Ray D’Arcy is back at RTÉ: will it be for a rest or a wrestle?

Every few months, in what has become a traditional parade of floating heads and jagged graphs, radio listenership figures get a splash on the news pages. It’s something that print media does now as a matter of course, like reminding readers when the clocks go forward, or the annual photo of Roy Keane with a guide dog.

Yes, the coverage of radio ratings has got a bit out of control, but so be it. The JNLR (Joint National Listenership Research) delivers a distracting mix of showbiz, news, statistics, long-running trends and a clap-o-meter.

You don't get such focus on any other media. The colourful graphics are not employed for Irish television ratings, where it's been long been a matter of which RTÉ show beats which other RTÉ show, and what lone TV3 import stows away in the Top 20.

You certainly don’t get it in the six-monthly newspaper sales figures. If there is one area that newspapers are particularly awful at reporting in a decent way, it’s newspaper sales. They were long ago reduced almost entirely to tools of self-promotion and obfuscation. And anyway,the arrows that point upwards were retired quite a while ago.

When the JNLRs are released, though, everyone gets giddy. Despite margins of error, and regardless of how large numbers are extrapolated from a limited sample sizes, relatively meagre gains are treated as triumphs and small losses as signs of crisis.

Yet, in these great radio wars, there are always a few battles of note. There is the proper slugfest of Kenny vs O'Rourke; the heavyweight vs plucky bantamweight of Morning Ireland and Newstalk Breakfast. There are the mid-morning battles, and the standard sideshow that is some apparent wish that Ryan Tubridy be in perpetual crisis.

But in all of that, you never hear much about the afternoon shows. They are seldom head to head. They are not at war. Afternoon radio shows are on, it would appear, when the soldiers get a smoke break and a rest before going over the top again at drivetime.

Today FM, for instance, has traditionally eased back on the talk and settled into its most music-driven hours of the daytime schedule. It seemed to take stock of the idea that afternoons are when people are at work or busy with the kids at home, and their brains are otherwise engaged.

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It doesn't have to be that way. Just a flight of stairs away from Today FM, Newstalk's Sean Moncrieff has long strived for something more, and while he tends not to get much more than a token mention in the JNLRs, his show is one of the most consistently interesting, entertaining and cerebral on Irish radio.

Moncrieff’s team of researchers are clearly adept at rooting out the most interesting topics from the more overlooked corners of academia and turning them into the kind of radio that stops you from leaving the car 10 minutes after you’ve reached your destination.

Which finally brings us to Ray D'Arcy. He has returned to RTÉ, moving to an afternoon slot that, under Derek Mooney, has audience figures below those earned by D'Arcy until now. But there is a greater difference. D'Arcy grew his, bringing in an audience bigger than the breakfast show that preceded him. Mooney has loyal listeners, sure, but he inherits many of them.

RTÉ Radio 1 starts its day with the highest rated show in the country. By the time Liveline comes along, Radio 1 is still attracting an audience of more than 375,000 – a number no independent station comes even close to matching.

However, in the languid stretch of the afternoon, those figures are almost halved (198,000 at last count). We’ll never know how Mooney would have fared in the far tougher wilds of independent radio, but we do know that D’Arcy’s Today FM show had to innovate and change in order to build its very loyal audience of 220,000 – and that its success lay not just by centring on a well-known personality, but in making household names out the production team as well.

It did that because D’Arcy had to fight every day, to scrap for every listener, and to work harder again to keep them. Moncrieff sounds like that too. People are fighting that same battle on RTÉ Radio, but the context is so different. They are broadcasting to so many whose radios are permanently rusted on that same spot on the dial.

It will be fascinating to hear how Ray D’Arcy approaches the particularly tough challenge of not growing rusty; of whether he can meet the challenge of sounding fresh within the comfortable walls of the establishment.

Whatever the outcome, afternoon radio just earned itself a juicy spot on the newspaper graphs the next time the JNLRs come around.

shegarty@irishtimes.com @shanehegarty