In the course of 2023, RTÉ was plunged into an existential crisis that appeared to be largely of its own making. It seemed that one scandal after another was being revealed in the press or in sessions of Oireachtas committees. The feeble and evasive attempts by some of the station’s senior management to offer explanations for this crisis only served to add fuel to the flames. The initial controversy had been started – like so many things in Ireland – by The Late Late Show. It was triggered by disclosures concerning financial arrangements that had been made between RTÉ and Ireland’s highest-paid TV star: the Late Late’s former host, Ryan Tubridy.
At first it was Tubridy who was subjected to intense criticism, and, at times, it seemed that he was being held personally – and unfairly – responsible for some of RTÉ’s corporate errors. But before long other aspects of the station’s governance came under critical scrutiny. One of the issues to be examined was RTÉ’s decision to invest millions of euro in Toy Show – the Musical. The decision to commit so heavily to this stage production was due, in part, to the particular significance that the annual Toy Show edition of the Late Late had acquired in preceding decades.
In 1975, when Pan Collins, a senior researcher on the Late Late, first suggested a Christmas Toy Show to Gay Byrne – who was then the show’s producer as well as its presenter – he was somewhat sceptical of its value. It was only through the sheer persistence of Collins – supported by Maura Connolly, Gay’s executive assistant – that he eventually agreed to include the item, but only as a relatively small segment of one edition of his show. However, over the next twenthy-five years, this segment steadily grew until the Toy Show became a regular, much-anticipated and complete episode in the Late Late’s yearly calendar.
Pat Kenny maintained some of Gay Byrne’s professional distance during the years that he hosted the Toy Show. All that changed when Ryan Tubridy was appointed as the third permanent presenter of the series. Tubridy seemed to embrace the Toy Show with genuine and, at times, barely contained enthusiasm. During his tenure, this live broadcast became a flagship show for the entire station and was promoted at every opportunity by RTÉ’s managers. The inclusion of disabled children and charity fund-raising allowed RTÉ to treat the Toy Show as a kind of touchstone that proved its continuing commitment to a public service ethos. At the same time, the sustained popularity of the show allowed premium rates to be charged for advertising slots and delivered a source of much-needed revenue.
When Ryan Tubridy decided to leave the Late Late in 2023 after fourteen years at the helm, it was the Toy Show that Dee Forbes, the station’s director-general, chose to single out as his outstanding contribution to RTÉ. ‘He had made it his own,’ she told RTÉ News. ‘He is the ‘Toy Man’ and he will be missed by kids and families all over the country.’ It seems doubtful that Gay Byrne or Pat Kenny would have been entirely happy with a similar farewell tribute – given that some of their most memorable shows focused on major social and political issues. However, an inflated sense of the Toy Show’s cultural and social importance may explain RTÉ’s decision to launch its first-ever stage musical – an undertaking that proved to be a financial, creative and political debacle for the station.
In February of 2024, due to sustained pressure from an Oireachtas committee, RTÉ released the ‘Business Plan’ on which the decision to commission Toy Show – the Musical had apparently been based. This is a remarkable document in several respects: remarkable for its hubris and self-regard; remarkable for the naivety of some of its claims; and, most of all, remarkable that anyone could ever have taken it seriously as a business plan.
Successful musicals are generally regarded – with good reason – as an exceptionally difficult form of theatre to create and produce. They can be very profitable, but they can also cost a great deal of money to stage, and their commercial success can never be guaranteed. Consequently, new musicals often involve a high degree of financial risk. Some of the individuals who drew up this business plan for RTÉ had little comparable experience of working at the level of musical theatre to which they aspired – and little relevant business or commercial track records. Considered as a group, they were essentially amateurs as far as producing this type of stage show was concerned. The great financial risks that RTÉ might face in such a production were acknowledged in their business plan, but any caveats were quickly and conclusively dismissed.
The plan began with an ‘Executive Summary’ of the project its authors wanted RTÉ to fund. In advertising-speak, this was ‘the sizzle, not the steak’. However, even allowing for the hyperbolic nature of many such pitches, this summary made extravagant and sweeping assertions about the significance of the Toy Show to Ireland, and the potential financial benefits to RTÉ from its future commercial exploitation.
