Regular listeners to RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland might have been alarmed this week to discover the soothing, Celtic-coded jingle that has for years introduced the broadcast had been replaced with something altogether more Wagnerian. Drums hammered, brass sections howled, the tension built and built. Was this the Battle of Helm’s Deep stampeding from your speaker? No, it was part of a new “unified audio identity” for Radio 1 – corporate-speak for a revamp of the jingles across the station, from Morning Ireland at 7am to Late Debate at 11pm.
It is fair to say this sonic switcheroo has proved divisive. “That jingle is awful. It hurts my head and it’s hard to hear the presenters over it,” wrote one social media user. “Bargain basement,” reckoned another. Commenting on the new introduction to his midmorning slot, Oliver Callan said he felt as if he was “presenting Euronews at three o’clock in the morning.” He added: “It’ll take a bit of getting used to, but this is our one. It mightn’t have the bombast of our previous theme tune, but I’ll have to bring the oomph myself, I suppose.”
He needn’t have worried – oomph is one thing the new “unified audio identity” does not lack. Inside Sport, a weeknight sports broadcast presented by Marie Crowe and Jacqui Hurley, now appears to be taking place in the vicinity of an illegal rave circa 1989. John Creedon’s late-evening slot is bookended by a bombastic techno-pop jazz odyssey. Even the sedate Mooney Goes Wild – a Monday night broadcast about the natural world – sounds as if it’s been scored by the people who brought you the latest Marvel blockbuster.
RTÉ in 2026 seems to exist in a state of permacrisis. This summer marks the third anniversary of the payment scandal that saw Ryan Tubridy giving evidence before an Oireachtas committee and which raised questions about the governance of the broadcaster.
READ MORE
Faced with the existential challenge posed by streaming services such as Netflix and the decline of terrestrial broadcasting, Montrose has emerged from that controversy on a mission to do more with less. Licence fee revenue is plummeting, and director general Kevin Bakhurst has pledged to reduce the headcount to 1,400 (from its present-day 1,800) by 2030. Amid such upheavals, the last thing it needs is further drama. Yet that is exactly what is on the cards following this jarring jingle do-over.
Why change all the Radio 1 jingles at once?
The goal, says RTÉ, is to introduce a “comprehensive, round-the-clock sound suite tailored to the station’s evolving identity”. The new themes, six months in the making, are the work of London agency Wisebuddah, which has previously worked with UK stations such as Magic Radio and Hits Radio, as well as Irish independents like Radio Nova. There was also input from the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, which recorded “key elements” that were incorporated into the compositions.
“Wisebuddah were chosen via a public procurement process,” RTÉ said in a statement to The Irish Times. The aim, says Patricia Monahan, RTÉ’s director of audio, is to “ensure RTÉ Radio 1 is not only heard but will be instantly recognised and felt”.
Anything RTÉ does is fair game for criticism and so it has proved with these new jingles, which have been taken to task for sounding generic and lacking a distinctly Irish quality.
“Very uninventive,” says Greg Malocca, a composer at Dublin audio post-production studio Egoboo, who has written jingles for TV Three News (as it then was), Quote Devil, and composed music for the Irish Rugby World Cup 2023 campaign narrated by Liam Neeson.
“I was quite surprised they went to an English company. I know they’re pretty good at what they do – they’ve done a lot of branding for different radio stations, including Irish ones,” he says. “It is very generic. Honestly, the first thing I felt was they’ve totally lost their Irish identity. There’s nothing Irish about it.”
In a world of constant distraction, where consumers’ attention is more precious than ever, jingles have become an essential part of corporate branding. From Netflix’s ta-dum to the strident countdown introduction to BBC News, corporations of every type understand that music is a critical way of communicating their identity.
As RTÉ is discovering, listeners are also attached to their jingles. That lesson was learned by London composer Toby Jarvis when he was hired to refresh the theme to ITV soap Emmerdale 15 years ago. Viewers did not take kindly to their beloved music being tampered with.
