RadioReview:Radio is easy business for sports fans - or so I'm told. Apart from the avalanche of weekend coverage on all stations - bar Lyric FM - there's BBC's Five Live, Newstalk's Off the Ball and maybe Des Cahill's Drivetime Sport - and that's it, done and dusted.
In my house, big GAA matches involve extension leads, a strategically placed radio and the telly on mute so that the great Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh's commentary can be heard. It never matters that for some weird satellite-related reason the commentary coming from the radio is always a beat behind the pictures. Even slightly out of synch, no one can beat Ó Muircheartaigh.
One of the best things about RTÉ Radio 1's new Drivetime schedule is that listeners, including myself, can turn off directly after Mary Wilson and avoid the sports stuff almost entirely. Weekday coverage of major sports events on Radio 1 used to be on medium and long wave, which is grand, because anyone who is interested can simply change the dial from FM while the rest of us remain happily oblivious to all that olé olé stuff and the low-lying fields of Athenry. But something seems to be afoot in RTÉ. In October, a Tuesday evening schedule was cleared for soccer match coverage and it happened again this Wednesday. The first time it felt like a mistake but a second time, well, it's starting to sound like a policy and one that seriously undermines the existing evening schedule. Can the powers that be really think that programmes such as the Documentary on One (usually one of the week's highlights) are so expendable they can be brushed aside when there's a footie match on? It doesn't say a lot for encouraging audience loyalty - the Holy Grail of radio listenership.
Last week there was a beautifully crafted documentary on the death of a homeless Irish man, this week it was a low-grade Irish international that the people of San Marino couldn't even be bothered to fetch up for.
There's always the BBC - which is a bit cheeky because we don't actually pay for that - but this week the World Service featured a major series of interesting and absorbing programmes on India, broadcast at various times every day. In the documentary series, India Rising (Monday to Thursday), presenter George Arney admitted that India is hard to get a handle on. "How do you summarise a country which is home to one in six members of the human race, which contains a third of the world's poorest people and yet has an increasingly consumer-oriented middle-class twice the size of the population of Germany?"
Despite the magnitude of the task, he succeeded in delivering vivid snapshots, focusing in one programme on the inexorable rise of shopping malls selling western brands; and in another, talking to brash young graduates fluent in English (peppered with American slang), who work in call centres and who up until the arrival of the multinationals wouldn't have had a hope of a job. He explored how television is creating a new pan-Indian identity that's very much driven by consumerism. More than 660 million Indians watch TV - more than have flush toilets - and the biggest programmes are reality shows, with Big Boss (no prizes for guessing what that's modelled on) a big hit. But beyond the islands of consumerism and economic miracles Arney found that by travelling 10 miles outside any large city, he was thrown back 100 years. In rural Bihar he found a caste of people so poor that their diet was made up entirely of rats, and where per capita income is $100 (€77) a year; where eight out of 10 girls don't finish primary school and only 10 per cent of homes have electricity. "There is a growing emphasis on the individual in the cities," said Preeti Reddy. "Indians used to save, save, save, now they spend, spend, spend. Now there's a much larger consuming class - spending is no longer looked down upon as greed."And speaking of filthy lucre, are there moves afoot for Morning Ireland to go down the route taken by The Breakfast Show on Newstalk, where so many segments are sponsored? It's one way of making sense of Cathal Mac Coille's strange outburst (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday). He announced, apropos of nothing at all, that Morning Ireland "is sponsored by . . . you".
And not just an ordinary "you". Mac Coille gave the word full, game show wellie. What on earth is all that about? Even way back in his sponsored- programme days, Larry Gogan (who was a true gentleman in a delightfully pleasant interview on Marian Finucane, Saturday, RTÉ Radio 1) couldn't have sounded as poptastic. Let's hope that puts a stop to any intrusive sponsorship deals.
