Some time in the early days of television someone realised that a cheap way of producing content was to televise famous people having conversations with a charming television host. It was like when Louis XIV invited the public to come gawp at his salons; the television viewers got to see modern-day royalty engaging in frank witty chatter, and we liked it!

It began in the US with The Joe Franklin Show back in 1951, but as a format it quickly became popular all over the world. In the US the baton was handed from Franklin to Steve Allen, Allen to Jack Paar, Paar to Johnny Carson, Carson to Jay Leno... or David Letterman (depending who you listen to). And that colossal duo still battle it out with younger stars like Conan O'Brien (newly at the helm of The Tonight Show), Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. There were also plenty of fascinating detours along the way involving iconoclasts like Dick Cavett, Johnny Cash and Joan Rivers.

In Ireland it was always a straighter line of succession. Thanks to our national monopoly, it was just Uncle Gaybo for centuries, followed by Pat Kenny and Ryan Tubridy, with other potential talk-show hosts, like Bibi and Gerry Ryan, occasionally leaping suicidally from the family tree. (We also had Eamon Dunphy hanging himself out to dry on a different tree entirely – TV3.)

These days there's a proliferation of talk-based formats – from light afternoon chat shows (of the Richard and Judy/ The Afternoon Show variety), to Jeremy Kyle-style audience-participation shows (poor-person-baiting, essentially), political panel shows (like The Frontline) and Oprah-style self-help sessions.

But when it comes to late-night, water-cooler television that everyone watches, there's the comedian-centred monoliths of the US networks (hosted by Letterman, Leno, O'Brien, Kimmel and Fallon), celeb-loving quirk-fests in the UK (hosted by Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton), and then more traditional straight-faced chat, once the province of Parkinson and Terry Wogan, and now solely the domain of Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late.

Why the longest-running talk show in the world survives and thrives as a place for un-ironic chitchat featuring politicians, actors, priests and members of the public, is hard to work out. In the US and the UK the notion of the late-evening chat show as a straightforward talking shop is almost dead. The days of Gore Vidal jousting with Norman Mailer about the state of the nation on The Dick Cavett Show are long gone (on Irish telly it's Eamon Dunphy versus Eoghan Harris), killed off firstly by a soundbite culture, in which all memorable television needs to be reduced to a sentence or YouTube clip, and secondly by a growing industry of media handlers dictating strict conversational parameters for their clients.

With the conversation well on its way to becoming a series of non-sequiturs, it made much more sense for these shows to focus
on the quick and witty host with the famous eye candy there as their obliging sounding board.

Meanwhile in the UK, after a few decades of sincere programming assisted over the years by charming Irishmen like Terry Wogan and Eamonn Andrews, the notion of getting someone to talk about themselves in an unaffected fashion was finally killed by Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge – a fictional chat-show host interviewing fictional guests. With Partridge, Coogan ingeniously honed in on the quiet desperation, innate silliness, insincerity and sycophancy of the chat-show format as practised by Parky and Wogan, making all subsequent attempts at keeping a straight-face seem a bit daft.

Afterwards it was impossible to watch anything without some wag claiming the host was "like Alan Partridge".

So the format needed an out. Earlier in the decade Clive James and Clive Anderson had tried aggressively comedic approaches to the chat-show interview. It was never really a mainstream idea. In Anderson's case this often ended up with people throwing water on him or walking out. (Richard Branson and the Bee Gees to name just two.) But PR people soon began to realise that there was something in this conversational quest for a punch-line. They understood that if the host added an easy smile, touch of the arm, and a wink, and if the guest resisted the urge to throw drinks and run, joke interviews were far less revealing, would end with the guest being lauded as a "good sport", and the book, CD or film being flogged would sell just as well.

Arguably this also made sense for viewers; In the midst of economic boom, self-analysis isn't half as diverting as a self-satisfied laugh, a willie joke, and some fake bonhomie. And so we got Ross and Norton, Podge and Rodge, and a series of celeb-led disasters such as the Charlotte Church and Lily Allen shows, all adept at avoiding the hard questions and skilled at asking the rude ones.

In Ireland, however, we never lost a taste for un-self-conscious chattery. The Late Late Show was always a bit more complicated than its British and American counterparts, dealing with a wider range of subjects, and never succumbing completely to pure escapism.

In its heyday, for every Billy Connolly or Peter Ustinov anecdote, there were uncomfortable moments where Gay Byrne would sit down on the couch like a parent and say the equivalent of "look, we have to talk about [insert burning social issue here]". He would then introduce us to a gay nun, victim of crime, irate bishop, or adulterous hussy and the country (well, me anyway; I was only 10) would gasp.

The Late Late Show never quite instigated change, but even during the Kenny-era it insisted we talk about it. In the early days this was shocking, but quickly it became reassuring, and then we got hooked on the reassurance, taking to it like mass or a visit to the psychotherapist. Now, if the economy goes down the toilet we want to see the Taoiseach "opening up" on The Late Late Show, and when a GAA man comes out to the country, everyone wants to hear his story... on The Late Late Show.

In many ways living in Ireland over the past few decades has been like constantly moving to a strange new country (a Latin American basket case in recent years) and watching The Late Late Show is like ringing home on a Friday; at its best the Late Late is the country asking itself about its week.

And new host Ryan Tubridy might just be able to bring that conversation to a new generation of viewers. Thus far he's shown that he understands the clichés of Partridge and the humour of Conan O'Brien, without worrying too much about the former or indulging too heavily in the latter. The breadth and format is the same it always was, despite the addition of an Americanised house band, a Europeanised audience, and a few more one-liners, but Tubridy does seem to have the skill and wit to balance the show's sincerity with its, unavoidable, post-Partridge cheesiness.

Over the course of his first season it's occasionally threatened to topple dangerously one way or the other, but that only adds to the excitement really.