“That theme tune has been going since 1972. All the people working on it hate it – it’s old-fashioned, terribly staid, very familiar. We were tasked with reimagining it, which we did in quite a seriously reimagined way. The head of ITV music said, ‘You know, you’ll get hate mail.’ I said, no, that’s not going to happen. She was totally right.”
The biggest gamble RTÉ has taken was to completely revamp its themes rather than tweak them. These snatches of music are part of the background of our everyday lives. They are there when we are running the kids to school, as we drive home from the gym, when we’re doing the housework. Switch them up completely and people will notice.
“It’s like taking away someone’s best friend, giving them plastic surgery,” says Toby Jarvis, who, as creative director with London agency A-MNEMONIC has worked with the BBC, Oxfam, Duracell, Ariel and others. “The risk of changing something completely is much bigger than the risk of giving it a lease of new life.”
In the case of a national broadcaster, he says, the jingles need to be built to last, as people are going to hear them over and over. “When you hear it coming up every hour – you might hear it four times an hour: once at the news bulletin on the hour, then a short news at half past, then the breaks at a quarter past. You’re going to hear it at least four times an hour. The trick is to make it brilliant and joyous and a good experience without it being annoying – it can’t get on your nerves.”
The added complication is that you’re writing a snatch of music – an idea rather than an entire song. When ITV hired Jarvis to write the jingle for Love Island, the brief was “dating and romance with an evil twist”.
“We’ve taken a really extreme cubist, wacky approach from the far end, but it’s also based in the familiar language of club music. It’s a bonkers tune, a bit of a bonkers sound – but it does hit the audience. The Love Island sting is about seven seconds. The challenge is to get it short and succinct so its meaning is unequivocally clear. That’s part of the skill and creativity. There’s no formula that will help you do that.”
RTÉ faces a challenge in that radio has to appeal to a broad audience, says Egoboo’s Greg Malocca. “I would think Radio 1 is for the older generation from mid-30s, early 40s up to retirees. It has to resonate with those people. It has to represent the country. It’s the national broadcaster. There’s an element of trust. Music should give you a feeling – with RTÉ, they want to be trustworthy. An element of professionalism needs to come across in the music. They definitely went for this modern vibe. There are a lot of electronic drumbeats. They’re using that to try to represent a modern twist. They’re merging different sounds together. Again, this has all been done before. There is nothing revolutionary about it.”
A good jingle has to walk a tightrope between familiarity and novelty, says Jarvis. “If something is too familiar, it’s boring, safe and repetitive. If something’s too novel, it’s too challenging and difficult to process. Human beings love stuff that’s a little bit novel but grounded in familiarity without being too boring or too challenging. This is where creativity lives. It’s the same in pop music, I guess – the same in all art. You draw from two extremes and find a sweet spot in the middle where you’re comfortable.”
Has RTÉ found that sweet spot? Was it wise to ditch the Celtic ululations and go full Lord of the Rings with its Morning Ireland intro? Should an Irish radio station “sound Irish”? Or is it wiser to try something different – to use the musical equivalent of a new broom to sweep away dusty, old themes? The ultimate verdict, in the end, will be up to us, the listeners.
Five memorable jingles
1. Nokia
The sound that reverberated around the world as Nokia’s mobile phones became ubiquitous in the 1990s is adapted from a guitar phrase by turn-of-the-century Spanish musician Francisco Tárrega.
2. 20th Century Fox Fanfare
As heard at the start of Star Wars and hundreds of other films, does anything sound more “cinema” than Fox’s bombastic, table-setting flourish?
3. McDonald’s
Justin Timberlake’s I’m Lovin’ It didn’t just reboot his career - when McDonald’s built an entire campaign around the snippet in 2003, it boosted sales by 7.8 per cent in the first year alone.
4. Windows 95
Keen to give their operating system a fashionable makeover, Microsoft went to U2 producer and David Bowie collaborator Brian Eno for the ethereal boot-up sound that is seared in the cortex of several generations. Ironically, Eno had never used a PC computer in his life and so never sampled his work in action.
5. Netflix
Netflix’s “Ta-dum” has an almost Pavlovian effect – when it plays, you know you are settling in for a binge-watch.
