Tubridy Tonight
television series
Tubridy Tonight is a talk show hosted by Ryan Tubridy that aired on RTÉ One for five seasons between 2004 and 2009. The programme featured guest interviews (usually three per show), audience participation and live music from both a guest music group and the house band. Tubridy Tonight aired every Saturday night, except during the summer months, directly after the main evening news. The show's house musical act was Clint Velour and the Camembert Quartet.
Tubridy Tonight was the first successful Saturday night chat show to be broadcast by RTÉ since the ending of Kenny Live in 1999. The programme had regular viewing figures of 450,000, however, the show also regularly fell victim to so-called "Saturday Night Syndrome", with The Late Late Show, broadcast on Friday nights, frequently featuring supposedly better guests. In 2009 Tubridy Tonight came to an end when RTÉ announced that Tubridy would succeed Pat Kenny as host of The Late Late Show for the following series, with the presenter describing Tubridy Tonight as "quite the odyssey".
Background
Upon Gay Byrne's retirement from The Late Late Show in 1999, RTÉ announced that Pat Kenny, host of his own Saturday night chat show, would be Byrne's replacement. Kenny Live had aired since 1988 and had been a staple of the RTÉ schedule since the first series. The departure of Pat Kenny to the Friday night slot left a gap in the schedule.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tubridy Tonight” is television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tubridy, Tonight and television, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11015460. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2009, 1999 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tubridy Tonight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.