RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

Just on the €900 taxi from Drogheda back to Dublin which Tubs said was for him at the Oireachtas committee meeting(but elsewhere it was for Niamh from NKM).

Tubs said “I love your county very much” regarding Louth. He loved it so much he couldn’t get out of it fast enough after the Renault gig, and wouldn’t stay the night in a hotel there…..one assumes none were good enough for his refined tastes. 🙄 Would have been a lot cheaper than a €900 taxi, but when you’re not paying you don’t care about the costs I guess….

Double post

You've described it perfectly there - not only does he not make guests feel comfortable, but he actively makes them feel uncomfortable and awkward. At times the radio show is pure Alan Partridge. He just can't relate to people in a natural manner. Everything is scripted to within an inch of its life and there's no flow or spontaneity from the man.

I didn't hear the Ronnie O'Sullivan interview but as soon as you mentioned his name I knew it had car crash potential. O'Sullivan has had his demons, and even on good days for him he can be a tough interview. I actually don't so much blame RT on this one as getting Tubridy to interview him was a bad editorial decision; but here's another problem with RTE - there seems to be no-one in the editorial teams across the station strong enough to say anything it seems to any of the NKM crew. You see it with Joe Duffy all the time - the man does whatever he wants on his show from pushing his own biases and agenda, plugging his death bukes, losing the rag at callers etc. etc. Anyone familiar with RT and RO'S would know it's not exactly a match made in heaven as they couldn't be more different. But they're either afraid to tell the self-anointed Toyman "we don't think this would be a good interview for you to do" (i.e. you don't have the skillset to handle this) or they actually think he's the second coming of Johnny Carson and actually a brilliant and skilled interviewer - neither of which reflects well on them.

The list of disastrous interviews is not limited to difficult characters. Look at the Jonah Hill interview for example. You could literally just say "Hi Jonah, tell us about your new movie" and Hill would go for 20minutes and make it funny and engaging. Instead Tubs' lack of human interaction skills betrayed him to the point where Hill asked him 'are you nervous?". Hill couldn't believe that Tubridy was hosting the show.

There's so many examples of bad and terrible interviews with him it's amazing he's still in a job at all tbh. In fact, it's hard to think of a really good Tubs interview with anyone. Even the not so bad ones are just meh, colour by numbers standard interview questions we've heard a thousand times.

He's 38 years in RTE and 25+ in. front of mics and cameras full time and still bangs on the radio and TV desk nervously and still is reading verbatim from cue cards. You'd think at this stage he'd at least have developed enough in his role to stop doing both of those?

Tubs is fine with old dears on the morning radio slot asking them about plain cake and trips to various parts of Ireland reminiscing about "jimmy" Stewart* and good old black and white movies. I personally don't think he's good with children but some of you seem to, so maybe some kids TV too. Anything trickier than that is beyond his skillset.

Dunphy called him "a young fogey" about 20 years ago on radio once and I thought it summed RT up perfectly at the time. He's just older now. And richer.

*edit - apologies, I meant to say Stewart but typed Dean for some reason when I posted this firstly. I was of course referring to Stewart as Tubs thinks we are all living a real-life version of "It's a Wonderful Life".