With the departure of the stalwart Irene McCoubrey from its morning schedule, RTE Radio 1 loses another member of the old guard. McCoubrey, better known by her stage name, Maxi, has retired as the presenter of Risin’ Time, the station’s early-morning offering. Even the programme’s title reeks of another era and given its relatively light content, Maxi’s replacement by stand-in Shay Byrne is hardly the end of the world. But it does beg the question: what is Radio 1 going to do as its vintage personalities succumb to the ravages of time?
This question would not be important if presenters of the calibre of Pat Kenny, Seán O’Rourke and Joe Duffy were being introduced to Radio 1’s schedule. However, with the possible exception of Mary Wilson, who has grown into her drivetime slot, the next generation of presenters shows limited promise. Derek Mooney will never be one of the greats. Ryan Tubridy is not the new Gay Byrne, as some in RTE seem to believe. There is a touch of the emperor’s new clothes about Tubridy; if one were to take any educated, middle-class boy from a decent home and stick him in front of a microphone after a few months’ training, he would probably perform just as well. Tubridy lacks Byrne’s cunning populism, Kenny’s forensic intelligence, O’Rourke’s waspish gravitas and Duffy’s talent for starting fights. He may have gone off to 2FM in saviour mode, but one wearily anticipates a future return to Radio 1, in the same mode. Nonetheless, Tubridy will always be just another educated, middle-class boy from a decent home, with no real fire about him.
John Murray, Tubridy’s replacement in the Radio 1 morning schedule, has been in the slot for just over six months, and while it can take a year for a new radio programme to find its feet, the omens are not promising. Murray’s slot won a few extra listeners off the back of the huge audience rise earned by Morning Ireland last year, but in the present climate, his “fun” agenda jars badly at that time of day. Like Mooney, one feels that Murray will never be a great presenter, at least not with the brief he has been given. Clare Duignan, RTE’s head of radio, seems to have a weakness for middle-aged white blokes who supposedly are fierce craic. When she sent Tubridy to 2FM, she missed a significant trick by not returning Pat Kenny to his post-Morning Ireland perch, off which he was inexplicably kicked by one of her predecessors, Helen Shaw, during a pointless reshuffle in the 1990s. Kenny has made headlines almost every week with his new current-affairs television show, and if RTE had any synergy across its departments, it would be exploiting his talent for pushing the big stories forward, on the radio as well as on television. Instead, Kenny is wasted further down the schedule and Murray comes on after Morning Ireland like a grating non-sequitur.
According to RTE, Maxi will return to music programming on Radio 1 later this year. This is another mistake. No reflection on Maxi, but Radio 1 should not be running music programmes at all. Radio 1 is Ireland’s only well-resourced national speech radio station and musical interludes are a lazy option. During difficult times, audiences naturally gravitate towards public-service speech broadcasters and there are other stations on which the likes of Ronan Collins and John Creedon could be spinning their discs; on a properly-managed 2FM, for example, although given the crazy way that Lyric FM is being programmed, they could easily end up there.
Radio 1 should be running more documentaries and innovative short strands, as well as acting as a seed bed for comedy. In other words, it should be developing the sort of quality output that quite soon RTE Television will not have the money to make.