The plan contended that the Late Late Toy Show had not only exercised ‘a formative influence on the entire population of Ireland’, but that it had also become ‘a TV phenomenon’ that was ‘watched globally’. The document claimed that its profound impact on the ‘Irish psyche’ had created ‘a sizeable, untapped surplus demand’ for related commercial products which would generate ‘premium revenues’. Those revenues, it was claimed, were currently only being enjoyed by those who were identified – in a revealing choice of words – as existing ‘beyond the gates of RTÉ’. The national broadcaster was urged by the authors of the plan to ‘carve out a space’ for itself in the world of theatrical entertainment so that it could tap into the ‘lucrative Christmas gifts market’.
The business plan listed some of the key and, some might say, the unfair advantages that RTÉ enjoyed over those competitors who could be found ‘beyond [its] gates’. These included the station’s ability to promote its own commercial activities – extensively and free of charge – through its multiple radio and television channels. It was claimed that the two Late Late producers – who had helped draw up the business plan and who were referred to in this document as the ‘custodians’ of the Toy Show – had delivered what was described as a ‘brilliant’ and ‘well-developed script/concept’. One previous production was cited as evidence of these custodians’ previous experience. This was Centenary: an evening of “music dance and poetry” that had been broadcast in 2016 to commemorate the anniversary of the Easter Rising. However, any connection between that rather old-fashioned event and contemporary musical theatre would seem to be remote.
More serious was the business plan’s projection of the likely costs incurred and the likely revenue returned from this production. To put it simply: all of the projected costs were gravely underestimated – and all of the projected revenues were greatly overstated. The business plan reckoned that the total costs of producing the stage show would amount to €1.3 million. The total incoming revenues – from ticket sales and merchandise – were projected as over €2 million. That would have meant a net profit to RTÉ of more than €700,000, and it was predicted that this handsome dividend would grow exponentially with every future revival of the stage show – since there would be no more major ‘start-up’ costs. The business plan foresaw that, within a few years, RTÉ would be receiving an annual cash return of several million euro from the musical. Judged by the usual standards of commercial theatre, all these financial projections were wildly optimistic.
The plans to invest millions of euro in this show should have required the scrutiny and approval of the RTÉ Management Board. However, a subsequent enquiry by the accountancy firm Grant Thornton found that no such approval had ever been sought by those involved in this production: it seems that the investment simply went ahead without any formal endorsement. One former member of the RTÉ Board told an Oireachtas committee that the director-general, Dee Forbes, and the director of strategy, Rory Coveney, had ‘deliberately circumvented’ established oversights in relation to Toy Show – The Musical. Anne O’Leary claimed that the board had only received a financial update when tickets to the show were ‘already on sale’.
RTÉ’s management clearly failed in its primary obligation to query whether the figures quoted in the business plan were credible – or merely the product of wishful thinking. Instead, the production became the most expensive domestic show ever staged in an Irish theatre: it cost almost €3 million – more than twice the original estimate. (The production budget for a typical Christmas show in Dublin is less than a tenth of that figure.) However, the revenues the musical generated came to substantially less than €600,000 – not even one-third of the original projection. This meant that the net loss to RTÉ amounted to more than €2.3 million. And that figure does not include the free and intensive advertising campaign that RTÉ launched to promote the show: a campaign which would have cost any independent production company tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of euro. Nor does it include the salaries paid to RTÉ staff who worked on the production.
By far the greatest error made by the six individuals who drew up this business plan was their fundamental and unshakeable belief in the popular appeal of the musical they were creating. Their plan assumed that RTÉ would sell a total of more than 90,000 tickets over three weeks. That projection was based on an average occupancy at each performance of almost 85 per cent. By any commercial theatre standards, that is a high percentage, but the business plan’s authors claimed to have erred on the side of caution in arriving at that figure.
