Wasn't it Gaybo who was fond of telling us we were a fickle lot, to be sure? Ah, good old Gaybo. Time was that when it came to radio, conversations and columns alike bristled with indignation about RTE's dearth of new, young talent. Same old voices all day, every day, we lamented. While rearranging the deck chairs we'd moan when there was some trivial change in the geriatric schedule.
Maybe it has something to do with slipping into that Lite FM demographic; maybe it's bad enough that the cops on the street are getting younger without the radio presenters doing it too. Whatever the reason, this column is increasingly of the opinion what-do-these-whippersnappers-know?
Take Ryan Tubridy talking about John Lennon on the Sunday Show (RTE Radio 1) as if he had a clue. He was just lucky no one asked what the panellists were all doing when they heard Lennon was dead; Tubridy would have had to admit he was finishing his homework sums and begging for an extra bickie in his lunchbox.
Still 30-minus, the boy Ryan slid into Andy O'Mahony's Sunday Show seat for the summer. Now, lo and behold, that chill autumn wind is aggravating my arthritis and Tubridy is still hosting the programme.
Lord knows Andy O'Mahony had his problems. But for a wide-ranging discussion programme like this, with a broad pre-set agenda but lots of room for digression, O'Mahony's breadth of knowledge and let's-call-it-life-experience made him a useful host and one who was in pretty good sync with much of the Radio 1 audience.
Just as an example from last Sunday: O'Mahony could not possibly have managed to listen to guest Paddy O'Gorman scatter around some quite radical ideas on AIDS - O'Gorman seemed essentially to agree with South African president Mbeki - and manage to ignore it. Again and again, O'Gorman made a spectacularly provocative remark - the "hoax" about AIDS in Africa, the "false" heterosexual AIDS figures in Ireland - and again and again Ryan Tubridy completely ignored him. And it didn't seem to be in aid of focusing the argument, which was supposed to be about health-screening for asylum-seekers; no, it sounded like Tubridy just either wasn't paying attention or wasn't up to the issues.
What was wrong with that wasn't simply that O'Gorman's ideas went uncontested; that's surely allowed. What happened was that they went unheard, because he was never encouraged to take his extraordinary throw-aways and present them clearly and systematically in conversation.
Similarly, when David Walsh from the Sunday Times started talking about the Olympics and didn't hesitate to defame, as drug-users, identifiable and uncharged individual athletes, experienced listeners could nearly imagine Andy O'Mahony's (libel-proofing) intervention about the presumption of innocence. And they would have had to go on imagining, because there wasn't going to be a word of that from Tubridy.
The imagining continued when Paddy O'Gorman actually picked up a guitar and performed Lennon's Imagine (just one verse), and remarked to Tubridy: "When I was your age I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star." That was perhaps a bit of an unintended cheap shot; Tubridy ought to be past air-guitar age and brings real energy to his work as a reporter on 5-7 Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). It's just that Sunday is a different show.
COMPARED with Ryan's rapid rise, Derek Mooney's progress through the RTE ranks has been positively stately. But the tucking of Mooney Goes Wild on One (RTE Radio 1, Sunday) into that pre-Sunday Show slot is good for him and the programme.
Smart-alecky nature boy that he is, Mooney is rarely as amusing as he seems to think himself, but the show buzzes along. Once Eanna Ni Lahmna - isn't she the Bull Island voice of Mary O'Rourke? - had done her usual highly stylised, no-nonsense spiel about the way butterflies migrate (or don't, as the case appears to be) from Africa, most of the programme was devoted to a plug for electronic pest control devices. That may have been amusing general-interest radio but is this really a nature programme?
The real nature people got a shorter slot devoted to a new birdwatching "hide" at Rogerstown estuary in north Co Dublin - a converted transport container with windows and seats, which seems slightly to defeat the birdwatcher's masochistic purpose if he or she can be snuggly indoor and sheltered from the arthritic winds. There were nice interviews from estuary-side - Mooney's gang has long since proven that birdwatching has radio quality - but I imagine there is an interesting story about how Birdwatch Ireland got Fingal County Council and the relevant property developers to support a conservationist project in this profitable day and age. Sadly there was no sign of that story on the determinedly apolitical Mooney Goes Wild.
`I N the elements, and in your element," Carrie Crowley told interviewee Eamon de Buitlear on the other Sunday morning programme, Snapshots. Crowley, now immortalised as the cautionary tale for "new talent" at RTE, was in Mooney's natural territory, but doing it with far more leisure and appeal. And de Buitlear certainly seemed in his element, roaming from nature to culture and back again, from the story of the oyster-catcher nesting on the Dublin-to-Wexford railway line to the story of the children who wore bags of hairy mollies around their necks to cure whooping cough.
He was amusing, too, about his Irish-speaking childhood in English-speaking Wicklow, where his father was the real Irish-language enthusiast. "My mother - I have to be careful about this - she always spoke in the future tense. Which was great I suppose - we were always very forward-looking."
Looking forward, too, is the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC): to another day in court, the Supreme Court this time, as the saga over the licence-award to Spin FM drags on and Dublin labours without a youth-oriented station; to News Talk 106 eventually sorting out its shareholding, finalising its contract and coming on-air in mid-2001 - at least a year after originally planned; and amazingly, given that track record, to licensing another two additional stations in the capital.
The IRTC's announcement this week that it's taking applications for two new services is really a refinement of unfinished business from the last round. Based on the tried, didn't-try and failed of last year, the commission has re-categorised what it wants: one, a special-interest music station; two, a religious station on medium wave.
A decision is expected in the spring, and interested pirate operators have to go off air now. So the good-news-bad-news on your Dublin FM dial this week: non-stop static where Jazz FM used to be.