What a difference Today makes

If there were champagne corks popping at Today FM last Wednesday, the sound didn't reach from the Upper Abbey Street studios across the Liffey to the Irish Times office in D'Olier Street.

Maybe it was drowned out by the noise of the parade. But I doubt that somehow.

No, March 17th is not an anniversary widely celebrated around those parts, though it's just gone two years since the licence now enjoyed by an entity called Today FM kicked in with the St Patrick's Day debut of Radio Ireland.

No doubt the estimable Eamon Dunphy raised a quiet glass somewhere to mark the second birthday of his radio stardom. Otherwise, the continuity between Radio Ireland and Today FM is scarcely acknowledged: the former can be lumped with Century in generalisations about "the fiascos of . . .", while the latter gets on with the grim business of survival - unstigmatised if not untraumatised.

There are a few longer memories in the business. Some of the rival consortia from the bygone days of the licence-application hearings (consumer warning: The Irish Times was part of one of them) can only wonder why they didn't pitch for a hits-plus-oldies licence, since the Independent Radio and Television Commission seems happy enough to hear such programming from Today FM.

And, indeed, it was - as The Irish Times might say - an unedifying spectacle to see how this "regulated free market" arrangement degenerated, as the regulator capitulated to Radio Ireland's market-led "need" for change, and most of the more interesting parts of the schedule, and finally the name itself, slipped into the Memory Hole. (As this column insisted at the time, the fault lay with the absurd arrangement itself rather than with either party to it, who acted according to their understandable priorities.)

Anyway, it was a bit of a culture shock to find last week that "Radio Riverdance" (the moniker stuck on the winning consortium because of the chief backers' main cash source, before it adopted the Radio Ireland label) actually lives on. As readers may perhaps have noted somewhere, and speaking of unedifying spectacles, Riverdance has been playing briefly in Japan. And by golly, the high-steppers brought Ian Dempsey and the Today FM Breakfast Show along to mark the occasion: the programme actually broadcast from studios in Osaka right through last week. (Poor old Dempsey and the programme are off to Tuscany next week to accompany a charity walk, with the sponsorship help of a food company; I wonder when he packed his bags to leave RTE did he know he'd have to keep them packed?)

To complain that amiable Ian failed to seize the opportunity for genuine intercultural insight would be taking po-faced criticism just a teensy bit far, even for this column. Nope, this is a breakfast show and it did the breakfast-show things, its jokes, requests and competitions taking on a hint of Japanese flavour.

The nearest the programme came to rotten-sushi taste - in my hearing, anyway - was when Dempsey joked to the show's instudio "hostess", Yuka, that they'd commissioned a song especially about her - then played Suzanne Vega's Luka. Apart from mocking the Japanese woman's pronunciation of English (which you'll get in these situations), this, strangely, associated her with the eponymous battered child of the song. But then, when did a pop-radio DJ ever pay attention to the actual lyrical content of the tracks he plays? Serious exceptions to that rule continue to dominant Today FM's evening schedule, when - after the tuneless Dunphy two hours - it is no longer a conventional pop station at all. Obviously 2FM has been doing this a long time with Dave Fanning, but Today FM does it longer and arguably better; in addition, the series of gigs associated with Donal Dineen's Here Comes the Night programme confirms that (like RTE) the station can take its support for good music out of the studio.

And the good stuff has survived the departure of John Kelly and The Eclectic Ballroom. The new 7 to 9 p.m. programme, Tom Dunne's Pet Sounds, is a more familiar rocky, indie-oriented show than Kelly's. Still, it's good, and makes a change from the station's patronising and still wildly unsuccessful efforts to lure the elusive daytime "housewife".