"After all these years, I've finally got my own email in RTÉ, " Brendan O'Connor declared to listeners on his first morning of summer cover for Radio 1's awkward 9am-10am slot. (It's Brendan@RTÉ.ie.)

Indeed, despite having to give way to prodigal son Ray D'Arcy on Saturday night TV, O'Connor doesn't look to be cutting his ties with Montrose any time soon, with his forthcoming mid-week show likely to displace the Midweek Movie strand from the post-news slot on Wednesday nights from 2016.

Midweek Movie is seen as an underperformer by RTÉ on an evening where it desperately wants to offer something to the non-current affairs audience, with last night's showing of To Rome with Love, a critically panned Woody Allen comedy from 2012, not untypical of a movie offering that's lacklustre compared to the on-demand competition.

Details of O'Connor's new TV entertainment vehicle have yet to be announced, but one thing he is firm on is that he has not been tapped to fill John Murray's slot on Radio 1. "I'm not replacing John Murray. Nobody could replace John Murray. And I think it's been portrayed in places like I've slipped into John Murray's still warm bed and I couldn't wait to get rid of him," he told listeners on Monday.

“I, of all people, would not do that, I wouldn’t take anybody else’s gig. I was booked in for holiday cover, okay. I’m here for four weeks. All I’m doing really is keeping the seat warm for whoever the anointed one will be in four weeks, whether it’s Tubs or whoever else. I don’t know, I don’t know that it’s Tubs, I have no information whatsoever, but whoever it is they’ll be here in four weeks.”

Still, with his own email now and everything, and other slots potentially coming up for grabs, O’Connor might yet find himself hanging round the RTÉ radio building for more than a mere four weeks.