The Late Late Show, which wraps up tonight for the season, rarely fails to arouse strong feelings. Some of its most trenchant critics, the ones who say they hate it most, seem to have their phones at the ready come 9.30pm to fulminate as loudly as possible.

Tubridy quit Twitter years ago. He said he had enough of its toxicity. One wonders if he searches his own name when he’s back home after yet another show. It would likely make for grim reading.

In social media’s binary world, there’s little room for nuance. ‘Tubridy is rubbish’ seems to be the prevailing mood.

The truth is rather different, however. At his best, he is as good a broadcaster as we have in this country.

At his worst, he is still better than many of those who earn their crust speaking into microphones or making sweet with TV cameras.

It’s easy to forget what a bizarre anomaly The Late Late is in global broadcasting.

This is a two-hour chat show that demands light and shade. It serves up interviews with celebrities and heart-to-heart chats with ordinary people telling extraordinary stories.

It tries to capture something of the mood of the nation, as well as vying to entertain a mass audience. It attempts to be all things to all people — and it frequently gets it wrong.

And yet, Tubridy keeps it hanging together, even if he’s better at some aspects than others. Oh and it’s live too — yet another anomaly in the days of the modern-day TV chat show.

More than any other broadcaster, with the exception of Miriam O’Callaghan, Tubridy’s empathy as an interviewer is writ large. There were two striking examples of that this season.

The first, from January, was his extraordinary encounter with Barry McGuigan. It was conducted on Zoom and we saw the ex-boxing champ like never before — broken and distraught as he tried to come to terms with the death of his daughter, Danika.

The actress died in 2019 at 33 from a cancer-related illness. McGuigan’s grief is still so raw it was difficult to look on, but it was impossible to turn away.

Tubridy handled the interview with great sensitivity — a challenge all the more difficult due to the remote nature of the conversation.

And, then, in February, he coaxed a really memorable interview from Lynsey Bennett, the young Longford mother who’s desperately trying to prolong her life.

Like hundreds of other Irish women, her cancer was not detected thanks to gross failings in the State’s cervical screening programme of the recent past.

Watching the interview, it felt like we were eavesdropping on a couple of friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time and one had devastating news to impart to the other.

For a considerable chunk of the population, hearing such painful stories at the end of a long week — especially those weeks in which it felt as though the pandemic’s grip would never loosen — can be too much.

Better, surely, to watch Graham Norton shooting the breeze with big-name celebrities or succumb to the seemingly endless attractions of Netflix and the other streaming services.

But for many, this writer included, The Late Late Show is something to be consumed in parts in the days that follow.

So many people were speaking about McGuigan’s unvarnished anguish and Bennett’s candour and resilience in the communal water-cooler of Twitter that it felt impossible to ignore.

When I looked back at both, I was struck yet again by Tubridy’s empathy and that delicate balancing act of seeking information, but not exploiting an interviewee at their most vulnerable. It’s a difficult skill, but he consistently does it exceptionally well.

I interviewed Tubridy in London several years ago. It was one of those summers in which he was providing holiday cover at the BBC — on that occasion, he was presenting Simon Mayo’s Drivetime.

Besides enjoying being a relative unknown in a huge broadcasting pool, Tubridy talked at length about his father, Pat, who had died a year or two before.

He said the loss had been profound and it gave him a new-found understanding of what his interviewees might be going through when they talked about grief.

He said empathy was a vital attribute for an interviewee, but it was something that you had to have innately — it couldn’t be manufactured.

Of course, The Late Late is about much more than empathetic interviews — and Tubridy frequently struggles with the bubblegum stuff.

He looks horribly out of place when doing the Valentine’s special, for instance, and this year, it was hard not to sense that he was relieved not to have to contend with a feral studio audience.

He often struggles with sport too. As a GAA lover, I cringe when he interviews a hurler or Gaelic footballer — no volume of carefully prepared briefing notes can paper over the lack of genuine knowledge or interest.

There are also times when he doesn’t ask hard-hitting or searching questions. Too often, he seems content to play it safe, to merely get through the conversation and get to the next topic.

That was especially apparent when we had got used to Covid, refusing to take off the kid gloves while chatting to some of the key players in Ireland’s pandemic response.

On a number of occasions this year, The Late Late has been beaten in the ratings by Tommy Tiernan’s excellent Saturday night chat show.

The social media reaction to Tiernan could not be more different to the way people think of Tubridy: the former is revered.

Several have suggested that it should be Tiernan, rather than Tubridy, who deserves to host the country’s flagship TV show.

But just as both men are very different, so too are their respective programmes. Tiernan is a gifted interviewee, but it’s the format of his show that truly helps him sing.

The idea of the host not knowing who the guests will be is novel, and one that Tiernan copes with admirably. But, unlike The Late Late, the show is not live.

It’s recorded well in advance and the interviews we see are painstakingly edited down. And that’s the case with so many of the top chat shows around the world.

Live telly is a very different thing — and part of the reason we watch The Late Late in such huge numbers is the element of unpredictability that comes with broadcasting in the moment.

And yet, The Late Late is in dire need of change. It’s still, largely, the same concept that originated at the start of the 1960s when television was a wondrous new thing in this country.

How to improve it? Well, a good half-hour could be lopped off, for starters. More than that, though, Tubridy and his team have to get ruthless about their guest selection.

No more Nathan Carter. No more Dermot Bannon (the architect is likeable and fun, but comically overexposed on RTE.) No more ransacking the RTE canteen — too many of their presenters would have trouble holding your attention over a drink in a pub, let alone on The Late Late couch.

Tubridy has to become more like his hero, Gay Byrne, and take a dictatorial approach to his own show. He has to micromanage.

He has to play to his strengths and allow The Late Late to morph in the moment — if there’s a really good interview, he has to push out its length, as Byrne did, even if that means curtailing the time of the next guest.

He has to take more of an interest in the music selections — take a punt on more emerging Irish artists, rather than going with the tried and tested.

Tonight’s final show of the season is likely to be the last without a studio audience. Next season’s will, hopefully, mean Covid receding into view and an opportunity for reinvention.

It needs to happen. But Tubridy is, for now, the person best placed to ensure The Late Late evolves — and, paradoxically, this most empathetic of interviewers has to get tough.