A fresh challenge to RTÉ 1's top slot

RadioReview:  Could last week's award of a national radio franchise to NewsTalk 106 spell the beginning of the end of RTÉ Radio 1's dominance of the airwaves?

In a few months, Montrose will have a talk radio rival throughout the day, a development that can only accelerate the decline in its listenership figures. It's true local radio has been steadily eroding the State broadcaster's share of listenership in recent years, but RTÉ Radio 1 still broadcasts virtually all of the most popular shows and advertisers have remained remarkably loyal to its flagship station. But for how much longer, when a new rival starts chipping into its reservoir of high-income, high-spending listeners?

RTÉ has seen off earlier pretenders. In the late 1980s, Century Radio lasted just two years, only slightly longer than the tribunal investigation it later spawned. A decade later, Radio Ireland wobbled seriously before morphing into Today FM, which eventually achieved success by eschewing expensive talk programming for most of its schedule, apart from the drivetime slot. In many ways, though, NewsTalk is better placed to take on RTÉ than these earlier incarnations of commercial talk radio. With four years of broadcasting in Dublin under its belt, it's not a start-up.

Broadcasters such as Eamon Dunphy and George Hook are household names. Its listenership figures, while small, are heading in the right direction. And finally, it has access to the deep pockets of its main shareholder, Denis O'Brien.

So far, NewsTalk has served up a half-decent alternative for Dublin listeners seeking refuge from bland music-and-chatter elsewhere on the dial. Better still, it hasn't taken itself too seriously, a trait that surfaced again last Monday when news of the licence award broke during Sean Moncrieff's afternoon show (Moncrieff, Mon-Fri), arguably one of the most entertaining programmes running on Irish radio.

Where other shows' use of text messages and e-mails from listeners seems forced, Moncrieff's communications with listeners are altogether more visceral and organic. Within minutes of the announcement, his audience wanted to know why the station wasn't going global instead of merely national. Another texter inquired whether the newly-expanded station, now that it was about to leave its urban roots, would soon be advertising Golden Maverick and warning about the dangers of early scour . News of Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue's press release congratulating Brian Kennedy on his Eurovision "win" originally broke on Liveline (RTE Radio 1, Monday), but within minutes Moncrieff was gleefully urging his listeners to check out the historic document on the Minister's website. Not surprisingly, it was taken down pretty quickly.

Elsewhere, too, the station is scoring well. Eamon Dunphy's curious mix of liberal and neo-liberal contributors goes down well in small doses, while Orla Barry's show is often more meaty than Ryan Tubridy's offering on Radio 1 (though neither is as engaging as Ray D'Arcy and his team on Today FM). I never thought I'd warm to a rugby critic-turned-presenter, but George Hook strikes me as a scrupulously fair interviewer who tries hard to educate as much as inform. And in its coverage of the biggest local story so far this year - the riots in Dublin - the station's news department showed admirable flexibility while Radio 1 was sticking to its usual diet of sports for the Saturday afternoon.

The biggest winner in the latest audience figures was Matt Cooper's The Last Word (Today FM, Mon-Fri), and it's not hard to see why. By teatime, most of us have read the headlines, heard the news bulletins, and maybe even watched a 24-hour news channel. The last thing we want is further repetition of the headlines; what we would most like to hear while stuck in traffic is coverage that gets behind those headlines and the people in them.

Cooper, an instinctive generalist with a wide span of interests, rises to this challenge manfully. Where Radio 1's 5-7 Live remains stuck in its traditional format, with news items squeezed in between farm news, regional paper round-ups and the like, Cooper lets items run on merit and shows himself a tough but fair interviewer. Even with the extra half-hour from starting at 4.30pm, the show doesn't drag.

Well, not early in the evening. Along with its main rivals, the Last Word displays a manic obsession with sport once 6.30pm passes. Flick from one station to the next at this time and you'll find that the element of choice has gone, to be replaced by wall-to-wall punditry about sport.

Presumably, radio programmers think their women listeners have gone off to cook the dinner or put the children to bed, or else they genuinely believe half the population is happy to obsess about a variety of ball games in which women's only role is as cheerleaders.

Top of the sports diet on all radio stations this week, for example, were the travails of a bunch of highly-paid golfers in the Irish Open who - the horrors! - had to play for hours in the rain in Co Kildare and the extraordinary hype surrounding Munster's appearance in the final of the Heineken Cup. You'd almost think rugby was a national sport, not one followed by a mere 8 per cent of sports attendances. But, hell, at least they won . . .

Bernice Harrison is on leave