By Sarah Caden
Sunday Jun 14 2009

Miriam O'Callaghan tried to withdraw from the the race for The Late Late Show because of concerns for her professional and personal life. When she heard she didn't get the job, the first thing she did was ring her husband, whom she had been unable to talk to during 'the most difficult' period of her career, for a snog in the car park of RTE.

And, as she tells Sarah Caden, she couldn't be happier to be starting into another run of her hugely successful chat show. Photography by Kip Carroll. Styling by Liadan Hynes

When she left the office of RTE's director general, having been told she had not got The Late Late Show job, the first person Miriam O'Callaghan rang was her husband, Steve Carson.

It was a natural response, of course, to want to tell the person closest to you such big news, but this was a little more complicated. Because for weeks, while most of Ireland speculated freely on who would win out in what Miriam calls "the biggest job application in the history of Irish media", she had not been able to discuss it with her husband. As director of programmes for RTE TV, Carson had counted himself out of the decision process on the new Late Late host as soon as his wife's name was put on the list, and, though Miriam understands that people might find it hard to believe, they discussed it only once again -- and briefly -- when she considered taking her name off it.

"And I really don't think Steve knew already when I rang to tell him I didn't get it, and he was the first person I wanted to tell," says Miriam, almost a month after Ryan Tubridy was announced as the new Late Late presenter. "I rang Steve and I said, 'OK, love, I'm not doing the Late Late -- meet me in the car park.' It was, like, for a snog. It was quite weird. I said: 'It's as if we're having an affair, and we're married!' But there was that sense of a huge weight being off our shoulders, because all that time I couldn't talk to my own husband.

"It was strange and difficult," Miriam continues, "because I adore Steve and I love working with him -- I began working with him back on Newsnight -- but during all the Late Late stuff, I was literally afraid to be seen with him. If I went for a coffee with him, I wondered if I should wear dark shades. It was crazy."

But then, as Miriam O'Callaghan points out, it has all been a bit crazy the past few months. It seems bizarre now, she says, but more than that, it was difficult, awkward and unsettling. And she's glad it's over. Really, she is, though the Prime Time presenter is smart enough to know that people will take such assertions with a pinch of salt.

"If I had a euro for every person who's told me, 'You were robbed', in the past few weeks, I'd be rich," Miriam laughs. "And they don't believe you when you say you're really, really, really fine about it. Because no one gets it that maybe you didn't want what's perceived as the biggest job in television, and that you might even have withdrawn from the race, to be honest. So, you just go along with it and reassure them that you're fine. And I am. I really am."

Though we meet, ostensibly, to talk about the new six-week series of Saturday Night with Miriam, which begins next Saturday, what's mainly on Miriam O'Callaghan's mind is The Late Late Show. She feels the need to explain and, within that, there are things she cannot quite explain. She is clear on certain things; such as how her commitment to Prime Time made her uncertain about dropping it for the chat-show job and how she feels a certain freedom in knowing the direction in which her career is not going.

Then, she is less certain about, less able to explain definitively, the stuff with which many women grapple. Such as whether the considerations in taking on a huge job like the Late Late were the same for her as they were for Ryan Tubridy and Gerry Ryan; whether if, as a wife and mother of eight, it would have been the right thing for her. She'll never know now, but, in a way, maybe Miriam is relieved not to have to find out.

"It all happened so suddenly and it was so shocking," says Miriam of the night Pat Kenny announced, live on air, that he was to retire from The Late Late Show at the end of its run. "It was so sensational and I was like, 'Oh, my God'. We're very boring -- we always watch the Late Late. We never go out on a Friday night because I'm not around all week and the kids like me to be home, so that's what we do. And I couldn't believe it."

But surely Steve knew? "Well, if he did, he never told me," she says, laughing as she tries to remember if her husband feigned surprise. Then, almost as suddenly as Pat announced his exit, Miriam's name was entered into the contest to become the next Late Late host, and Steve Carson officially and publicly withdrew himself from the decision process. It was strange, she says, to be in a race you had not entered yourself, then doubly odd not to be able to discuss it with your partner.

"It was awkward," Miriam says. "There's no point being disingenuous about it. Obviously, Steve must know things he simply can't tell me and, in all of this, I couldn't tell him anything. But when he got this job, I decided -- and I never actually told him this -- that I would never ask him about anything, and that held true with this."

When the names up for the Friday night chat-show job were whittled down to Ryan Tubridy, Gerry Ryan and Miriam, she seemed consistently the most popular contender all through the race with the bookies, the public and, the whispers went, RTE. She, however, was unsure. Early on, Miriam says, she wrote a note -- handwritten, as is her wont, being slightly wary of emails that fall under the Freedom of Information Act -- to her boss, RTE Director of News, Ed Mulhall, expressing her concern about taking the Late Late if it meant leaving Prime Time.

Funnily, Miriam explains, she literally bumped into Mulhall as she walked across the RTE campus for a formal meeting with Director General Cathal Goan and the Managing Director of Television, Noel Curran. "I was walking along, thinking, 'How do you do an interview for the Late Late? Do you sing and dance?'" Miriam laughs, "and, as the gods would have it, I bumped into Ed. He said that I'd been on his mind and to come and see him after the meeting."

At that meeting -- no singing and dancing -- Miriam says she explained that she would ideally want to continue with Prime Time if she got the Late Late, maybe doing only the Tuesday night show. "I was told at that meeting I couldn't do the two and I said, not aggressively, 'Look, I think it's a wee bit unfair because the other two candidates will be able to keep their radio, five days a week'. And I know radio and television are different, but still. I told them I was worried and they said it was not negotiable; that left me very worried."

