Kieran Cuddihy and I are chatting in Taste cafe near the Newstalk studio. We talk briefly about how I’m neurotically using two different audio recorders. He can relate. “I was interviewing Domhnall Gleeson recently and I forgot to turn the recorder on,” he says. “Halfway through the interview I saw it and he saw me turning it on. He was polite enough not to acknowledge it. [The clip] ended up getting 10 million views or something. Selena Gomez shared the clip because it was about the actors’ strike. It almost never existed.”

Cuddihy is a seasoned radio presenter at this stage but he’s happy enough to lean into his own failures for my entertainment. He anchors Newstalk’s Hard Shoulder drive-time slot and he has, as of last week, begun helming Virgin Media’s long-running Tonight Show. He’s nervous about that. “You’re conscious with TV that it’s an active watch. Every second they’re watching they’re thinking they could be watching something else. A lot of radio listenership, it’s on in the car or it’s on when you’re doing something else in the background. The fight for eyeballs is a hotter war than the fight for ears.”

Cuddihy grew up in Kilkenny in a family of current-affairs-loving healthcare professionals. His father is a doctor. His mother is a nurse. Three of his grandparents were also trained healthcare professionals. His sister is also a doctor. Cuddihy decided to rebel and study law in UCC. Why law? “On reflection, it was probably a degree of pomposity or something,” he says. “‘This sounds like a fancy job. It sounds good. It sounds impressive.’ I’m not sure I really thought too deeply about what my day-to-day work was going to be like. And then when I was training, I kind of realised, ‘Oh, this is the day-to-day work’. It was grand.