There is life after The Late Late Show. Gaybo proved it when he departed Montrose on his Harley in a cloud of rock-n-roll dust a decade ago. Acres of newsprint were given over to the career obituaries of RTÉ's smoothest broadcaster amid Nostradamus-like predictions that a Late Late without Gay was only two steps away from the end of civilisation. A nation wept. Then back came bitesize Gaybo, reincarnated as a Lyric FM dj and the guardian angel of Ireland's roads.

The question that needs to be faced up to now is whether there is any trace of life at all left in the Late Late. The show's greatest claim to fame as the world's longest-running television chat show resonates more like a health warning than a boast. It has out-lived its era. To ask any broadcaster to take over hosting it in order to rescue it from the graveyard is crueller than vivisection, though there will already be a queue of hopefuls outside the Director General's door by nine o'clock tomorrow morning. It has endured this long despite its proven formula, not due to it, and because RTÉ's mandarins have been too frightened to let a once good thing die with dignity. Despite the brickbats pelted at him for the last decade, Pat Kenny has been performing miracles most Friday nights, managing to keep his guests so distracted they don't notice the corpse at the party.

To dispose of the station's most revered mausoleum will pose several immediate problems for the bosses. Not least will be the dilemma of how to blatantly promote itself, its in-house luvvies and its latest exercises in reality tv without the Late Late's ready-made PR platform. Kenny's unexpected and perfectly-pitched announcement on Friday night's show that he was quitting must have triggered an earthquake on the planet of the Hidden Persuaders. Book and movie publicists, political spin-doctors eager to show their clients' "softer" side, companies donating five-star holidays in Timbuktu in return for an on-air name check, soap opera strays, boy bands and Gerald Kean, must be feeling destitute as they contemplate next autumn.

RTÉ will have to devise another vehicle with the pulling power to attract the same level of advertising revenue enjoyed by the Late Late. The predictable option is to confine the station's chat quotient to one programme of the genre in a weekend and let Ryan Tubridy get on with it. However, the sort of opportunity raised by binning an institution does not come along often and it ought to be exploited with bold thinking. One of the benefits of the recession is that the station's most rampant egos have been curtailed in the stand-off over their pay cuts. That should strengthen the state's negotiating hand.

It is fitting that Pat Kenny announced his decision in a week when he demonstrated professional valour by questioning his employer's obsequious apology for reporting the Cowengate portrait story on the Nine O'Clock News. As Montrose's highest-paid worker, his preparedness to challenge it on his radio programme last week (to the chagrin of Fianna Fáil's 'outraged listener' machine) will have upset those who sign his pay cheques but it will also have shown solidarity with RTÉ's journalists who have to be ever vigilant against political interference. Kenny's stature gives him the moral authority to set standards in the organisation.

In his short valediction on Friday night, Kenny said he wanted to go while the Late Late was still prospering. That's smart. But he needs to be smarter still. The time has come for him to accept that his greatest talent lies in news and current affairs. It was where he started in the 1970s, and he has continued to shine in his handling of the daily news diet on his radio show. While he has always looked uncomfortable in the hail-fellow chatshow milieu, his forensic intelligence and instinctive curiosity make him a natural for current affairs. At 61, he needs to stop fighting the tug of nature.

Kenny is the second of RTÉ's éminence grises to announce this month that they are moving on. John Bowman is leaving Questions & Answers and obeying his academic instincts by making a history documentary about RTÉ. Questions & Answers too has had its day. Its zenith was 19 years ago with the calls-to-the-Aras plant in the audience. It's been a snooze-a-thon ever since.

With a new RTÉ authority in place, chaired by former journalist Tom Savage, and the re-shuffle that ushered documentary-maker Steve Carson into television's executive suite, RTÉ finds itself sitting on the cusp of enormous change. This is a time for courage.

jmccarthy@tribune.ie