Anton Savage is posing in a doorway for The Irish Times photographer. Like many national radio presenters who sometimes have to be photographed for their jobs, he’s quite good at vamping. He stands and sits, pops his head on his chin, offers smiles and serious countenances. He’s much as you’d expect from his radio shows: amiable, good-natured and wisecracking, resigned to the awkwardness, willing to lash out a side-order of humour if he can locate a joke between modelling manoeuvres.
There’s only one catch and it takes me a minute to figure it out. I’m surprised the Newstalk presenter is not wearing a suit. For a decade or more, you would hardly ever see Savage in anything other than pristine suits, shirts and cufflinks. Where other presenters might schlep into studio in get-ups a college student might shun as too ragged, Savage always looked like he was carrying a ring-light somewhere about his person. His navy jumper from Marks and Spencer (“this little up and coming boutique”) and cargo pants today are solidly respectable attire, but not quite the Anton I’d imagined. He knows what I mean.
It turns out: this is Savage 2.0. “I hated suits,” he says with a cheerful grin, as he nurses an americano in a quiet nook of a Dublin hotel, having dispatched the photographer with an anecdote about brake pads (Savage knows his engines). “It was simply a uniform. Then it becomes synonymous and people think it’s a style choice.”
They were a pragmatic decision, the 48-year-old says, because they made his portfolio career possible. A suit could take him from presenting roles on Today FM or Ireland AM right though to his more corporate desk-job in The Communications Clinic, the public relations and media training agency that his parents Terry Prone and Tom Savage founded in 2008, and where Anton once served as managing director.
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Well, no more. The suits have got the boot because Savage has taken a leap of faith, stepping down from his position at The Communications Clinic, resigning his directorship and placing his shares in a blind trust. If fall back plans are for people who plan on falling back, Savage has finally decided to throw in his lot with the radio crew.
It’s a call he has made as he prepares to take on his biggest radio role in more than a decade. Next week he will begin presenting the weekday breakfast show on Newstalk from 7am, taking over the slot from Ciara Kelly and Shane Coleman, who move to drivetime on the station.
On Tuesday, Savage will arrive at Newstalk in the well-named Marconi House in Digges Lane at 5am to prepare for his show, taking his motorbike, a Yamaha FJR1300 (“effectively what the cops used to ride”), for the 20-minute spin from the Clontarf home he shares with his wife Cathy and their two children.
The aim is to take on RTÉ, where he will face off against Morning Ireland, the show his father Tom once shepherded behind the scenes to success. It will be the first time Anton Savage has hosted a weekday morning current affairs show as distinct from a midmorning or weekend magazine show. Although he says he wants the programme to have a rounded feel with “pop psychology, personal finance, health” and a “little bit of a tabloid instinct”, it will in essence be a current affairs programme, which is what has prompted the directorial decision.
[ Anton Savage is biggest winner to emerge from Newstalk’s schedule overhaulOpens in new window ]
One of the services The Communications Clinic offers is media coaching for politicians and other professionals. Savage says he has never had to back-pedal in terms of declaring a conflict of interest. “I never had, and I don’t think there was ever any issue with me being objective or impartial or having a vested interest, because I wasn’t doing the work that would cause that to occur,” he says. “But I think if I had remained with the company, there would have been a drumbeat of questions. It becomes at best an annoyance and at worst a problem. So I thought, ‘Okay, the only way to do this is to sever myself and focus entirely on the show’.”
Could you call it the Ivan Yates effect? Savage doesn’t want to talk about the media pundit much – “I like Ivan, I’m not going to judge or second-guess Ivan’s actions”. But he agrees that Yates’s controversial advising of former presidential candidate Jim Gavin, while also commenting on then presidential candidate Catherine Connolly without declaring a conflict of interest, had the result of focusing minds. “Ivan most definitely made it more of a current issue than it had previously been to that point. But I would have arrived at the same place.”
Savage no longer has a desk at The Communications Clinic. “Any shareholding that I have is in a blind trust. I don’t know where it’s invested, I don’t know what’s done with it. If the trustee decides to sell, invest, divest, I have no control over that.”
Independence day has been a long time coming. The son of veteran media adviser Terry Prone and the late Tom Savage, former chairman of the RTÉ Authority, Savage got bitten by the radio bug early, back when he was at college studying English at Trinity and working as a trainee researcher on Today FM’s precursor Radio Ireland. An only child, Savage learned the media trade at the dinner table by osmosis from his parents. “I probably benefited from being involved in discussions,” he says. “It gave me a very close relationship with them.”
He saw first-hand what it meant to work hard, overcome obstacles and stay determined. His father famously left the priesthood to be with Prone. After his mother was in a car crash near Spiddal that nearly killed her, she insisted on checking herself out of the hospital early. She was told if she didn’t do physio twice a day every day, she would wind up with an arm that didn’t unfurl. It was six-year-old Anton who helped her with her physiotherapy, forcing her arm time after time as she asked him to keep going through both of their tears. “These days,” Prone wrote in her memoir Caution to the Wind, “whenever I do a task that requires me to fully extend my left arm, I am always grateful to a resolute little boy who gave me that gift, albeit through much personal distress.”
