Claire Byrne Live debuts on Monday on RTÉ1, and managing editor of current affairs David Nally says he believes the debate programme will be "exciting" enough to keep viewers watching in the 10.35pm slot.
After taking up his role in mid-2012, Nally "decided to throw the cards up in the air" and merge RTÉ's two current affairs programmes Prime Time and The Frontline, so that "there would be less predictability".
The thrice-weekly Prime Time gave "an injection of adrenalin" to the department's output, he says, and the Monday night viewer ratings "were around where I expect the The Frontline would have been".
However, the mix wasn’t perfect, Nally concedes.
"One of the consequences of having an audience in on Tuesday, mixed in with Prime Time, is that we didn't always spend much time talking to them, because there was so much else going on. The Monday Prime Time also became a bit of an orphan.
“We just thought if we were going to ask people to stay up to 11.30pm watching current affairs, we had to give them something more distinctive.”
Executive-produced by Aoife Stokes, Claire Byrne Live will include video packages, newspaper previews and interactive elements, such as "demographically credible" polls, as well as audience and panel debates that will form the core of the show.
Before settling upon it, Nally looked first to the past.
"I thought about bringing back Questions & Answers as a format," he says, describing it as tried and tested. But the more he explored how he might make it less rigid as a show, the more it became "something that wasn't Questions & Answers at all".
There is a logic to the new show, Nally says, even if it doesn’t succeed in increasing ratings. He would love to have the post-news slot on Mondays as well as Tuesdays and Thursdays, “but we do pretty well to have two 9.30pm slots”.
The only choice
Byrne was the obvious choice to host, he says. “In reality, she was the only one that we seriously considered to do it. I think she’s really exciting as a current affairs journalist – she kind of has the whole package.” He cites her credibility, studio presence and “innate sense of fairness”.
The audience, seated in a semi-circle, will be “closer to the panel than we have ever had before”, while the panel will sit behind desks and face each other. Byrne herself will not have a desk. There will be two or three items every week, with vox pops and one-on-one interviews also part of the mix, making it a bit busier, Nally says, than its predecessors.
One item has already been lined up for the first show on Monday, while a second possibility is being explored.
“If it doesn’t work out, I’ll wake up having sweats and nightmares,” Nally says. “But then something else will happen. It always does.”
