Wednesday 1 May 2019

Why RTE Radio 1 Is More Awful Than Ever

Five years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled 'Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful'.   It has been, by a long way, the most read post on this blog, outdistancing any musings on books or inflammatory writings about Palestine.  Even the bots of the Donbass or West Virginia seem to enjoy it.  Here it is:


Since then, I have not stopped listening to Radio 1.  I switch back and forth between it and Newstalk106.  Both stations annoy me, but it's RTE Radio 1 which benefits from the license fee which I have not as yet paid - not possessing a TV - but which, no doubt, I soon will have to pay, just to guard against the outside possibility that I'd someday be stupid enough to want to watch 'The Late Late Show' on the smartphone I don't have.  Because Radio 1 stands as the 'radio station of record' of Ireland, in the manner of the Irish Times in the print media, I resent its dreary and often asinine character.

My irritable and scornful analysis of Radio 1 still has currency.  It probably says a lot that the station's character has not changed one iota since April 2014.  Some presenters have gone, some new ones have arrived.  None are, of themselves, worth listening to.  Some, by virtue of the extraordinarily fixed pattern of the station's schedule, acquire or have acquired 'importance'.  None of them deserve it.

For my money, the only broadcaster worth making an effort to listen to in Ireland these days is Sean Moncrieff, who presents an afternoon programme on Newstalk, Monday to Friday, between 2pm and 4pm.  Moncrieff, with a background in stand-up comedy and a training in philosophy, manages to present a programme which steers between those poles, often to striking effect.  He can be drily, or vulgarly, funny.  He clearly improvises at least part of his spiel.  He has real range in his interviews, which mostly tend towards the light, but not always.  Moncrieff can cut to the heart of a topic, be it a serious cultural matter or some scrap from popular news, with a combination of steeliness and sympathy, which leaves most of his competitors standing.  He is (of course) supported by an able and creative production team, but this does not take away from his own wit, articulacy and mental agility.  He is vastly more interesting to listen to than Ray Darcy, his rival in the same slot on RTE Radio 1, and he's vastly more interesting than most of his Newstalk colleagues - the callous Paul Williams, the breathlessly conceited Pat Kenny, the crassly philistine Ivan Yates who seems never to have advanced in his capacity for speech beyond the Terrible Twos, or the bizarrely-accented Susan Cahill, who gushes in the same way over various writers every Sunday.

But RTE Radio 1 has no one of Moncrieff's wit, insight or sure touch.   RTE Radio 1 is stale.  As a friend pointed out to me a while ago, the problem with Marian Finucane is that she is getting old, and her programme and its arrangement are getting old.  In fact they were all old when the damn progamme was created.   The whole RTE Radio 1 structure is old, and it needs a kick in the arse.  Alas, when you produce, or collude in the production of, 'star' presenters, such people then expand to fill the fetishized space that has been allotted to them.  It's beyond comprehension that RTE (or anywhere else) would pay a superannuated fogey like Ryan Tubridy nearly half a million euros per annum to do the 'work' he does.  I don't understand or see his 'talent'.  His voice is hard to bear, his wit is flat, and his morning radio programme is almost entirely without interest.

I feel sorry in summertime for Dave Fanning - a major Irish broadcaster, with substantial cultural achievements to his name in the promotion and development of rock music (even if I differ with him about U2) - who often 'stands in for Ryan', while 'Ryan' takes the long holidays written into his disgraceful contract.  Years ago, someone said that the two best Irish radio broadcasters were Fanning, and Tommy O'Brien.  They both had very distinctive voices and fields of interest and expertise.  Fanning still has these things; O'Brien, sadly, died in 1988.  Fanning who has a very distinctive radio voice, radio patter, and angle on the world, is much much better than Tubridy, but presumably has not been able to negotiate the kind of ludicrous contract with RTE that the younger and less talented man has, and so he takes gigs like this one.  

Tommy O'Brien was the kind of real original figure which RTE now almost entirely lacks.  He owned a huge collection of records of classical music, particularly grand opera, and he presented a weekly radio programme on Radio 1, always opened with his greeting 'Good evenin', listeners', in a strong south Tipp accent.  He possessed great knowledge, was passionate about his subject, but was entirely lacking in pretension.   Not everyone might agree with his taste, but his extraordinary individuality was undeniable.  Compared to him, a Tubridy is merely a buffoon, and a Cathal Murray is a soogey-moogey saccharine dummy who would make watching a game of tiddly-winks seem exciting.

Tubridy's 'talent', as I say, is lost on me.  I don't see what he brings to his programmes that a smart young journalist, well trained in radio and with an able production team, could not do for a tenth of the cost.  RTE tells us that if it doesn't pay bloated marionettes like Tubridy or Finucane or Miriam 'Genewwwwoyyynely' O'Callaghan or Joe Duffy commensurately bloated pay packets, it will 'lose' them.  Well and good.   Fine.  So be it - lose the lot of them, and give us radio with some content, and less of the faux charisma which is the real content of so much of the drivel we are asked to listen to.

The same vapidity pertains to programme content, as ever.  Now that we are moving towards the summer season, the 10pm slot on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays on Radio 1 is vulnerable to even more dross than usual. We have had in recent times a gamut of female journalists anchoring 'The Late Debate' - the typically useless RTE magazine with a few talking heads.  We now have repeats on three successive nights of 50 years of 'Sunday Miscellany'.  'Sunday Miscellany' is a vintage programme, but it is hardly the kind of totem of Western civilization which RTE plainly thinks it is.  It does not warrant repeats - five decades of middlebrow ruminations do not bear much repetition.  And, to add insult to injury, we are always told we are being 'given another chance' to listen to these programmes, as if we are unregenerate brats who are resistant to the dreary nostrums of our elders and betters and now are being given one last chance to simper properly and suck it all up.   If this is what RTE thinks of its listeners, then it really is on its last legs.

Conor

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