[ Terry Prone: ‘I never do parties, dinners. I’ve always been reclusive and shy’Opens in new window ]
While maintaining that he wasn’t that hard or disciplined a worker – “I did a good line in feckless through most of school,” Savage says of his time in St Vincent’s and then Belvedere – evidence points to the contrary. For years, in order to be able to flit between Today FM, Ireland AM and The Communications Clinic, he carried a pillow with him in his 36-year-old Mercedes, bought in 2001. “I used to travel with a pillow in the car, so that literally anywhere I could stop I could get a sleep.”
His on-air persona was slick and well crafted. Naturally ebullient, he had no vocal mannerisms or ticks, he didn’t sound tired. There was a comedic bent. He had lots of passions and quirky curiosities. And he learned from his mistakes. Even now, he says, he has the “mot ‘d’escalier”. What’s that? “Going up the stairs to bed, it occurs: the thing you should have said or done.” He is still getting over a radio show on Today FM where he introduced a guest by saying she was pregnant. She had had her baby three years before. He feels shame where there’s “the kind of thing where [a person] had their feelings hurt on air and I can’t fix it.”
If his work ethic and radio abilities threatened to make him unstoppable, his family background often made him unhireable. When his father was appointed chairman of the RTÉ Authority in 2009, he says “it was almost reverse nepotism”. “I used to be Tubridy’s stand-in presenter on RTÉ. The moment my father got appointed chairman of RTÉ, all of that ended. That was taken off [me]. I could see their logic. But there’s not a lot of doors.”
At the time, the other main door was Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp, which owned stations including Today FM, 98FM and Newstalk. In January 2015, after a long stint as a cover presenter, Savage was hired as Ray D’Arcy’s replacement after D’Arcy had decamped to RTÉ. It should have been an easy and comfortable fit. “I’d had a very good relationship with Willie O’Reilly, and with Peter McPartlin, the two previous chief executives. And John McColgan, then chair of the board.”
But things started changing. The executives left, new management appeared. Behind the scenes Communicorp was prepping for a sale, instituting swingeing changes that affected production staff and on-air presenters. Ray Foley, a presenter who had joined Today FM around the same time as Savage, had left Communicorp in acrimonious circumstances. When he subsequently appeared as a contributor on Savage’s show, “I and my entire production team got called in for a dressing down for bringing the station into disrepute because we had Ray Foley on”.
Savage argued back, and, while renegotiating his contract in late 2016, asked to be given an editorial role on the programme. “It meant that if anybody was going to be blamed for things, it would be me, not the production team.” The station’s management countered, asserting that he should play more music and talk less – notably, a form of radio that is cheaper to make, requiring a smaller production staff. In a fatal blast, Savage – who had control of the show’s Twitter account and the password for it – tweeted that he was leaving, owing to a disagreement on “music quotas, topics for discussion, format, choice of contributors and guests”.
Savage isn’t the type to talk about his feelings other than in a jocose manner; he’s too careful. But the situation was wounding. “I felt that was probably radio done,” he says. A few months later, in March 2017, his father died. At the funeral in the church in Grange in Cooley, County Louth, Savage gave the eulogy. His face betrays rare vulnerability as he recalls the day. “I can still see the faces of people at the graveside,” he says. “People like Ian Dempsey, Mairead Ronan came as colleagues. People were coming up again and again to shake hands. Not even halfway through, you’re literally bruised. I’m still grateful to everybody who showed up, to see the effect he had on so many.”
They were low, hard times. If Savage has come full circle now, finding himself back full-time in Digges Lane separated by one floor from his old home on Today FM, he’s quick to acknowledge that it more or less happened because of the Communicorp sale.
When Communicorp was bought by Bauer Media in 2021, Savage “got the call to do stuff with Newstalk on the afternoon that Communicorp sold: literally my phone rang that afternoon”. Central to the decision was Patricia Monahan, then programme director at Newstalk, now RTÉ’s director of audio. For the past number of years, Savage has presented the weekend breakfast shows on Newstalk, growing the Saturday programme to a record 146,000 listeners, before winning the plum weekday gig.
It’s a happy story for Savage in the end. Elsewhere, in the dance of moving chairs, not everyone has had an easy time of it. One of the most high profile departures in recent times was Ray D’Arcy, who left RTÉ last year after ten years. “I was very sad for Ray. [On Today FM] it was the most loyal listenership that I’ve seen on almost any radio programme. I’d find it very disappointing if Ray doesn’t find a way to recreate that through some vehicle.” But he’s glad for the presenters who have boomeranged back from similarly dismal exits. “Muireann O’Connell, Ray Foley, Louise Duffy,” Savage reels off. “Ray Foley back in his rightful place on Today FM. A lot of the people who had very difficult experiences now have great gigs.”
In radio, you live by the sword and die by the sword. What does success look like for Savage in the future? “Not being fired?” Savage quips. He’s only half-joking.
