Brendan O'Connor is coming back to our television screens with his new panel show Brendan O'Connor's Cutting Edge, and he has said he hopes it will have the energy of a sprint in comparison to the marathon that was The Saturday Night Show.
The Saturday Night Show came to an end last year after five years on the air, with The Ray D'Arcy Show filling the time slot.
Now, O'Connor is making his return to live TV on RTÉ One with his new panel discussion show that will deal with the news of the day, water cooler moments and colour pieces that may have escaped the public's attention.
He will be joined each week by three panellists, with Pat Shortt, Norah Casey and Chris O'Donoghue taking part in tonight's first episode.
The show, which is starting out with an initial run of 5 episodes, but will return in the autumn with a further 10, will be a change of pace for the presenter coming out of a talk show that ran for 32 weeks.
"Obviously the preparation over the last few weeks has been intense, but the 32 week run is a grind like," he told RTÉ TEN. "Just being on the Late Late last week and talking to them all, they're going 'I've two more, two more shows to go' and I remember that - limping to the finish line when you'd done the 32 weeks. Teams get tired, presenters get tired, and it's a tough grind.
"This, instead of being a marathon, will hopefully be a sprint and will have the energy of a sprint."
Brendan O'Connor says his new show will be a sprint, not a marathon. #CuttingEdge https://t.co/Gvw5XSZFz7https://t.co/mNq7OStFWk
— RTÉ TEN (@RTE_TEN) May 18, 2016
O'Connor added that while he loved his time working on The Saturday Night Show, he was glad to get his weekends back and to be able to spend more time with his family.
"It was great to have weekends back and to get to know my children again – my, how they'd grown in the five years! – it was great. You know what; the thing that I loved the most was the feeling after work on a Friday of being able to go for a few pints without having that responsibility hanging over you on a Saturday night. As much as I loved it, I get more of a sense of a weekend, you know?" he said.
While Cutting Edge is technically a panel show, O'Connor said it wouldn't be a panel show in a traditional sense, "You'd hesitate to call it a panel show, there are panels but we'll be seated around an uncomfortably small table and we'd be hoping that people would be forced by that to speak the truth, have rows, things might get a little bit awkward, and a laugh."
Other panellists due to appear on the series include Al Porter, Cait O'Riordan and Eleanor Tiernan, and O'Connor said they have all been specifically hand-picked as contributors.
"They're all hand-picked for craic and chat and otherwise. So instead of having people on who are around and available, these are the people we want at the table because they're all entertaining," he said.
While the majority of the show will take place around the small round table, it will also feature two regular segments; a taxi -cam which will feature taxi drivers discussing news topics, and a soap box where "somebody who is passionate about an issue or something they feel strongly about" will discuss their views.
"The idea is that those two things would feed back into the table and we would discuss them," O'Connor added.
Cutting Edge is on RTÉ One at 10.10pm tonight.
