MOVING The Arts Show from 7 p.m. back to 2.45 p.m. was one of the better decisions made by RTE management of late. Arts followers may find the new time unsuitable, but the purpose of an arts programme is not to cater for those who are interested in the arts - it is to provide society with a forum in which its art and culture is subject to scrutiny before the largest audience possible. Previously, The Arts Show was heard only by those who deliberately chose to listen. Now, there is a chance of it being listened to by people whose lives it might touch in spite of themselves. That is all one asks of a radio programme.

This decision went against the cult of mindlessness which infects much decision making in RTE. The Arts Show is a "sit down" programme, which is to say that, as a rule, it requires attention and provokes thought. Placing it in the grazing fields of daytime radio showed inspiration and daring.

For people going about their lives with the radio on, the content of daytime radio can be secondary to the role of silence breaking. And once you move towards meeting the demand for unchallenging radio, you begin to create an appetite which is insatiable. The public craving for blandness and repetition grows and grows, until finally those who attempted to placate it have cut the ground from under themselves, plumbing greater depths than they are decently able to inhabit.

It is interesting that, after years of following public taste down the cul de sac of popular craving, there are now signs of a split in the thinking governing the primary national radio service. While the generality of programmes have followed a course down the road to blandness, there is now evidence of experimentation with a different approach. In practice, this has meant some of the "sit down" programmes which used to go out after teatime being tried out during the day. Some of this experimentation, particularly in the 12.30-12.50 p.m. slot, has lacked focus, but moving The Arts Show was a masterstroke.

Listening last week to a special programme on the work of Roddy Doyle, it struck me that some of the best radio RTE has produced has previously been heard only by miniscule audiences. Here was a fine, in depth, programme, with interesting contributions from several perspectives, and it was a pleasure to be able to listen to it by accident in the afternoon.

The role of Radio One can only properly be seen from the perspective of the society's need to converse with itself. Programmes like Morning Ireland, The Gay Byrne Show, The Pat Kenny Show and a Liveline have to react on a daily basis to events as they happen, and have little scope for more long term evaluation and analysis, which programmes like The Arts Show, because they are dealing with issues at a remove from the everyday, deliver willy nilly.

Everything must have a "hook" to the present moment. They cannot therefore make the connections our society needs to make if it is to understand root causes. Perspective and depth requires planning and reflection. To say this is not to criticise anyone, but to make a fairly obvious observation about this kind of radio.

And if all that was at stake in this was the quality or otherwise of a particular element of the media marketplace, it would hardly be worth commenting upon. But what is at issue is the ability of this society to understand the forces at work within it. Radio One is not just another radio service - it is the national mouthpiece. And so we are talking about the quality of our national conversation. Allowed to drift on, unchallenged and unmediated by reflection and interrogation, this conversation becomes thin and contaminated, like unchanged engine oil. Listening to Radio One in the course of some major running story, it often seems like there is little difference between sitting at home listening to the radio and sitting on a high stool listening to a babble of voices from the other end of a public bar.

There is a place for this form of reactive radio to allow for the occasional public outpouring at some major calamity or other. The trouble is that, in the absence of more thoughtful and reflective discussion in the periods when there is no calamity to discuss, the response to tragedy or disaster is inevitably lacking in the kind of perspective that the situation demands. I think it was Terry Prone who, in the course of the Arts Show special on Roddy Doyle, observed that Paula, in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, did not seem to understand the things she was recounting - about her life.

"There are people," she said, "who seem to be able to describe what is happening to them, but not to reflect on it". The same could be said about our national addiction to talk radio.