Radio Review: It's worth remembering that when Ryan Tubridy arrived on to the RTÉ 2Fm schedule with his Full Irish breakfast programme he took weeks to find his feet. But once he did, he was off and running in a big way, hoovering up listeners and developing a strong, lively programme unlike anything else at that time of the morning.
The puzzle is that the basic format of the much-hyped The Tubridy Show (RTÉ Radio 1, daily) is virtually identical to what's on offer at the same time over on 2fm. Both are listener-driven shows with an in-your-face male presenter talking 90-to-the-dozen, with breaks for music.
It's as if the slot, once home to Marian Finucane, has morphed into The Gerry Tubridy show. One major difference is that with Gerry Ryan there's the possibility of a lurch into risqué territory, but Tubridy keeps reassuring us of his sober Radio 1 credentials with his old-fogey shtick, talking about Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and the like and preferring the sound of vinyl records to CDs. And can Tubridy talk! Fluently and without pause for minutes on end about anything that comes into his head and at a speed that makes him sound as wound as a coiled spring.
An ability to talk isn't exactly a career defect in a radio presenter but listeners have limits. Even Gerry Ryan, who handles his three hours of live radio with such ease, needs planned content. He has regular guests, such as Fiona Looney and a roving reporter, Evelyn O'Rourke, to take the pressure off and give some variety.
There's very little going on in this new programme except Tubridy, some lame feature items, nice'n'easy music and calls for listener participation repeated to the point of desperation. When those listeners did phone in, it was with items ranging from the woman whose two-year-old got a rash from a henna tattoo to a U2 concert-going granny.
But all that is really beside the point. The real issue is that the element of choice from the national broadcaster is gone. Before, if you wanted music-free, intelligent talk radio you could tune into Marian Finucane and if you were in the mood for a light-hearted show with music and listeners gassing on, there was Gerry Ryan.
That said, it is the silly season and there is the sense that this show is a very public try-out for the real business for Tubridy - the autumn schedule - so maybe it'll come right . . . eventually.
The most inspired idea for a programme this week was Blessed be the Fruit of the Loom (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), where producer and presenter Mary Owens travelled to Morocco to discover exactly where the Fruit of the Loom jobs went when the company left a trail of redundancies in Buncrana.
She brought along Donegal factory worker Bridie Burns, who knew the right questions to ask and could suss out a well-run textile factory a mile off. It was a sharp lesson in global economics. The factory girls in Rabbat earn €50 a week, the average industrial wage, and in the big factories the jobs are coveted and the conditions are relatively good. But already the T-shirt business is on the move again to even lower cost-base countries, such as Pakistan and Russia. Just as the Donegal women were heard discussing the devastating effect of their redundancies at the start of the programme, a young Moroccan machinist talked in whispers about how her wages support her entire family and if her job went, they would have nothing.
Curiously the programme did not get permission to go into the Fruit of the Loom factory itself, and Burns and Owens were reduced to waiting around a corner hoping to interview one of the women workers on her way home but all were unwilling to talk.
Just where work fits into our lives was explored in The Workaday World (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday). Why is it that one of the first questions people are asked is what do you do? In this age of status anxiety, it's the quickest way to get a fix on who you're talking to and, according to psychologist Barry Rogers, "work defines who we are" - though maybe Will Hutton's definition of work being the "meaning of life" was going a bit far. All the talk about work-life balance presumes that work is in some way bad when, in fact, most people get a lot out of what they do. Popular philosopher Alain de Botton suggested that work "flattens your identity". In a work situation, certain defined tasks and attitudes are demanded and not much else, "so it's a relief from the greater existential angst of 'why am I here?'" Now there's something to think about when the alarm goes off on Monday morning.
