You think economics is the dismal science? Try demographics, which is just as dismal and probably even more reductive. It's reductive, anyway, if you have the misfortune to be a radio "personality" (as opposed to person). In this business you are what you attract, and what you attract is a set of listeners carefully weighed and measured according to age, sex, family and social status, writes Harry Browne.
Thus we have the sad saga of Ryan Tubridy, a bright broadcaster whose wanderings around the RTÉ radio centre seem to have less to do with finding him the right programme than with getting him hitched up to his key demographic.
This is all probably blindingly obvious to most of you, but it only really hit me properly on Wednesday morning when I was listening to his latest vehicle, The Full Irish (2FM, Monday to Friday). First I heard Tubridy play Thin Lizzy's Boys are Back in Town, and I thought to myself: Gee, this is a nice wake-me-up, though this show's musical selection is really straight-up pandering to (us) pushingfortysomethings, isn't it? But hey, I like a little pandering of a Wednesday morning - it beats the increasingly eternal Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday).
Then came the ad for Disney on Ice, and in the background of the parent-oriented pushiness there it was again, synthed up a bit perhaps but recognisably the same tune, and I felt beyond pandered-to now - fully, sickeningly schmoozed, a middle-class pushingfortysomething with kids, my heart and credit card the unmistakable objects of RTÉ/Disney affection.
Perhaps because I'm a journalist - a profession that mainlines Morning Ireland - I'm usually something of a traitor to my demographic at this hour of the morning: I have signally failed, for example, to join my cohort in the move to the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show (Today FM, Monday to Friday). One can only presume that it was watching Dempsey and Today FM profit in their jocular embrace of this massive mid-market that prompted 2FM chiefs to abandon the more youth-oriented approach of the Damien McCall morning programme in favour of a Radio 1 import, the young fogey Tubridy, and an entirely new fight-Dempsey format.
There's also the not-small matter - the slightly corpulent matter, actually - of keeping Ryan on the radio. 2FM is sitting on RTÉ's top radio asset in Gerry Ryan, but for how long? Can Radio 1 afford to keep him off its own airwaves? Can RTÉ afford to keep him on the premises at all? In these circumstances, this other Ryan, the Tubridy lad, looks the most likely groomee for the role of keeping Gerry's vital transitional audience with 2FM - an audience that wants information, but not too much, and with some laughs, sex and gossip in the breakfast mix - but still with the impression of getting a real fibre provider in the form of news, international stories, the arts.
The irony is that, whatever the peculiarities of tone on The Full Irish, this programme's arrival, plus the extended Morning Ireland, actually means more of the same on the radio: more mid-market talk, of a sort that mixes personality-oriented and current affairs style. Everything on Radio 1 and 2FM, every weekday from 7 a.m. until noon, is now a variation on this theme.
Presumably, when new station News Talk arrives on the air shortly in Dublin, it will mean more and more of the same.
As for Tubridy himself, he appears to be following the example set by Gerry the Great in his early radio days, when he audibly indulged his native obnoxiousness and his cultivated ego and became the man Ireland loved to hate. Last week, I heard Tubridy rather snappily dismiss a young listener's musical request as not "breakfast programme" material; this week, with the help of the Oscars, I caught him dissing celebrities at every turn ("Isn't he some piece of work?" etc). Hyper-critical smartarse is an easy-enough pose to strike in a weekly newspaper column; it can hardly be so simple to sustain it in a daily radio programme, however.
He's playing a less-than-amiable character that will put Tubridy's articulacy to the test. So far, he's doing all right, but one gets the sneaking suspicion that he is only as good as his interlocutor. That's good enough when he's having a smart and informed conversation with Keelin Shanley in Paris, but this week's chat with the very young-and-nervous-sounding Simon Carswell got dragged down to the latter's level, which consisted of insights into Oscar night for "gown" designers along the lines of: "It can work out bad, or very very good."
Tubridy wasn't rude about everyone. "Most people love the Clintons - I happen to be one of them."
IN a week when Hillary's cavalcade joined the line of tourist coaches that absurdly block the traffic in Dublin's Nassau Street, Lorelei Harris's documentary, The Calligrapher's Song (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) looked at the item that brings many of them there, the Book of Kells.
Harris tends to set herself difficult targets, and a radio programme about an illuminated manuscript must fall into that category. However, she produced something quite complex and manifold, but still lovely and listenable. The Calligraper's Song dealt with the Good Book as a vistors' phenomenon, as an historic artefact, as evidence of a particular creative process and artistic practice, and as a work of scriptural interpretation rather than simply decoration. One expert explained how the work is a visual effort to find unity in the diversity, even the contradictory natures, of the four gospel narratives; another one calls it "erratic" and "scrappy".
As usual, the sonic world of Harris's programme was sophisticated, occasionally sublime. She combined monastic chant with touristic chatter, typographical analysis with awestruck admiration. The visitors who were looking at the book because "it's famous" have no less a place in this world than the academics who can discuss at length, even if some (of both groups) do sound occasionally silly.
MARTIN Cahill's widow, Frances, was very silly to go on Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and unconvincingly deny that she'd given interviews and photographs to the Evening Herald. Brian O'Connell of the Herald effectively refuted her claims and put them in the context of her desire for more co-ordinated self-publicity. But my favourite moment was when O'Connell told Joe Duffy that he wouldn't make a value judgment on Martin Cahill.
No? This brave statement came from a man whose paper last month was prepared to make a value judgment about what it (nonsensically) called "multiracial weddings", telling us on page 1 that such marriages "have reached an alarming peak".
Go on, make a value judgment on Martin Cahill: like racist tripe, he has the value of selling newspapers, hasn't he?