RTE's Ryan Tubridy said he’d love to star in Virgin Media's Gogglebox with his daughters some day.
The host is gearing up for the return of a new Late Late Show season next week after the Friday night show took its usual summer break for the past two months.
But the Radio One star, who is a self-confessed Gogglebox mega fan said he’d also be up for testing out other shows in the future - admitting he’d love a go at being an armchair critic on the Channel 4 series if the opportunity ever arose for an Irish celebrity edition.
Asked if he has ever been approached, he said: “No.
“And now I’m thinking ‘what is wrong with me?’ Maybe they are embarrassed because my house will look terrible,” he joked.
“I do watch it all the time with my oldest daughter. We do laugh and say, because we’ve watched it with Roman Kemp and his dad and all those and we laugh saying, ‘if there was an Irish version of this would we do it? And I’m like I'd love to do it.”
Whilst the dream is there, the dad-of-two feared he may get cold feet if the time ever came.
"But I just love it so much," he went on.
“I watch TV like everyone else going ‘ah jaysis, you can’t say that’.
“Imagine. It would be great fun. You would love watching me watching TV. I have very strong opinions,” he said laughing.
“I think that people watch TV. I watch Googlebox. I love Googlebox.
“I love watching people watching TV because what I get from Googlebox, whether it’s Irish or British, is that you see how perceptive audiences are on their couches and they can smell authentic and they can smell fake.
“I find it very educating in that sense.”
After a year of hosting without an audience, and navigating the new way of presenting a live TV show every week during the pandemic, Ryan, 48, said he feels he has changed as a presenter and became more ‘like himself’.
“I felt we embraced a whole new sense of empathy for people at home,” he explained.
“I definitely grew considerably in terms of who I am as a person and in terms of who I am as a presenter, strangely enough.
“It really did feel like things changed. I was well guided by colleagues and friends.
“They brought me to places career wise that I hadn’t been to before, so I found that very enriching and I like to bring more of that.
“I felt that it turned me as a persona and the show into a much more authentic television experience and less showbiz and I want that to be the case going into the future.
