Newstalk goes national with a low-key launch

Radio Review: You don't want a new radio station to launch with a bang - loud one-off noises not being the most attractive sounds on the airwaves - so Newstalk sensibly kept its launch as a national station low key yesterday.

Just an announcement on its 8am news and a lot of staged-sounding vox pops from people professing to be delighted at the new nationwide talk radio alternative. "It's good for the young people" growled one voice, in what might or might not have been a spontaneous understanding that this station is aimed at a younger demographic than RTÉ Radio 1, the other (mostly) talk offering.

Newstalk's launch is good news, though, for those of us who want a choice when it comes to talk radio and for listeners who'd mostly rather not bother with music on the airwaves. The station, which for the past four years has been available only in Dublin, kicked off with a much improved Breakfast Show - thanks largely to new presenter Claire Byrne and the easy chemistry between her and Ger Gilroy, who has been manning the breakfast desk a little unsurely since its former presenter Eamon Dunphy took the Montrose bait.

At the beginning of the week, the station was saying Byrne couldn't get out of her TV3 commitments to start on launch day, but that obviously changed by Friday and the Breakfast Show was unrecognisably better for her presence. She's super-confident, has a great radio voice and she slipped easily into that Newstalk "man in the street" way of doing things. So when quizzing Enda Kenny on his reaction to Bertiegate, she asked: "I can't get my head around your strategy at all, are you saying he should go or not?" - her informality setting a different tone to the more grown-up one that defines Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1. That said, the approach isn't any more productive when it comes to getting an answer, especially from a politician, but its irreverence is refreshing.

Some "different" ways of doing things didn't work, though. An otherwise strong report about the Monaghan hospital controversy was marred by the sound of a heartbeat thumping away, ER style, in the back ground. It just sounded silly.

The station is obviously keen to shed its image as a male haven - its biggest draws have been the testosterone talk of George Hook, Dunphy and the blokeish Off The Ball evening sports programme. So the morning schedule is dominated by female presenters, with Orla Barry's magazine programme, Life!, followed by one of the station's new recruits, Brenda Power. Your Call is being sold as a caller-driven show but the first one wasn't - vox pops on the streets of Limerick, a newspaper crime correspondent talking about gun crime (which none of the voxes popped seemed bothered about) and a fired-up Power setting the agenda. It sounded like Life!'s bigger, crankier sister.

Arts fans hoping that Newstalk would have come up with something to fill that big niche for a good specialist culture and arts show will be sorely disappointed. Maybe the commercial station can't see the potential in it or feels that culture belongs to people who wear leather patches on the elbows of their Harris tweed jackets, and not the affluent thirtysomethings who are its target market. It's not like the gap hasn't been well flagged. The decision by the head of RTÉ Radio 1, Ana Leddy, to abandon specialist arts coverage during anything approaching prime time has been as publicly controversial as it is plain stupid and it has fallen to existing programmes to pick up the slack. It's not working - just ask Pat Kenny. He can't be happy that this week two major international authors made him look seriously out of his depth. On Monday's Today with Pat Kenny, Pulitzer-prize winning author Richard Ford rightly seemed mystified by Kenny's mortifying "so you wanted to be a writer since you were eight?" type of question. "Er no, where did you get that idea?" replied Ford.

The real humdinger came on Thursday during the interview with Martin Amis. Mostly, the conversation was about Amis's most recent essays, about al-Qaeda, the war on terror and suicide bombers and Kenny was in his element, teasing out the issues and displaying deep knowledge. Then he turned the talk to Amis's new novel and the whole thing fell apart. Kenny, clearly floundering, opened with an asinine question that prompted the writer to begin his reply with the sneering put-down, delivered in his trademark drawl: "I must caution you never to say to a writer, why did you choose this or that?". That has to bruise and Kenny must want a specialist arts programme more than even the most ardent Rattlebag fan.