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Media world: Too Late Late for Pat Kenny?
Sunday, August 24, 2008 By Catherine O’Mahony
Could The Late Late Show part company with Pat Kenny?

The possibility arises after last week’s news that RTE’s highest-paid broadcaster still hasn’t signed a contract to present The Late Late Show, three weeks before the first programme of the autumn season.

RTE won’t comment, but Kenny himself has since said he’s confident he will reach a deal in time for his scheduled start of September 5. It seems the issue is the length of his contract which, one would assume, shouldn’t be a sufficiently big problem to result in him parting company with the show.

Still, the notion is now out there of a Kenny-less Late Late Show. It isn’t nearly as unthinkable as the notion of a Late Late minus Gay Byrne, who hosted it for nearly 40 years. But the transfer happened. The tireless Byrne is now set to host a modest 20-week series on Sundays on Lyric FM, with sponsorship being sought at a cost of €15,000.

The Late Late Show is, by contrast, theoretically RTE’s most valuable asset in terms of sponsorship, with a price tag of around €1.3 million. You can see why it’s priced this highly.

At a time when audiences have so many viewing options, The Late Late Show no longer gets the mass audiences it used to, but it is nonetheless delivering consistently for RTE 1 every Friday night, averaging 670,000 viewers in its last season.

It still gets a peak above a million for the Christmas toy show. That’s not matched anywhere else on the TV schedule.

But this latest controversy over Kenny is unlikely to help RTE secure a new sponsor for its premier talk show in time for September 5.

It’s not the first time that RTE has had trouble selling the sponsorship slot. When Renault ended its association with The Late Late Show two years ago, it wasn’t until October – several shows into the season – that it was able to announce Halifax as a replacement.

The Halifax deal was, according to industry estimates, struck at around the same price as the deal with Renault, which meant that its value had effectively fallen.

The decline has clearly progressed since then, since RTE is understood not to be seeking any premium on the Halifax deal for the 2008/2009 season, despite the recent big inflation in TV ad rates. It’s also seen as unlikely to tie in a new sponsor to a multi-year deal.

Halifax, incidentally, said it was delighted with The Late Late Show. It created its own giant owl mascot to give some personality to its backing of the show. It also had a €12 million marketing budget, so it could afford to be generous. Now all RTE needs is another big consumer brand with a giant budget . . .

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