IT'S THE best soap opera around. For the fourth time in two years, 2FM are changing their breakfast show line-up. Christopher Guest would get a great mockumentary out of the ongoing shenanigans as the station tries to find a palatable breakfast show team, Jim Carroll
After the ups and (mostly) downs of Ryan Tubridy, Rick O'Shea with Ruth Scott, and Marty "Bell Eleven" Whelan, the national pop station has given up and has reached for its cheque- book.
Pinching FM104's Colm Hayes and Jim Nugent was a no-brainer. Expensive probably - Hayes worked at 2FM during the 1980s so he must have relished the sight of John Clarke approaching on his hands and knees - but a no-brainer all the same. The FM104 duo have demonstrated an ability to do what 2FM can't do: attract and keep younger listeners.
During their tenure at Dublin's FM104, Hayes and Nugent were responsible for a show which pulled in 105,000 listeners every morning, according to the last Joint National Listener- ship Survey (JNLR) book. They did this in the most ruthless and cut-throat radio market in the country.
The trick for 2FM is to get those listeners to work out where the station is on the radio dial. Considering that most of those listeners probably never tune into 2FM and that two-thirds of the country has never heard of the duo, the nation's billboards are going to see a lot of Hayes and Nugent in the coming months.
Their move to 2FM means Ian Dempsey's hugely successful Today FM breakfast show now has some competition. Both shows will deal from the same pack, with easy-listening sketches and japes having as much prominence as the music and patter, so it will be interesting to note how this scrap develops.
Of course, the new breakfast line-up is just the headline story in the latest bulletin from Montrose. You really didn't think station boss Clarke, a man who rivals Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez when it comes to constantly tinkering with his line-up, would be content with just one change?
Legal eagle Will Leahy gets rewarded for pulling in oodles of weekend listeners with a daily drivetime show, while Irish radio's longest running star attraction, Larry Gogan, heads in the opposite direction. Rick O'Shea is moved yet again, this time to an afternoon slot, and Ruth Scott gets to call O'Shea's old evening shift her own.
Nikki Hayes, Damien Farrelly and Dan Hegarty must be wondering if their lack of movement is a sign they're doing the right thing or the wrong thing.
Yet the elephant in the corner, the one who keeps farting to attract our attention, remains in situ. Gerry Ryan is the DJ who is losing more listeners than anyone else on Irish radio (51,000 in 2005 alone). Every single JNLR book delivers more bad news for Ryan and his awful, dated show. Yet he continues to sit, Buddah-like, in the prime morning slot.
Rick O'Shea must be dizzy from all the moving about he has done at 2FM since joining the station. In the last couple of months, though, he found a groove on the evening show, helming a programme which was tight, focused and bright. Let's hope he will at least get to spin his Messiah J & The Expert CDs in the afternoons.
It has to be hoped that these are the last changes at 2FM for about two years. It takes time for new voices to bed in, anything from six months to a year, and for listeners to get accustomed to the changes.
It takes just as long for these changes to work their way through to the JNLR system and provide hard and fast data on which shows are working. Some observers might note that 2FM could use the latest batch of changes to excuse any poor JNLR showings in 2007. But only cynics like Discotheque. Everyone else knows 2FM would never do any- thing as lowdown or calculating as that.
jimcarroll@irish-times.ie
