RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: Way back when Today FM was Radio Ireland and better known to the headline-writers as "Radio 1 Per Cent", an ad-agency insider told The Irish Times that the station's audience was "small but perfectly formed". In other words, the listeners were urban, affluent, tasteful, attentive - nice fat sitting ducks for upmarket ad campaigns.
The station's money men didn't buy that analysis as a map leading the way to commercial success. They scrapped most of the speech-led programming, dumbed down the daytime music policy and have (mostly) made money the old-fashioned way: by selling homogenised rubbish, albeit with one or two name "personalities" at the sales counter.
However, while the dream of Radio Ireland died young, there's something of a resurrection happening in Dublin in the shape of NewsTalk 106. Parts of its schedule, indeed, bear a passing resemblance to the first effusions of Radio Ireland - as well as predictably targeting RTÉ Radio 1 at a few key daytime thresholds. (For example, NewsTalk keeps its morning newsy programme on air through the first half-hour of soft stuff on Marian Finucane; it brings its lunchtime news magazine on air during Radio 1's Creedon nap-time; it starts drivetime a half-hour before its national rivals.) Radio Ireland, though, had broad populist aspirations and got a shock when it found out about its small posh audience.
NewsTalk is setting out with a clear intention to poach, for some part of the day at least, just a select listenership comprising the younger, more affluent part of Radio 1's Dublin daytime audience and, with a bit of luck, some of Gerry Ryan and Eamon Dunphy's more sophisticated listeners too.
On the basis of the first couple of days' programming, the station seems to be seeking those listeners with some of the most high-brow current affairs talk I have ever heard on a commercial radio station. This, admittedly, is not saying a lot, but in David McWilliams at breakfast-time and Damien Kiberd at lunchtime, NewsTalk has an astonishing pair of brainboxes, men whose ostentatious knowledge and keen intelligence make Myles Dungan and Richard Crowley sound like Gaybo and Howard Stern. John Bowman himself might fight for a place on this team.
Even the pop psychology on The Flip Side, Daire O'Brien's mid-morning programme, tended toward the abstract: are we really ready to mull over, at 9.40 in the morning, whether Bill Clinton represented a more feminine form of US leadership, as opposed to Dubya's more butch psychic make-up? Maybe. As for the multi-part series on the second (second!) anniversary of the dot.com bust that featured on the McWilliams programme, I'm just going to come out and say No. Yes, okay, on both days I heard it, guests managed to make amusing reference to the fact that, before the bubble burst, dot.commers thought they could get rich selling pet-food on the Internet. But on both days the conversation rapidly ascended from those whiskered realms, and you would have wanted to be stuck in solid, bumper-to-bumper traffic to have the out-of-body time to follow it closely.
McWilliams, of course, is himself a better-than-reasonable populariser of tricky economics, but he and his less able guests laid it on a bit thick this week. Day one's first rip-roaring business discussion saw him chuckling to his panellists about how funny it was that these days the economists are actually more optimistic than the analysts, ha-ha-ha. Notwithstanding the convivial studio atmosphere it created, I think it's fair to guess that far more listeners were bemused than amused by the remark. If that's going to be the tone, it must be a lovely miniature IFSC audience NewsTalk is seeking.
Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) has lengthened backwards to 7 a.m., partly in a defensive measure against NewsTalk and McWilliams, and its first hour is also quite business-heavy now. This is narrowcasting of the most extraordinary sort, rivalled only by the inordinate amount of time all stations spend talking about rugby, in the pretence that it is of broad national interest.
The business stuff is (even) more insidious than the rugby talk. And it too is based on a nonsense that is widely treated as a truism, i.e. that a vast expansion in people owning corporate shares justifies obsessive coverage of market activities. Actually, I'm sure that if you factor out Eircom, and ignore people's stock options in their own workplaces, the percentage of Irish people who actively "play" the stock market has probably risen in recent years from infinitesimal to tiny.
What all this coverage does to the majority of us for whom it is meaningless is to naturalise all this speculative market activity, suggesting it is as normal to be concerned about AIB's share performance as about Manchester United's Champions League performance. Geraldine Harney's interviews with managers are often livelier than Des Cahill's.
In fairness to NewsTalk, if, as a commercial station, it wants to reach stockbrokers and currency traders, it is entitled to do so; RTÉ has no such excuse. And in fairness to McWilliams, his track record suggests he is more likely than Harney to relate "business" to economics, to people's lives and livelihoods. Toward the end of his first programme, he even did an interview with a Swedish expert on "globalisation" that strayed from the economic orthodoxy that is being challenged all over the world, on the streets, in books, in journals, in factories, in universities - but rarely on Irish radio.
Nonetheless, the prevailing boyish business mentality of NewsTalk was captured, again on day one, when Damien Kiberd was chatting to some money types on his programme, and one joked that some particular set of figures "could make you turn to socialism". Cue uproarious laughter around studio. Now, Kiberd may have lowered his own personal red flag many years ago, but perhaps someone has noticed that the next election (the first major test and opportunity for the station) will likely see Dubliners vote for at-least-nominally socialist candidates, plus Greens and some real out-and-out lefties, in numbers to rival Fianna Fáil and to dwarf the twin pillars of respectable Irish capital, Fine Gael and the PDs. (Of course, this may or may not be the case in the constituencies that concern NewsTalk.) Kiberd is good, very good, and I would have given him and NewsTalk some credit for the first reporting on the Molloy controversy. But the station itself went so overboard in claiming kudos for "breaking" a story that was essentially read out in open court that they obviously need no help from me.
And then there's The Right Hook. Clearly NewsTalk knows the evening drivetime competition is strong, and it's gone for a presenter in George Hook who is so brightly, starkly, weirdly idiosyncratic that he just might work. You get the feeling that at least one item per hour originates with Hook rasping to staff: "You know what I've often wondered about?" Thus Wednesday's show started, in all seriousness, with "the resurrection of Christ - fact or fiction?" Hook turned to his guest: "So Jesus supposedly rose from the dead. Is it believable?" His guest being a Jesuit theology lecturer from Milltown, clearly it was.
So that was a short chat anyway, over in plenty of time for a "20/20" news break. These thrice-an-hour bulletins vary in length and content, according to a system that I'm sure makes sense but isn't entirely transparent. They're supposed to be NewsTalk's raison d'être, but there was a slight sense this week that they were floating somewhere between distraction and afterthought.
IRONICALLY, as 23-year-old Aideen McLoughlin's voice joined those of other young journalists on NewsTalk, she had a documentary airing on RTÉ Radio 1. Death by Drowning (Wednesday) was an extraordinarily far cry from the techno-soundtracked simplifications of "20/20" news; this was a lovely, meditative programme on the rhythms of real-life tragedy, consisting of interviews and sounds from that most tragically beautiful part ofIreland, the fishing town of Castletownbere in west Cork. The simple, human stories of drowned fishermen and their families, told in tangents and at length, they were a reminder that there's more than one kind of talk radio.