What has Lyric FM got to be defensive about? (Answers on a postcard, please.) Presumably all the gripes about the new station's mandate and the way it's going about fulfilling it - most of them, I think, in the pages of The Irish Times - are getting to the consciences of the good folks in the Limerick HQ.
Check out this summary paragraph from a Lyric press release this week: "Lyric FM is RTE's new classical music and arts radio station, broadcasting nationally for 24 hours daily. Its schedule features a diverse choice of programmes, from full-length concerts, CD reviews and an arts show to classic excerpts from the world's composers."
Now, what other brand new station, anxious to attract publicity and a big audience, would relegate its central programme format - those "classic excerpts", the stuff that dominates a full 10-and-a-half hours of the 6.30 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekday schedule - to a virtual afterthought, a half-hearted prepositional phrase tagged on to this version of the mission statement?
Come on, Lyric: you made your bed, now lie in it, guiltlessly. Everyone I've spoken with is delighted to have you around. (No, my conversational circle does not generally include music critics and editorial writers.)
By training and instinct I usually find myself on the snobs' side of a cultural argument. However, maybe because of my deep-rooted ignorance of this music, my T&I have let me down so far on the question of Lyric FM; my outrage lies dormant.
Of course I recognise a certain patronising vulgarity about Lyric's treatment of the music and audience. (Even presenter Eamonn Lawlor sounded shocked at the abrupt ending of at least one "excerpted" aria.) The station's identikit slogan, "Music for the mood you're in", is nonsensical as well as trite: the playlisting computer obviously is programmed for rather manic mood swings - allegro one minute, andante the next. And I can sympathise a bit with the cringe factor when 2FM veteran Lorcan Murray, doing Lyric Lunchtime Requests, reckons we're "fans" of Rachmaninoff or Grieg; when he murmurs at the end of a requiem, "Hmmm, very sombre, very solemn"; when he sticks on Flight of the Bumblebee "while I buzz off".
I even chafe at the slavish imitation of Classic FM. How come the news comes music-free but the weather requires the accompaniment of a string quartet?
But hey, I'm a vulgarian who needs patronising. When you're listening intently to Lizst's Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 in C Sharp Minor, I'm singing along: "Breakfast, McDonald's breakfast / Made-from-the-very-best- ingredients / We-do-it-all-for-you".
So I was grateful when Baroness Helena Kennedy, on Calling the Tune (Tuesday) defended this popularisation - the movies, TV shows and ads - and said, "anything that gets people to listen to this music is a good thing". Grateful, but not convinced. In the last week I've spent more time deliberately listening to "classical" music than, probably, in all my life prior. Glad of it, I've been: when Lawlor tried out his own slogan, "Lyric FM - where we love the music", it struck me as appropriate, both because of his own infectious knowledge and affection (shared with other daytime presenters such as Michael Comyn and Maire Nic Gearailt, and by Arminta Wallace big-time on a Tuesday evening) and because this music is very, very good, loveable in fact, in a way that very little on the radio ever is.
However, the insistence that a particular set of musical genres is necessarily A Good Thing is highly suspect. For one, if I'd spent all those hours learning about society and politics in contemporary east Asia, I'd be far better equipped for the world as we live in it than by getting an hourly dose of Mozart.
On a less utilitarian level, an astonishing range of music occupies a black hole in the Lyric universe, from new composition to "world music" and jazz, all of which live in tiny ghettos in the schedule. The politically correct brigade in the US is often mocked for deriding a canon-load of DWEMs (Dead White European Males). But the term is not, necessarily, pejorative; the idea of this descriptive string is to highlight, with each word, how canonical writers and composers differ from most of the people who have ever lived - people who, it is suggested, might also have something to say culturally. Lyric FM is DWEM City; this fact alone - more than the advertising or the CD sequences - mocks its public-service pretensions and locates Lyric as a comfortable and commercial Easy Listening station.
SO what about the arts on this "music and arts" station? That remains to be seen. Certainly there is little programming devoted specifically to art, and Eamonn Lawlor's Into the Evening, which Lyric FM head Seamus Crimmins recently told The Irish Times would be "mostly talk" about the arts, has instead adhered closely to the daytime music formula.
However, I'm not sure that more of the arts agenda, as promulgated elsewhere on RTE and in the pages of our newspapers, would necessarily add value to Lyric FM. Irish arts coverage is hampered - crippled, you might even say - by a belief that it exists to serve a constituency of arts institutions requiring publicity, rather than audiences seeking stimulation and guidance. (Radio Ireland's Entertainment Today, hosted by bright young thing Philip Boucher-Hayes, was arguably scuppered as a programme by these institutional demands.)
Such coverage is, to say the least, alienating for most people. Lyric's The Invisible Thread (Sunday), with a promising interview-with-artists format, still managed to fall deeper than most into that trap.
I'm in the minority of the arts-interested minority who have actually stood in front of a Dorothy Cross work. Nonetheless, James Conway's fawning interview with her took the works entirely for granted, did nothing to describe or evoke them for the audience.
"Critics - you'd just despair, wouldn't you?" Conway lamented. Cross, meanwhile, talked brilliantly - a long way, she said, from US art college, where her belief that her work spoke for itself was met with a firm "No it doesn't, honey". Then it turned out that Chiasm, the performance/installation she and Conway were looking forward to during this chat, was set to appear on May 1st and 2nd. In other words, this was a recorded programme previewing something that had already happened. Broadcasters - you'd just despair, wouldn't you?