RADIO REVIEW: Is pop music so bad nowadays that radio listeners are turning to speech, even when you'd least expect it?
Take weekday afternoons. Even on speech-driven RTÉ Radio 1, it's traditional to give over some of this period to ostensibly "housewife"-friendly music - this weather it's noon to 1 p.m. and 3.30 p.m. to 5 p.m. The theory is that while she may have time for high-class, middle-brow speech during much of the day, when she's preparing lunch or organising the kids back from school with their dance classes and their homework, the dwellingspouse wants a few nice tunes.
But hark, what's this? It turns out the best-rated programme on the new all-talk station in the capital is not one of the ones hosted by David McWilliams and Damien Kiberd, but Dublin Life (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday) - the afternoon show that goes head-to-head against virtually nothing but music, plus the unapologetically minority-interest Rattlebag (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Now, Dublin Life has been hit-and-miss, to put it kindly - vaguely youthy, a bit of fun, not a lot of focus.
But it turns out that, just maybe, some listeners (homepartners or otherwise) will take any-speech-that's-going over rubbishy music.
I say "just maybe" because I understand that the listenership sample for the NewsTalk audience (which was measured as three per cent of the market) may have been unreliably small; e.g. the relatively good Dublin Life ratings were based on the listening habits of perhaps three surveyed people! Still and all, here's RTÉ attacking the other end of the evening-drivetime bulge with more speech, in the form of Dave Fanning (2FM, Monday to Friday). For those of us who insist on remembering Fanning as a great DJ with a sweetly idiosyncratic speaking style, it's disconcerting to see that style commodified: his programme is marketed on posters around the country as a forum for Fanning's motormouth.
Ah sure, we've been putting up with that for a while anyway - particularly on the demon TV, where "isn't it gas the way he goes on?" has had to serve as a poor substitute for "hasn't he got interesting things to say about film?" So now that Radio 1 has moved music into the 7 p.m. slot with John Kelly's Mystery Train (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), 2FM counters with a show that is still poppy, but with lots of pop talk to go with the pop music (and of course more credible music too, Dave still being Dave, at least in body).
I'm the wrong person to judge how interesting or otherwise it is to hear Fanning read through the celebrity-gossip "news" from the wire services. But some of the Fanning-meandering studio chat about this and that has a pleasant charm - not far removed, indeed, from the Dublin Life "formula", such as it is. He's better doing it here than in the Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) slot, and I won't be a bit surprised if the marketing and the man turn this into a popular bit of early-evening radio fun.
I'll be downright disappointed if Crazy Dog Live (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) doesn't turn into a runaway success. This is more "audio theatre" from the brain of Roger Gregg, the man behind the likes of Big, Big Space and a truly astonishingly inventive self-made CD, The Apocalypse of Bill Lizard. The concept this time around is that we're going to get six Saturday mornings of real, live, old-fashioned radio comedy-drama, shorn of any fuzzy nostalgia trips, funny and smart in and of itself, but also broadcast as it happens in front of a living, breathing, laughing, groaning, heckling audience in Studio 1.
Last Saturday, for your benefit, I was in that audience for the first show, Ferdia the Druid, with Frank Kelly as the eponymous Iron Age fraudster. (Did I mention the guest stars? Owen Roe, Mary McEvoy, David Norris, Phil Proctor - famed voice of American radio and cartoons - and Maria Doyle Kennedy complete the six-week list. Jack Benny was never so lucky.)
Kelly knows a thing or 2,467 about audio comedy, but he was in good company here. Gregg himself was set up behind the special effects table - fave location for the kids in the audience to plant themselves in front of - and directorial heart and soul of the production. The genre here was Celtic Mist Pisstake, a familiar Gregg realm, and the material was simply spot-on, thanks in no short measure to fantastic performances from Deirdre Molloy, David Murray and Anne Byrne.
When the two women, playing mother-queen and daughter-princess of a magical underworld people known as the Sí, launched into a mutual tirade about the latter's hair (shorn), her friends (crows) and her ambitions (none), I laughed all right, but the pre-adolescent girl beside me offered unstinting titters too, which means Crazy Dog was definitely getting something right. (She moved on to full-blown giggles when young Síofra finally hooked up with the tuneless bard, Geldorf.) Producer Eithne Hand has taken up where the retired Tim Lehane left off, calmly guiding Crazy Dog into the ether, and clearly trusting Gregg's own educated sensibility. (This morning, for example, his genre is superhero, The Phantom Chancer; then in coming weeks there's melodrama in Sundrive Boulevard, boy's-own adventure in Scott's Last Last Trip \ and so on.) It's a process that radio-lovers really shouldn't miss: Studio 1 was not-nearly-full with what looked like perhaps 60 or 70 people last week, but if you guys have any sense it will be packed out in the weeks to come. Among other things, it's a chance to see your licence-fee at work in the Radio Centre, to go to the loo and say: "Gerry Ryan pees here." To book, telephone (01) 208 2728.
It's probably too late to get down to Montrose this morning. But unless you're a wild-late Weekend reader, you've plenty of time to hear this evening's edition of poetry programme The Enchanted Way (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday). I've a small soft spot for this sort of thing - coincidentally, it's the only soft spot I have for its presenter, David Hanly - and for the last two weeks it has lazily but effectively drawn its sustenance from a new poetry anthology, Staying Alive, from Bloodaxe Press, a book Hanly says would be in his own desert-island selection, and that the great John Berger calls "500 examples of resistance".
The first programme featured poems that more-or-less explicitly insist that they know what poetry is, or might be, or should be, e.g. Archibald MacLeish's "A poem should not mean / But be." Less self-involved and more fun was last Saturday's theme, "Body and Soul", poems from the world of nature and sensuality. (Unfortunately, last week part of the fun was spotting the repetitions, as the finished programme badly mixed up its readings and intros. Oops!)
Hanly always sounds like he's enjoying the poems and the stories that surround them; readers Anne O'Neill and Jonathan White could take a few lessons from him - unfortunately, they sound like they are taking it all a bit seriously. Maybe they could get Roger Gregg in? Dave Fanning?
hbrowne@irish-timese.ie