire menu of a dinner party he was hosting in the background. By the third hour, Tubridy was already replaying clips from the conversation with Crowe.
The first episode of The Ryan Tubridy Show 2.0 marked a departure from the RTÉ Radio 1 edition, more heavily punctuated by long music breaks and densely packed with audience text messages (one of which came from the son of Tubridy’s dentist).
With the exception of the chat with Crowe, however, Tubridy didn’t get the chance to zero in on any particularly topics of conversation. The Virgin Radio inbox was apparently so overburdened with text messages wishing Tubridy well that it was all he could do to riff on each individual text for a few moments each before moving on to the next song.
The vast majority of the texts Tubridy read out were from Irish listeners, leading him to tell Irish stories and throw out Irish place names. Maybe there is an audience for this in the UK, but one suspects that in a city with as strong an identity as London – a city teeming with its own news, culture and people to explore – the average listener might be mystified to hear their city boiled down to a few parks while Tubridy sings about how Galway is his favourite county in the world.
Unlike his former slot, there is less room here for Tubridy to impose his idiosyncratic style of hosting on proceedings, and yet he found a way. He managed to have a little argument with himself about whether a well-wisher who signed their name as Fran was a Francis or a Frances. He repeatedly alluded to his new running habit, specifying that he ran 6.7km in Regent’s Park just the other day. He did his awkward, weird voices. And of course, he managed to sneak in one story about a child referring to him as ‘The Toy Man’ and made the English audience aware of his passion for children’s literacy.
Despite the constraints of the new format, Ryan Tubridy remains decidedly Ryan Tubridy. Fans who have fallen for him over the last 20 years will undoubtedly be pleased to learn that his new role sees him deviating little from the style that has seen him through his long RTÉ career.
Whether it’s enough to win over the English audience, however, remains to be seen.
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