INTERVIEW: Our first radio station for children goes live on Monday, and it promises an innovative mix of music aimed at young listeners, writes Bernice Harrison
THE PROGRAMME LINE-UP for RTÉ's new children's radio station reads like an antidote to the recession. Pop Pop is followed by Hokey Pokey and then there are four hours of Kitchen Dancing. Definitely a more attractive proposition than tuning in to the realities of the economic meltdown.
Junior, the music station, isn't aimed at doom deniers, but at children aged from two to 12, and it goes live in a trial phase on Monday alongside RTÉ's five other digital (Dab) stations. Like the others, the children's station is available during this trial phase only to people in Dublin, Cork and Limerick who have digital radios, although anyone can listen on the internet by logging on to the RTÉ site.
Junior will offer mostly music, and children's voices will be heard between songs introducing their favourite tracks, talking about the songs and telling jokes and stories. But one adult voice has been signed up - 28-year-old Louise Foxe will present Pop Pop from 8am to 9am every morning. The programme is a music show that Foxe says will be more chart sounds than Barney and will be peppered with jokes, requests and snippets of Irish and maybe a bit of Polish or Nigerian - the languages children hear in their school yards.
"It's going to be fun," says Foxe, who positively radiates energy and enthusiasm. "Because it's a trial phase, we've got the freedom to experiment, to figure out what children want to hear." Top of her playlist at the moment are Pink, Rihanna and Chris Brown, "though really it could be anything - maybe classical music, a movie theme tune or even stuff from the 1980s, so kids can have a laugh at what their parents where listening to at their age. It'll change every day."
Foxe was already working in RTÉ when she heard Junior was looking for a presenter. She is a broadcasting co-ordinator (BC) in RTÉ Radio's music department, which is as far from the mic as you can get, with daily tasks that include hunting out music for the presenters on the prime-time shows, doing the paperwork and generally running around on errands. It's a fairly lowly rung on the broadcast ladder, but it got her foot in the door.
A graduate of the DCU communications course, Foxe went on to get an MA in music from University of Limerick, before landing back home in Dublin with no job and out of funds. Thinking that a bit of secretarial work might be a good filler while her dream broadcast job came along, she signed on with an agency who sent her out to RTÉ, where she spent a year typing out scripts on Fair City. "But really I spent as much time as I could hanging around the radio centre hassling people for a job," she says, laughing. "I eventually wore them down."
She'll be presenting her programme in addition to her "day" job as a BC.
Eithne Hand, former head of RTÉ Radio and now a freelance consultant, has been brought in for the start-up of Junior and to put together the schedule. "It mirrors a child's day really - for example, nursery rhymes and songs will be on in the morning for little ones who aren't old enough for school, but later in the day it'll all change for an older listener, and at bedtime there'll be lullabies and chill-out music."
Putting together the schedule has been something of a revelation for the experienced radio editor. "There is so much music out there made for children that you simply don't hear on the radio at the moment," she says, giving the examples of Futa Fata, a Connemara label that makes CDs of music and stories in Irish, and Spud Yam, who mix Irish and Jamaican music. A world-music programme is planned for the weekend schedule, and the idea throughout the entire playlist is to expose children to as many types of music as possible. "Our main objective," says Hand, "is to be cool."
You can listen to RTÉ Junior and get more information on kids' radio from www.rte.ie/junior, live from Monday, December 1st