There’s been a lot of melodrama in the radio business over the last couple of months: presenters leaving their job to take up a new one or – to use that great radio euphemism – “going in a different direction” with the schedule. Which means someone getting fired.
Over the years, I’ve witnessed a lot of people getting the chop, and it’s invariably brutal. No amount of corporate waffle can soften the blow: because – even though they may cling to the idea that it will be different for them – it happens to most presenters, sooner or later. To paraphrase the loathsome British politician Enoch Powell, most broadcasting careers end in failure.
In Ireland, there have been only a handful of people who got to leave on their own terms. The rest don’t get their contracts renewed or have them terminated or are quietly edged out. Some – the more high-profile ones – won’t have any great financial worries afterwards. Others (often RTÉ presenters) have a staff job anyway. But most are on a contract. Radio presenting is a well-paid job, but contrary to the popular view, it is not (in the vast majority of cases) so well paid that they can afford to give up work.
[ My car is old and disgusting, but I just don’t care. It gets me aroundOpens in new window ]
And even if they could afford it, they wouldn’t want to. That’s where the business can be particularly cruel: once you’ve lost a radio presenting gig, be it in a local or national station, the chances are vanishingly small that you’ll get another one. It tends to be a one-time deal, because those jobs are so scarce. If you tot up, for instance, the number of people who host national speech radio shows, it is a very short list.
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A few manage to pivot out of industry completely, but most hang around in other roles: researching, reading news bulletins. Radio has a peculiar way of infusing itself into the blood.
I’ve met people who have managed to move past the loss, and are happy to be still working. I’ve met people who, years later are still angry and baffled as to why it happened. Because when a show is axed, it’s not always clear why. Audience figures can decline, or a presenter can start to sound jaded, but as often as not, they can be fired because an executive somewhere simply doesn’t like their on-air persona. Like the rest of us, the people who make these decisions are listeners too, and have their own likes and dislikes. And, as with the rest of us, it’s not always completely rational.
Given how insecure it can be, how it can suddenly end, you’d wonder why so many people want to do it. It’s not glamorous. Radio presenters don’t get recognised on the street. You’re a voice, coming out of a box. And for all years I’ve worked in it, I’ve been unable to come up with a succinct sentence to express the quiddity of radio: what it is about it that gets inside you and won’t leave. Even when it treats you badly.
My first radio gig was It Says In The Papers on Morning Ireland. I did it for a couple of years and never lost the terror that one morning, I might sleep in. Thankfully, I never did. Mostly because I didn’t sleep at all. Yet every time the red light went on in the studio, and even though I had to concentrate on reading my script, I would have a curious, out of body experience: a sense that the words were travelling across the country while people woke up, while they got their kids into cars or started up tractors or spread butter on toast. And it wasn’t because they were my words people were listening to. It wasn’t ego. It felt more like an invisible thread, connecting all of us. I never got over that. Never will.
