Madam, - I am bemused by the shocked reaction of Irish Times readers to the latest RTÉ shake-up. RTÉ's progressive abandonment of those of us who think and speak in whole sentences has been gathering momentum for many years. The anti-intellectual Mafia do what they do. The question is how long we are prepared to give them free rein without screaming blue murder.
Rattlebag and The Mystery Train were among the few radio programmes that didn't make you want to eat your own hair. Myles Dungan's guests had generally achieved eminence through real artistic merit. Unlike the members of the pop-cultural mediocracy, the dreary phone-in vox-poppers, the D-list celebrities who daily plague the life out of us, they had something to say and were all the more listenable for it.
John Kelly played music that was distinctive, refreshing and quirky, music that sometimes sent you scurrying off to the shops to follow up on a wise recommendation. And for those very reasons, they were misfits in the mulch of lowbrow populism that has engulfed radio just as it has engulfed television. Wilde looked up at the stars from the squalor of the gutter; radio programmers gaze into the gutter from the comfort of their ivory radio towers.
None of this is new - except that where once we were left to enjoy the crumbs, now these too are being dashed from the table. It's as if they no longer feel the need to acknowledge the rights of mere arty-farties and, fools that we are, we take it all lying down. we should be throwing open the windows - as Peter Finch urged in in that great movie Network - and yelling: "We're mad as hell and we're not gonna take it any more."
How much worse can it get? Just watch. Anti-intellectualism has a rich enough history in Ireland, as the treatment of Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey and John McGahern will attest, but the current affluence affords it even richer soil. Bloomsday invariably draws the sneers of the unread who proudly declare Ulysses unreadable. John Banville wins an overdue and richly-deserved Booker Prize only to endure the sneers of many, including an Irish poetaster who brazenly and incongruously declares his own "novel" superior. Any programme that treats its subject remotely seriously is, according to some, for "pointy-heads". The lexis of abuse says it all.
The real question is not why Ana Leddy laying waste to the radio schedules but rather why it is that "intellectual" is now widely regarded as a pejorative in a society that gave the world Joyce, Yeats and Beckett. - Yours, etc,
BERT WRIGHT, Hillside, Dalkey, Co Dublin.
Madam, - Your edition of June 6th reports that the Arts Council is to meet RTÉ director general Cathal Goan to raise concerns about arts programming. Last Saturday's Artscape column quotes Tania Banotti of Theatre Forum commenting that RTÉ's jingle about "supporting the arts" is now ringing a bit hollow. A very important point seems either to be overlooked or not appreciated in all the writings and comments I've seen and heard about this and similar matters.
RTÉ is not just a supporter of the arts, as it claims in this half-truth, but a major arts administrator in that it receives generous direct public funding for two orchestras, a string quartet, the Philharmonic Choir, a children's choir and Lyric FM, with a consequent public service responsibility to demonstrate our national music culture, and others, in it's programming. RTÉ is therefore very much on a par with the Arts Council and is not there just to be brought to heel occasionally by that organisation or to let itself down cheaply by simply describing itself as a supporter of the arts. Does RTÉ not appreciate that it is actually out there on the pitch, funded by the licence-payer, with all the national artistic responsibilities that entails? The jingle, worryingly, indicates that it does not.
Since the advent of television, and with the many twists and turns in administrative shake-ups and expansions over the years, the position of music within the larger RTÉ is now very much diminished from what it was originally. This has apparently led to a devaluing, or non-appreciation, in the minds of some people within RTÉ of what they actually possess. Also, the programming policy for all of these groups is at the whim of the individual who happens to be in charge of the music department at any particular time without any direct artistic accountability within RTÉ. I know this because I was in that position myself from 1983 to 1988.
The national performing groups can be bracketed with the National Gallery, the National Theatre and the National Concert Hall, whose policies are rightly overseen and guided by boards of various national interests. There is therefore an overwhelming case for the artistic direction of another major publicly funded art form, music, to be upgraded to this status to ensure that the investment of public money gets a proper return at all times.
Could I suggest that the Arts Council expand its admirable concern for matters artistic within RTÉ Radio 1 programming to include this extremely important issue and to follow through by its advice to Ministers until the goal is achieved. - Yours, etc,
JOHN KINSELLA, Marley Rise, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.
Madam, - In its glory days of memory Radio Éireann carried plays, serial drama, features, serious current affairs and improving "talks" during peak listening times. It balanced this demanding fare with the likes of Music on the Move, Music for Middlebrows and the Gay Byrne Show. The arrival of 2FM and then of Lyric FM brought changes in the main channel: commercial pop music went one way, serious music went the other, and Radio 1 was left to cover everything else.
But now Radio 1 seems to changing into a 2FM for adults. While 2FM continues to play the pop music of today's teenagers, Radio 1 seems now to be devoted to the pop music of the immediately preceding generation, softened by phone-in shows, chat shows and some "drivetime" news programming.
When this is coupled with a certain lightening of the content of Lyric FM at the same time of day, it does seem as if anything other than light music and undemanding talk radio has to be found in odd corners of the schedule, usually when the dog is demanding to be taken for a walk. - Yours, etc,
HUGO BRADY BROWN, Stratford on Slaney, Co Wicklow.