TV3 HAS CONFIRMED that Vincent Browne’s Friday night chat show – seen as the station’s rival to The Late Late Show – will not be renewed this autumn.
A spokeswoman for the station this morning said that the channel’s decision to show the US edition of The X Factor on Friday nights meant that the Friday Late with Vincent Browne would not be returning in the autumn schedule.
The Friday night show – intended as a more casual and light-hearted alternative to his nightly Tonight With Vincent Browne panel show – had begun in March, filling the vacancy left after the weeknight show expanded into Fridays for the general election campaign.
The show aired for 13 weeks – a fortnight less than the ill-fated 2003 run of The Dunphy Show, TV3′s last direct rival to The Late Late Show.
The TV3 spokeswoman explained that while the X Factor airtime would not have directly clashed with the Browne slot, it would have had a “knock-on” effect.
She insisted, however, that the show had only ever been planned to run from after the election until Browne took his summer break in early July.
Speaking on the Ray Darcy Show earlier this summer, Browne said RTÉ had tried to poach some of his own show’s production staff to work on the Late Late, and that RTÉ had deliberately lengthened its Friday night flagship show in order to deliberately overlap with his own slot.
Browne will host a new addition to TV3′s schedule this autumn, with a new show called ‘Challenging God’ in which he will challenge the assumptions and power of religion.
The show’s zenith may well have been its first edition, when Browne admitted to being “completely out of my depth” when trying to interview Jedward:
Read: Vincent Browne ‘challenges God’, while Twink waits for your call… >
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