The Meaning of Life with Gay Byrne

First in the chair is Gay’s long-time friend and former colleague, Sir Michael Parkinson. The two of them worked together in the early days of Granada TV, including the night The Beatles made their television debut. Paul McCartney asked Parky for his autograph… for his Mum. The band also asked the young Gay Byrne to manage them. He said ‘No’! Other topics that Gay and Michael discuss are his turbulent marriage, his journey from being a South Yorkshire Sunday School teacher to agnostic Grand Old Man of broadcasting, his battle with drink, and if he believes that one day he’ll find himself at the pearly gates...

Brendan O’Carroll tells Gay Byrne, the man who discovered him, how much his TV character Mrs Brown owes to his Mum, an ex-nun, pioneering Labour T.D. and widowed mother of eleven. In a frank and revealing interview, he talks about how failure taught him to succeed; how his baby son’s death taught him about life; and why he’s confident he’ll go to heaven.

Gay Byrne has wanted to interview Mark Patrick Hederman ever since they appeared on a radio programme together in 2009. The Abbot of Glenstal is a paradox: a priest who never wanted to be a priest, who freely describes the Church to which he has given his life as “a dinosaur”. Expect the unexpected, as Gay asks him life’s big questions.

Kilkenny GAA legend, Brian Cody tells Gay Byrne why he’s never been tempted to leave the faith – or for that matter, the county – of his upbringing. He also explains what winning and losing at sport have taught him about life… and why he never prays to win.

On a day when his son, Charlie, appeared to be committing career suicide, Martin Sheen spoke to Gay Byrne with remarkable openness about his family, his faith and his film career – three strands which come together in his latest movie, The Way. Having nearly died of his own excesses during the making of Apocalypse Now, Sheen describes how that near-miss was the start of a journey back to the Catholicism of his youth, a faith rooted as much in radical activism as piety, which has brought a welcome sense of humility, balance and purpose to his other life as a movie-star.

Even before the Moriarty tribunal had branded his behaviour “profoundly corrupt”, Ben Dunne admitted to Gay Byrne he’d been “a complete eejit” in his past dealings with politicians. His colourful life has included several brushes with death, an IRA kidnapping, a chequered relationship with Charlie Haughey (not to mention a different sort of Charlie) and more money than was good for him. And yet he reveals how it was the infamous events in a Florida hotel room that finally put him on the road to redemption.