As it turned out, only 11,044 tickets were sold across the entire run – little more than 10 per cent of the number projected in the business plan. Complimentary and free guest passes accounted for over 5,500 tickets and 3,600 more were given away to the winners of competitions that were run by RTÉ to publicise and promote the show. In other words, almost as many tickets were given away as were sold. Even when those free tickets are counted, the total attendance still amounts to no more than a fraction of the business plan’s projection. There is a further damning statistic: the costs of staging the musical were so grossly underestimated that, according to Grant Thornton, even if the show had managed somehow to achieve 100 per cent attendance across all of its run, it would still have lost money.
I attended one performance of Toy Show – the Musical during its brief run. It was staged in the Convention Centre in Dublin. This venue has almost 2,000 seats – more than any other theatre in Ireland. In fact, it has a bigger audience capacity than the majority of theatres on Broadway or in London’s West End. Even large Broadway shows often open in small out-of-town venues to test the water and to judge the likely financial risk of transferring to a bigger theatre in Manhattan. The decision to open in such a large venue as the Convention Centre indicates RTÉ’s supreme confidence in the success of the show. However, when the performance I attended began, the balcony was completely empty. The few people seated there had been moved down into the stalls – which were not even a quarter-full despite the new arrivals.
Once the show got under way, it was evident that the children in the cast were giving the performance their whole-hearted commitment. The script, however, struck me as the sort one might expect to have been written for a school production by an inexperienced writer. That sense of well-meaning amateurism extended to other levels of the show – which was hardly surprising since so many of those working in creative roles had so little experience of producing musical theatre. RTÉ’s Late Late Toy Show was constantly praised by the characters on stage for providing Ireland’s children with ‘the greatest night of the year’. As a critic from The Irish Times commented: ‘it was difficult not to feel cynical about the artistic intention of what is essentially a spectacular self-congratulatory marketing ploy.’
At the end of its run, the elaborate sets for the musical – along with all the unsold merchandise – were put into storage. This was in apparent readiness for the next season’s return of the musical. RTÉ spokespersons informed the public that this revival would take place once some ‘adjustments’ to the production had been made. However, it seems more likely that the station’s management hoped to bury the failed musical quietly and in obscurity. The station refused a Freedom of Information request to reveal the profit and loss on the musical – claiming that this refusal was simply to ‘protect its commercial interests’. It took several months before RTÉ finally confirmed that the show would never be returning and that its sets were being ‘recycled’. If the Oireachtas investigation of irregular payments made by RTÉ to Ryan Tubridy had not occurred, then the Irish public might never have known the extent of the debacle that had taken place.
When that began to be exposed, RTÉ’s senior managers claimed that a willingness to take creative and financial risks was part of the station’s remit and an essential requirement offor any national broadcaster. According to Dee Forbes, ‘creative projects of all kinds carry a degree of risk’. It was almost as if she was suggesting that the failure of this musical was itself testimony to the integrity, the imagination and the courage of those who were primarily responsible for that failure.
When RTÉ finally published the unredacted Grant Thornton report, it emerged that the station had been warned in advance of the impending disaster. The report revealed that Julian Erskine – who was acting as a consultant to the production – suggested that the scheduled opening should be cancelled. It seemed that poor advance ticket sales indicated a lack of public interest in the show. However, it appears that Rory Coveney, the station’s director of strategy and one of the authors of the show’s business plan, believed that RTÉ was ‘locked in’ to the project since large costs had already been committed. Coveney – who was described by RTÉ as the ‘driving force’ behind the production – thought it would be ‘unthinkable’ to scrap the show and that to do so would damage RTÉ’s ‘reputation, confidence and market credibility’. And so the production went ahead regardless.
Toy Show – the Musical may have played a role in the station losing some of the trust that the Irish public had placed in the national broadcaster. However, there were other factors that might also have led to a loss of confidence. Further damaging disclosures revealed what seemed like the excessive use of hospitality expenses; the substantial salaries paid to some of the station’s senior managers; the existence of so-called ‘barter accounts’ that had been used by RTÉ to make discreet payments; and the large sums of ‘redundancy’ money paid to some of the station’s managers whose jobs apparently still existed after their departure. Much of this may have been exaggerated in media coverage, but these disclosures still made an impact on the Irish public.