After that meeting, at which she was also told that her boss was not in favour of the move, Miriam went to see Mulhall and came away convinced that the Late Late was not for her. "And that evening," she says, "the hardest part of all was that I couldn't talk to Steve. But I'm terrible, I'm very bad at keeping a secret, so I did say, 'Steve, I spoke to Cathal and Noel today for the first time.' And he asked me how it went and I said, 'Actually, I'm thinking of pulling out,' and he just looked at me and said, 'But you'd be brilliant at it, love.' And that's all he said and all I said."

The next day, Miriam -- whose children range from three to 21 years old, with the youngest still toddling, while the eldest is sitting her bar exams -- was at RTE at the crack of dawn. She wrote a letter withdrawing from the race, went on to draw up a press release with the publicity office, then was asked to, as she says, "Please reconsider".

While accepting that Miriam O'Callaghan seems genuinely happy with the way all of this has ultimately shaken out, surely the fact that she was asked to stay in the running was a little galling once Tubridy got the job? Did she not then feel they just kept her in to keep the notion of a battle of titans going?

"It certainly got the whole thing a lot of coverage," Miriam says, "but I don't think that was the intention. But it was the accidental outcome. I go with the theory in life that most people are not setting out to shaft other people, genuinely. But I think the outcome was very awkward for me. So in a way, it would have been easier for me if I had exited, but how do you do that without seeming like a pain in the neck?

"It was a process that took on a giant life of its own," Miriam goes on. "And I was trapped in it. Even when I tried to pull out of it, I remained trapped in it. And no matter how you try to tell that story, people will say, 'She's just saying that because she didn't get the job'."

Miriam O'Callaghan's mother prayed she would not get the job. Miriam O'Callaghan senior was one of the people the Prime Time presenter turned to when she was not able to confide in Carson, and her advice gave pause for thought. A retired primary school principal, this is a woman acquainted with professional ambition and the realities of managing career and family, and she didn't want The Late Late Show for her daughter.

"My mother said, 'Steve will come home on a Friday tired from a week's work. You'll work all week, then you'll come in at 1am after the Late Late and your kids won't have seen you, then you'll spend Saturday and Sunday worrying about the reaction to the show.' And she has a point.

"I think it's different for a man from a woman, I really do," says Miriam, who not only has her RTE job, but co-owns the Mint production company with Carson, which has made, among other things, the Haughey and Bertie series. "I'm not saying the mother is more important," she goes on, "but I think the happiness of my kids and my husband is largely affected by the mother and wife.

"And, you know, I'm an ambitious woman and I'm not going to pretend to be a wilting violet, and I should be unhappy about not getting the top gig, but I'm not. That's unusual and it's primarily about Prime Time, but if I'm really honest, deep down in my psyche, it's also to do with my family life and my marriage, because they are, by a million miles, the most important things."

The flipside of her mother's advice, Miriam adds, came from her older sister, Margaret, an academic and another working O'Callaghan mother. "My sister said that by withdrawing from the Late Late running I was imposing my own glass ceiling," she explains. "Because, while I love Prime Time and think it's a very good show, I also wanted to keep it on as security, because I was worrying about if the Late Late was panned and it just didn't work out -- then I'd have nothing.

"That's where my sister came in and said, 'A man wouldn't think like that; they wouldn't even consider that they were going to fail.' But it made me unhappy to worry about that, because I'm the daughter of a civil servant and a teacher and I worry about security; I have eight children and some of them are very young."

Given, then, how Miriam worried about the impact of The Late Late Show on her family, the difficulty of not being able to talk to her husband about it becomes all the more apparent. And maybe, she says, that barrier would only have been built upon had she got the job. It's impossible to say now, but maybe her mother was right, and given that Miriam's first marriage -- to journalist Tom McGurk, who is father to her four older children -- ended in divorce, it's not as if Miriam does not understand the essential fragility of human relationships.

Anyway, Miriam laughs, she went through having a loved one as the boss all those years ago in childhood, when her mother was the principal and excessively strict with her kids in school hours to ward off any accusations of favouritism. Maybe, Miriam laughs, she didn't need to revisit that experience with her husband.

"There's no point in pretending this was the easiest period in my life," Miriam says. "In all honesty, it was probably the most difficult time, because it was very awkward and it took on a life of its own. In a way, it's a huge load off our shoulders."

And, now, while Ryan Tubridy has The Late Late Show, she still has Prime Time and, oddly enough, her chat show in the offing, with the fourth series of Saturday Night with Miriam. She's keen to get her teeth into it, Miriam says, as six weeks of fun and a bit of light. She insists that the Saturday night show was not launched in 2005 as a grooming for the Late Late job and, further, says that if the rumours that her chat show was cancelled this summer were true, then nobody ever told her. Not officially, anyway, she laughs, but it was one of the many whispers that made its way to her in recent months.

"I'm looking forward to the show now," Miriam says. "It's as if, because I've shut down one chapter in my life, I feel free to try other things. I've turned down so many things over the years, because you don't want people to get sick of you or whatever, but now I'm really looking forward to the chat show.

"I'm doing a programme about men and women and I'm going to do some radio over the summer, and I feel more open to things. Maybe, if I thought this meant I now was going to do nothing but current affairs for the rest of my life, I would be less happy with how things have worked out, but I'm really, really happy."

In all the confusion of recent months, Steve Carson was not the only person with whom Miriam O'Callaghan refrained from mulling over the pros and cons. She also left her eight children out of the process, leaving them to childish things or their own, young-adult issues. When it was all over, however, her 10-year-old son seemed suddenly concerned.

"Does that mean you're not going to be doing the Toy Show?" he asked, with no small disappointment.

"That was his only interest," Miriam laughs. "And that puts things back in perspective."

'Saturday Night with Miriam' begins on Saturday, RTE One

- Sarah Caden

Download our iPhone App Now