[Rdd]

Mid September is a decent launch time for the show - for me, I am hoping they have reduced its run time to 90 minutes, as even Ryan Tubridy said he felt the over two hour format needed changing.

Hopefully Patrick has kept the owl, as it is the icon for the show

The theme tune is the issue for me - Gay Byrne's era theme tune is brilliant, but Tubridy decided to butcher that in his versions of it, and also the "To Whom It Concerns" is just more associated with Gay Byrne, that I feel a brand new theme tune is needed.

Pat Kenny had a very decent theme tune, and I feel Patrick's production should have a fresh new theme tune, maybe with night time scenes of Dublin, leading up to the night time view of RTE Television Centre, with The Late Late Show logo over it.

Pat Kenny felt pretty much they same, or at least he said that publicly just before taking up the reigns. But then his theme tune was essentially a soundalike - a tune that wasn’t To Whom it Concerns but tried its best to sound like it - it even incorporated a similar drum roll.

TWIC (originally a single by Chris Andrews) is iconic and I was glad Tubridy brought it back, even though I wasn’t really a fan of the Brian Byrne arrangement used for most of Tubridy’s tenure - though to be fair that was arranged to fit in with the musical style of the house band that carried over from Tubridy Tonight and was a key feature of those years (dumped suddenly when Covid came along though). 

BTW the version used for the last few years (since 2019 IIRC) is the exact same arrangement as was used by Gay Byrne - just with a bit of the opening drum roll cut for timing (in Gay Byrne’s day, there was the odd practice of running the credits over the opening titles, which is why they were so long in the first place).  I do hope they’ll keep it, but hopefully the titles will be a bit less cheesy than the later Tubridy version, which was (visually speaking) awful.