Television – as a medium and as an industry – has changed enormously in recent years and RTÉ is almost unrecognisable from the station where I started working in the 1980s. On my producer training course, we were shown a pie chart that was divided into two slices. The much larger slice represented those viewers in Ireland who could only receive RTÉ TV broadcasts. The much smaller slice represented those who also had access to the three existing British channels: BBC One, BBC Two and ITV, (Channel 4 had still to launch). In today’s Ireland, there are not only scores of available TV channels – British, American, European and Irish – new technology has also created a great range of alternative sources of information and entertainment.
Such developments have not only changed Irish viewing habits; they have also affected the relationship between the Irish public and RTÉ. That is reflected in the shift in public attitudes towards the TV licence fee. To continue to demand that people must buy a licence for a service that they may only use infrequently – if at all – no longer seems to be quite fair or even sustainable in the long run. To some, the very concept of a TV licence fee now seems as out-dated and unacceptable as RTÉ’s corporate logo of Saint Brigid’s Cross became in the course of the 1990s.
The real value of the revenue from the TV licence to RTÉ has now fallen consistently for several years. That is, partly, because the fee has been frozen by successive governments, but it is also due to the growing reluctance of the Irish public to pay for it. There was a dramatic fall in the licence fee revenue collected in 2023 – following the testimonies given by the station’s senior management to Oireachtas committees. It dropped by €17.3 million in that year. An RTÉ spokesperson claimed that this fall in revenue was due to recent ‘negative publicity’ – as if the crisis facing the station were only a public relations disaster.
Of course the underlying crisis is not unique to RTÉ. It is shared by many other public service broadcasters across the world. Those broadcasters are trying to keep pace with the profound changes that are taking place in media consumption and in the rapid growth of international streaming services. To meet that challenge effectively would require a level of investment in new forms of programming and technology that RTÉ is currently not able to make.
In recent years, terrestrial broadcasters have lost some of their previous commercial advantages – such as their effective control of the transmission schedules. The reality is that viewers can now determine when they choose to watch programmes – either by recording them or through digital streaming services. There are, however, still some ‘event’ broadcasts – such as celebrity weddings or sporting fixtures – that continue to draw large live audiences. The Late Late Toy Show is one of those broadcasts – and that is one of the reasons it became so prized by RTÉ. Perhaps the prospect of a money-spinning musical based on the proven appeal of the Toy Show and its ‘event’ status seemed to offer the station’s management the prospect of accessing new sources of revenue: sadly, that proved to be a fantasy.
It seems clear that successive Irish governments have had no real vision of what the future should hold for RTÉ. However, the current plans made by the station’s management seem designed to result in it being systematically dismantled. The plan is apparently to sell off or dispose of much of its current infrastructure, including some of its land and many of its buildings and studios. RTÉ will apparently produce less and less of its own work until it becomes more of a transmission platform than a hub of production.
For some, these changes may appear both logical and obvious. For others, the logic may seem too obvious: the downgrading of RTÉ and the outsourcing of some of the station’s prime programming – including the Late Late Show – might seem to lead, in the words of Fintan O’Toole, to the ‘gradual disappearance of RTÉ as a physical and creative entity’. That process may also seem likely to increase the role and importance of senior executives within the station’s management structure. Recent events do not inspire great confidence in the professional judgment or competence of some of those managers.
The threat to the future of public service broadcasters like RTÉ is real and present – and comes at a time when the need for the continued existence of such broadcasters may never have seemed greater. However, RTÉ cannot claim to hold those in power to account if the station appears to exempt itself from a similar accountability. Considerable respect – and affection – still exist in the minds of very many Irish people for the national broadcaster. In many respects, that is RTÉ’s most precious asset – and it would be deeply unfortunate if it were to be put at any further risk.
1/10/2024
David Blake Knox has worked as a producer for RTÉ, the BBC and HBO. His independent production company, Blueprint Pictures, has made films and programmes for a range of channels in Ireland and abroad. His latest production, Face Down – the Disappearance of Thomas Niedermayer, is based upon his book of the same title. The photograph above shows the stalls in the Convention Centre, Dublin, minutes before the start of a matinee performance of Toy Show – the Musical.
