150KTubs - future career in Virgin Radio and other soulful pursuits **Mod: Read OP**

I am always interested on what the thoughts or views are from within the industry of Ryan Tubridy/RTE and of course his new venture with Virgin.

Liam Thompson, programming director for Classic Hits, formerly a PD for Virgin and RTE has written in his Raudio newsletter his views on Ryan Tubridy and the RTE Toy Show debacle. It does delve into his thoughts on The Toy Show musical in finer detail but for the purposes of keeping the post relative to Ryan Tubridy I have limited it as per the following extract:

RTE released its list of highest paid stars on Monday, it covers 2022, and it showed that our old friend Ryan Tubridy trousered €515,000 in the 12 months, that’s a hefty 17% pay increase on 2021.

There’s a considerable gap between the born again Virgin, and his RTE compatriots, with Joe Duffy and Claire Byrne, the only two in the €300k club, while lesser lights like Ray D’Arcy, Miriam O’Callaghan and Brendan O’Connor have to make do with roughly a quarter of a million, or in football parlance, 5 grand a week.

It all seems quite tame now, compared to the glorious and mystifying adventures with the Public Accounts Committee, and RTE is committed to making sure that no one gets paid more than the boss, Kevin Bakhurst, who is also in the quarter of a million club.

Arguably, if I were Kevin, I’d just give myself a pay rise and save some negotiating time, but I have a feeling in the age of austerity that RTE face, that might cause a headline or two in The Daily Star.

I’d be extremely surprised if Ryan’s new gig on Virgin Q102 is landing him anywhere near the kind of money RTE paid him in 2022, and that London can be terrible expensive, so it’s just as well he also had a Daily Mail Diary now, to keep him in Tube fare.

So far, not so scandalous really. But that’s not surprising, given that the salary list emerged in the same week as the truly spectacular report on RTE’s most spectacular failure, “Toy Show, The Musical”

The Musical Report

The headline numbers are truly staggering, the show sold just 11,044 tickets, resulting in a loss to the organisation of €2.2 million, or 4 years of Ryan Tubridy.

Nothing about the report is positive, as Grant Thornton sliced their way through the figures, it turns out the show failed to attract the projected sponsorship, so RTE had to make up the shortfall, putting an extra €75,000 into the pot.

The show was projected to make a net profit of €1.2 million in Year 1, and the projected takings for the first three years was over €6 million.

That kind of projection is truly insanity, and it appears the RTE Board didn’t have the full picture, and the process of signing off doesn’t seem to have produced any kind of paper trail.

Look, organisations make mistakes, and I think we’ve all been in those meetings, where the Board has decided we need to diversify the business, expand into new areas, find new revenue streams.

Let’s have a Brainstorm

Usually, people get broken up into subgroups and sent away to develop a strategy that will take the businesses’ existing strengths and turn them into a whole new revenue stream. Some people will come back with great ideas, some will come back with very predictable ideas and some people will return with ideas that just don’t work.

Clearly, at some point in the last few years, there was one of those meetings in RTE.

You can hear the pitch, “times are tough, linear media is under pressure, we need to branch out, can’t just depend on licence fee and advertising, we need to add a new revenue stream”.

Someone at the back, puts their hand up and says, what about events? We could run live events and generate income from our audience in new ways.

That is the point at which senior management should have said, ok, but we have no large scale live event expertise, we’ll need a carefully worked out plan, that minimises risk and lets us trial the idea before we go all in.

That doesn’t seem to have happened though, and instead, we got Toy Show, The Musical, which clocked up a loss of 2.2 million euro in one year.