These days feedback is built into the programme formats. If they’re not taking phone calls, they’re reading out text messages and e-mails. Shows insist on running asinine competitions to check that their listeners are awake and tuned in (and to harvest phone numbers for marketing purposes).
Getting listener feedback is not always a bright idea. The Sunday Supplement (Today FM, Sun) should be the heavyweight Sunday- morning programme, if only by default. Since RTE suspended The Sunday Show for the summer, the Supplement presenter Sam Smyth has continued to fly the flag for insider political gossip and debates.
But is anybody listening? This week, straining for satire with a topical touch, Smyth appealed to listeners for alternative Olympic sports attuned to the Irish character. Like, say, the 500m binge-drink through Temple Bar.
Either Smyth got few responses, or those he did get were too idiotic to read out. The show rolled on. Eventually somebody came up with “synchronised tax-dodging”. And that, more or less, was that.
The lack of Supplement feedback is a pity because Smyth has the contacts and the doggedness to dredge political gossip from the depths of the silly season. Last week’s guests included the neo-con economist Moore McDowell and the Irish Times’s pinko-lefty environmentalist Frank McDonald slugging it out like a pair of pantomime villains.
Advertisement
With Smyth the topics and the tone are constant. The show sounds like something overheard in one of those bars where journalists meet politicians. The guests argue about public spending, transport, and ministerial reshuffles. There are flashes of wit and spurts of erudition, and Smyth can keep up with the best of them.
But it seems that many people are sick of politics: they want it to keep quiet until the summer is over. If Smyth wishes to preserve the illusion, he may have to write his own text messages in advance.
It is not the sort of problem which Ryan Tubridy (The Full Irish, 2FM, Mon-Fri) suffers from. Tubridy speaks texting like a native. Even early in the morning, he can cajole an audience into making its presence felt. The Full Irish crackles with inconsequential information.
Tubridy can be intensely irritating, having developed a unique language out of simulated teen-speak and studio in-jokes. He talks to the masses but with that youthful trick of making it sound like a secret code.
Smyth, grinding away at the treadmill of old-fashioned politics, lacks that sense of scale. Old-style current affairs are now a minority taste. The majority prefer the sexier kind of affairs: tabloidised and textable. However, we can be grateful that Smyth still does things his way. He has an authenticity that is all too rare on the airwaves these days.