Radio: D’arcy’s room for improvement lies outside his comfort zone

Seasoned pro that he is, Ray D’Arcy knows that no matter how long you’ve been broadcasting, you still have room to improve.

Even so, as he has been ensconced in RTÉ for less than a month, one might think that D'Arcy would wait a bit longer before starting to do softball promotional interviews for the network's television shows.

But the architect Dermot Bannon turns up on Wednesday's Ray D'Arcy Show (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), where he is gently quizzed about how his RTÉ home-improvement programme, Room to Improve, continues to thrive.

So inoffensively bland is this slice of cross-platform puffery – “Is this the most successful season so far?” is D’Arcy’s opening question – that it makes a press release read like a firebrand polemic.

But as D’Arcy remarks to Bannon, about his new surroundings, that “I’m still not completely comfortable”, his slightly rueful tone suggests that he’s not merely indulging in banter.

And the flat atmosphere that pervades the show indicates that the host has yet to find the form that made him such a force on Today FM.

At first glance it’s business as usual. The programme not only retains many of the presenter’s old back-room team, such as his producer Will Hanafin, but also largely follows the same formula.

There are celebrity guests from the worlds of showbiz (Louis Walsh) and sport (Pádraig Harrington), human-interest items (transgender life in Ireland, the challenges of alopecia), and phone-in quizzes and regular panellists, with the medical broadcaster Dr Pixie McKenna yet another familiar fixture.

Some items stand out. As one might expect from an outspoken Gaelic football pundit, Joe Brolly is a spiky guest, forthright in his opinions about the GAA while being starkly honest about the experience of donating a kidney for a friend's transplant.

Meanwhile, a discussion about celibacy in the clergy leads to a poignant portrait of how priests can feel diminished from lacking a partner and the life experience that brings.

Fr Brian D’Arcy – no relation to the presenter, both men stress – recounts how, as a 40-year-old cleric, he felt that he “wasn’t really a man at all”. It is, as the host says, a desperately sad item.

But, overall, the proceedings lack fizz. Part of the problem may be the new time slot. Helming his old morning show, D’Arcy sounded full of piss and vinegar when he took to the air, his energy fanned and his focus sharpened by reading the newspapers.

In moving to the afternoon that urgency has gone. And in this shorter RTÉ slot, D’Arcy relies less on audience feedback to fill time.

Although this, mercifully, spares listeners an endless stream of banal texts, it also deprives the presenter of the springboard he previously bounced both his patter and his persona off.

The more sedate pace and relative lack of audience interaction have resulted in a blander show. It’s still early days, but in trying to re-create his past form by slavishly copying his old format, D’Arcy has magnified his show’s flaws while losing many of its strengths. He needs to get out of his comfort zone more.

There's little apparent discomfort in evidence on The Anton Savage Show (Today FM, weekdays). Since taking over as D'Arcy's permanent replacement, Savage has settled into his berth with almost insouciant ease.

His on-air performances betray little in the way of doubt, as his encounter with the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White emphasises. The famously temperamental White comes across as an eccentric but intimidating figure when he appears on Tuesday's show, bringing an imperious authority to his nuggets of fortune-cookie wisdom: "You don't realise a dream if you have an off button;" "Before you push others you have to push yourself;" "Every boy must build a monument for his mother."

But while Savage cedes space to White, he also engages with him to lively effect, jumping in whenever his guest’s slowly enunciated yarns ramble on too long.

“Do you always speak across people?” White asks at one point, but far from being annoyed he seems to rather enjoy being “savaged by Mr Savage”, describing him as charming and quite handsome.

Savage jokes about there being “a moment” between them, but amid the japery is a sense that White is opening up. More crucially, it’s entertaining.

As well as his good-natured confidence, Savage has an appealing tendency towards self-deprecation, particularly when it comes to his taste in music. If there’s a problem it’s that he rarely strays from his default setting of easy professionalism and wry detachment.

It’s no coincidence that when it comes to true-life stories – the bread and butter of morning talkshows – Savage, a motoring enthusiast, sounds happiest when interviewing a man who has a phobia about driving on motorways.

Compared with his predecessor, Savage is going in the right direction. But in the long run his approach needs more diversions.

Moment of the week: Celebrity goss falls flat

Surveying the newspapers on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), Caroline Murphy talks about the extensive coverage of Madonna's on-stage fall at the Brit Awards. As Murphy finishes, the normally inscrutable Cathal Mac Coille sounds distinctly unimpressed. "I don't know, call me sceptical: a singer falls off a stage and doesn't get hurt, so naturally it's a news story all over the world," he says wearily, before concluding, "I'm definitely getting too sceptical." Clearly, when it comes to Morning Ireland, show business has no business being there. Long may Mac Coille remain sceptical.

[CF413-407]radioreview@irishtimes.com

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