FROM THE ARCHIVES:Century Radio, the first national commercial radio station that was supposed to rival RTÉ's Radio 1, lasted just over two years, and was in trouble from its beginning. John Maher explained why.
ALTHOUGH CENTURY’S end was sudden, it can hardly have surprised observers of the commercial radio scene.
From the beginning, there was confusion over who Century was aiming at, and what it intended to broadcast. The Century “product” or “sound” was never firmly fixed in the public mind and, from all accounts, was rarely fixed within many Century minds either.
“I first started getting worried about Century a few months before they started broadcasting,” one advertising agency director said last week. “It was obvious that RTÉ could make ‘stars’ of people. They gave all their high-profile audio broadcasters a television show, something Century could never hope to offer.” Yet Century had been claiming it might be able to bring some of RTÉ’s “stars”, such as Gay Byrne, to the new station.
Byrne wisely chose to stay where he was and maintained the dominant position he had built up. A survey before the independent broadcasting legislation came in showed that, during the hours of his morning radio show, 23 per cent of adults questioned (including 40 per cent of housewives) tuned to RTÉ Radio 1, while nine per cent were listening to Gerry Ryan on 2FM. An early 1990 poll had 25 per cent of adults listening to Byrne.
In these circumstances, “catching” Gay Byrne could have brought Century enormous success. Publicly failing to do so proved a proportionately huge disaster. Gay Byrne’s decision, which was widely known, was an important factor in convincing other established broadcasters not to join Century. In the end, Century failed to get anyone more famous than DJ Marty Whelan.
The failure to entice Gay Byrne, Marian Finucane or any of RTÉ Radio’s best-known “talkshow” hosts threw Century’s programming plans into disarray. To compete with RTÉ it had been obvious that the battle would have to be held on RTÉ’s home ground – current affairs coverage and talk programmes. There was no reason to suspect that listeners tuning to Byrne, Finucane et al really wanted to hear music.
But how could Century hope to compete against these radio “stars” when its own personnel were largely unknown? In the end, it could not, but it took many months of unsuccessful programming for the Century management to realise this. A series of senior management changes resulted in there being no overall plan to Century’s output, which vacillated from a poor imitation of RTÉ Radio 1 to a serious effort at being 2FM, and then a well-planned assault on the “classic” music market, all in the course of each day’s broadcasting.
Independent competitors in Dublin built up large audiences in their chosen niches of the music market while, outside Dublin, stations exploited the desire for local radio, which had been proven by the success of pirate stations throughout the 1980s.
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