When you can read elsewhere in The Irish Times about trendy restaurants where twentysomething Dubliners happily spend a tenner on pancakes for their Sunday brunch, it's no wonder that young listeners are radio's Holy Grail. Their gullibility and poor money-sense ratio make them perfect advertising fodder. RTE Radio 1, famously, hasn't got them - and while there's little sign of attrition among the station's older audience, luring the under-40s (at least) is a 1990s marketing imperative. Until recently, the only sure 'n' certain cure for the affliction generally mooted was the recruitment of Gerry Ryan to the Radio 1 schedule - whereupon the execs would remind you that this treatment, while likely to be effective, could visit a more terminal illness on 2FM's ratings.
So rather than radical surgery, Radio 1 has benefitted of late from the application of a few cosmetics. Sometimes this has involved tinkering, as in the brightening-up of what's now Five Seven Live; nearer the fringes of the schedule, it has seen the rise and rise of youngish personalities such as Carrie Crowley and Derek Mooney. This process is gradual, as it arguably should be, in the interest of veteran listeners. However, further "liberation" beckons for the station with next year's dramatic expansion of FM3, which could become a reserve for serious, minority-interest programmes: RTE Radio Middle-Aged. It's not that specific shows are likely to hop immediately. However, the long-term future of programmes such as The Darkness Echoing, specialist music slots and even the fairly populist Arts Show must be in doubt on Radio 1 when a dedicated, full-time arts station is a flick of the wrist away. The model is already in place. With little direct commercial imperative, BBC Radio 4 has pushed to bring "yoof" into its programming over the last year - and, in terms of politics and public relations, the continuing presence of an indubitably upmarket BBC Radio 3 has been indispensable.
Thus when someone had the bright idea to revive The Brains Trust, the location this time was Radio 3. The new Brains Trust series kicked off (sorry, I'm forbidden to mention sport in this column for some time but I had to sneak that in) on Saturday and it's so pompous, so boring, so out of keeping with a post-modern zeitgeist that it has a certain musty charm. Theodore Zeldin, Stephen Rose, Angela Tilby and Ben Okri debated questions like "What is imagination?" or ones that started off with "Do you agree with Shakespeare when he says . . ." (prompting Tilby to a suitably pedantic contextualising of whatever quote it was in Hamlet).
Even more cringe-inducing than the notion that these "betters" would teach us all about philosophy and morality was the absurd pretext that the generic questions that set off these rehearsed replies originated with listeners. Thus the chair, Joan Bakewell, closed one segment: "Sorry, John Simmons in Surbiton, our panel can see no prospect of an end to war."
What was very 1990s was the fact that Rose, a brain scientist, made the best stab at answering most of these questions. When linguist Noam Chomsky turned up on Radio 3 on Sunday afternoon's Viewing The Century, listeners might have considered why these two men, among the world's leading experts on human consciousness and cognition, also happen to be radical egalitarians. Hmmm.
Chomsky also maintained a certain modesty in this interview, happily teasing out the way some of his scientific ideas have been proved wrong in recent years and eschewing certain conclusions about how the "complex system" of the mind operates. Memorably, he pooh-poohed the notion that recent studies of brain injuries and illnesses had allowed us to pinpoint certain aspects of mental function: "It's like trying to understand how a computer works by hitting it with a crowbar and seeing what goes wrong."
