The title alone was loaded with promise - Gerry Ryan: The Last Interview but even before the man himself began talking, a voiceover gravely informed us that if TV3 had known that Ryan was to be dead in a mere six months, the questions would have been a lot different.
Well, duh! That viewer beware warning was TV3’s get out clause on what was an anti-climax of a show. This was not going to be some great final confession by the late great man after all but even without shock revelations there was just about enough on The Last Interview to keep us watching.
For a start, Ryan looked well. Prosperous in a well-lit room in his beloved Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin 4, he humorously traced his life from skinny boy broadcaster to wannabe Gay Byrne with all the semi-luvvie bravado of an old showbiz warhorse. In fact, Ryan in his latter years (and he died at a very young 53) had become to resemble Jerry Lewis as chat show host Jerry Langford in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.
Anyone interested in the inner workings of the national broadcaster and the mechanics of how to make, or how not to make, a TV show would have relished tales of Gerry being offered the Rose of Tralee in front of RTÉ’s editorial board. "They said we want you to do the Rose of Tralee and I looked around and they were all sitting there saying, isn’t it great!?" he said, as though he was savouring a fine wine. "I said I’d rather have someone saw my legs off. They must have thought I was an uppity little brat."
Ryan enjoyed being an uppity little brat and that was a large part of his charm. He had been offered the Eurovision Song Contest too, the year before he co-hosted it in 1994 but as Gerry confided with a chortle, the then Director of RTÉ, Joe Barry, would rather have had Satan presenting it than a loose canon like Ryan.
He himself took a highly critical but always funny overview of his choppy television career acknowledging that he only really found his metier as a TV host with Ryan Confidential. That was done in a face to face, one on one interview format, shot in flatteringly-lit interiors but well before that, Ryan’s telly career was a slow motion car crash beginning with Non Stop Pop and continuing with Secrets (RTÉ spent £85,000 an hour on it. Ekk!) and Ryantown.
These were shows which tried to ape the big, shiny floor Saturday night light entertainment spectacles of ITV and BBC but which were only memorable for their truly awful graphics. However, Ryan gamely played along and as he remarked in last night’s interview, "In my early days of television, if someone came up to me and said we want you to do The Angeles on Saturday and a porn movie on Sunday I would have said yeah!"
Naturally, the print media, whose job it is to have a go at the electronic media, hated everything he did. "Week after week I’d see another headline saying Another Turkey For Ryan and there would be a picture of me with a turkey’s head superimposed on my face," Ryan said. "I took it very personally. It was very difficult week in, week out. It’s going to get to you eventually."
He couldn’t handle the fact that the media thought he was an "imbecile" which he clearly never was; over the top, occasionally arrogant - yes; an imbecile, no. Worse still, Ryan’s colleagues at the National Broadcaster weren’t exactly pleased with him either. "When I did Secrets, I would be walking around the campus in RTÉ and I would have people coming up to me saying I am ashamed to work in RTÉ because of that show. It is disgusting," Ryan said. "I’d think, ok that’s what my own guys think of me..."
However, Who Wants to be a Millionaire was the show Ryan really coveted. "Gay kept getting in the way. I’d think, it’s a pity Gay’s not dead because than I’d stand a chance of doing it," Ryan joked. "I’d sit there going please Gay, die."
Then when Pat Kenny’s mother passed away, Ryan was offered the chance of a life time and was asked to play stand in for one night only on The Late Late Show. "The head of entertainment said to me we want you to do The Late Late Show and I said no because I always feel the guests don’t get enough time and I feel like an eejit and that I don’t contribute anything when I go on. It never works," he said. "He said, no – we want you to present The Late Late Show. I said yeah!" He thought it was his finest moment and he was pretty damn good at it too.
Ryan always loved talking about himself and last night he did at length for what was sadly to be the last time on TV. There was never going to be anything about the excesses and turmoil of his private life but Gerry Ryan: The Last Interview left you wondering, wondering things like what would he have brought to The Late Late Show if RTÉ had chosen a different Ryan? And wondering if Ryan himself knew it was perhaps time to re-invent himself as he dealt with the break-up of his marriage and saw the ultimate prize of the Late Late slip away again.
There was nothing new in The Last Interview but what it did very well was to remind us that Gerry was a vibrant man in love with life and for that it made for sad viewing indeed.
Alan Corr
