The editor of The Irish Times was kind enough to provide this column with an annex on Saturday, ample space to spout about the performance of - and prognosis for - Radio Ireland.
Still, now that we're back in our cosier Tuesday home, a little more close consideration of the JNLR figures seems called for: this is, after all, a defining moment for the new national service and thus for Irish radio - and besides, there is very little of great note on the air.
The most extraordinary and important statistic to emerge from last week's survey report has been mentioned in most media, but perhaps not probed for all its worth. The figure is Radio Ireland's shame and Radio Ireland's opportunity.
Here it is again: 79 per cent of those surveyed have never listened to the station. That's an awful lot of people in no position to judge the station's output - in no position, really, to choose whether to tune in or not. Before we get all hot and bothered about how this state of affairs came to pass, let's flip that statistic over. It means that only one in five people has listened at all to Radio Ireland. In that context, the "listened yesterday" figure of 4 per cent looks rather better; the "listened in the past week" rating of 10 per cent should be downright encouraging.
After all, that 10 per cent is roughly half the "ever-listened". Even that tiny "listened yesterday" 4 per cent is nearly a fifth of those in a position to know anything about Radio Ireland. RTE Radio 1 - with which all listeners are surely familiar - gets roughly a third of the total sample as "listened yesterdays".
We won't get carried away playing pro-rata games with the numbers. It's far from a valid exercise, since that "ever-listened" fifth of the population is self-selecting, people who had some reason to believe they might be interested in Radio Ireland.
But even allowing for caution, that passably positive response from actual listeners to what has been a decidedly mixed-quality weekday schedule is surely a starting point. (It should be made clearer than it has been in media coverage - including my own Saturday article - that the JNLR listening figures do not thus far include weekend programming, where the quality of Radio Ireland has been more consistently high.)
Where the JNLR post-mortems have cut the sharpest has been in relation to Radio Ireland's marketing failure, embodied in that 79 per cent figure. Over the weekend, two station personalities, Declan "Garrison Town" Lynch and the summer's rising star, Kevin Myers, used their newspaper columns to highlight this failing, the latter using the harshest possible terms.
Let's look at what actually happened. There was a billboard campaign, featuring the station logo only, plus the frequency where it could be found. Billboards and newspaper advertising tried, where feasible, to be more specific than "100 to 102 FM": the actual frequency varies around the country, which is a real problem when seeking an identity in the crowded centre of the dial. Why weren't personalities featured in the ad campaign? A combination of business-school wisdom about creating "brand familiarity" and understandable caution about the shelf-life of the station's stars dictated that decision. A mistake? Probably, but not an entirely senseless one. Then things went quiet. We know now that station chiefs were looking forward to acres of free publicity when the Gerry Ryan deal was sealed. You can imagine the billboard campaign that would have followed.
Instead, having negotiated for most of the April-to-June period of the JNLR survey, Ryan decided to stay at Montrose, where his ratings are again sky-high. That's business, and I haven't heard anyone at Radio Ireland whingeing or making excuses about it.
They are similarly stiff-upper-lipped in public about the continuing presence of a powerful pirate, Radio Dublin, adjacent to 100 on the capital's FM airwaves, and about the growing strength of the transmitters of the legitimate Dublin stations, 98FM and FM104, making it harder for Radio Ireland to get a Leinster foothold.
These non-programming problems need to be addressed by the IRTC, while Radio Ireland gets into gear for a new start in early October. No panic.
There's just room enough to give honourable mention to Anna Livia FM. The Dublin community station is doing what others provide only in small doses: satirical comedy. The Alternative Angelus, what's more, is genuinely funny. Last week it expanded its Sunday slot to an experimental 55 minutes and took the piss out of the weather, Dana, Sonia O'Sullivan and sundry other topicals. Fair dues too to the same station's Colin McClelland, whose Rock 'n' Roll Guide To Classical Music (Wednesdays and Saturdays) brings the musical past to tabloid life - Debussy's fetish for natural blondes, Mozart's freaky childhood - without sacrificing its essential snob appeal.
