Holy Misery

RTÉ Radio 1 is like a divine mystery: three stations in one odd bod. There's Radio 1 the Father (serious culture and education), Radio 1 the Son (news and current affairs) and Radio 1 the Spirit (light entertainment and "human interest", sport).

It's perhaps surprising that these three personalities remain united, more than a quarter-century since the creation of 2FM might have been expected to break the Spirit, and long after Lyric FM could have given the Father another way to occupy Himself. Outside Ireland, sceptical programmers have abandoned such Trinities, creating stations with a single coherent character, but here the true believers continue to pray for listeners who are prepared to mix their devotions.

There have been tensions among the faithful, some heretics who believed that one personality should be seen as dominant and the others subordinate. From the late 1990s, adherents of a strong current-affairs model began to rule the Montrose roost, right across the Radio 1 weekday schedule: Morning Ireland was expanded to two hours, Gaybo gave way to an expanded Pat Kenny, Liveline got newsier, the fast-paced 5-7 Live was invented, and Vincent Browne's late-night show was moved from Dublin local radio to the national airwaves.

The shows that emerged in the gaps between, such as Marian Finucane's brief hour and arts programme Rattlebag, weren't so news-based, but they were arguably more serious, more journalistic, in their approach to stories than their Gay Byrne and Mike Murphy-presented predecessors.

For the last couple of years, however, there have been mutterings that the current radio-management regime in RTÉ "knows little and cares less" about news and current affairs. (The language is excessive, but it is true that neither director of radio Adrian Moynes nor Radio 1 chief Eithne Hand, despite many other fine qualities, has a newshound background.) It seemed the Helen Shaw heresy, positing the primacy of news, might be in retreat, and the old faith in the Trinity reasserting itself.

This summer has probably been the first time we can clearly hear some evidence that the mutterers were on to something. While RTÉ has always set great store by Silly Season, with news cut back and the main presenters taking inordinately long holidays, this Radio 1 season has been the silliest in recent memory. (And that's despite this year's copious evidence that news keeps happening even when politicians go on holiday.) Often it has seemed that even the most serious events merit nothing more than a few doses of Philip Boucher-Hayes's stentorian instant-expertise every evening.

Radio hell

A Village colleague has described these last two months as "Radio Hell", and certainly from the point of view of people who stayed tuned in to Radio 1 to follow what's happening in the world, it has been something like that. But is it really Hell, or just a purgatory from which we'll emerge when the schedules return to normal?

Well, Pat Kenny will be back, for better or worse, and the awful Evelyn O'Rourke will hang up on Liveline. John Creedon won't have so much time for his harmless, not-quite-charmless mix of easy-listening music and easier quizzes. But in at least one respect, listeners' torments are destined to continue: the last two months of The Tubridy Show would have been terrible, truly squirm-worthy, if it were merely a summer filler. As the debut for what is supposedly destined to be Radio 1's long-term morning flagship, it's a worrying debacle.

And it's been disastrous regardless of your vision for Radio 1. For those who want news and current affairs, the programme represents a thorough rout: whereas in recent summers the morning has been dominated by a Kenny-type show with a substitute host (Richard Crowley, Vincent Browne, Leo Enright), this year the station has been pretty unremittingly lightweight from 9am to 1pm. But if, on the other hand, you thought the station needed to re-balance, to win a new demographic for an old formula of soft music and softer interviews, hosted by a chit-chatterer with attitude a la Gaybo – well, you got an earful of just how hard that's going to be.

It's true that Tubridy got smoother over the first few weeks of the show. He also got flatter, as if he were worn thin (and he was thin already) by what was being asked of him. It's obvious, and perhaps unfair, to point out that he will never be Gay Byrne. But it's reasonable to expect similar commitment: Byrne made his show sound easy by working so hard at it, descending to the studio at 8am to rehearse his scripts like an actor, never relying on his own clever-clever ad-libbing.

More importantly, Tubridy will also never be Gay Byrne because he lives in a different Ireland. Radio is a wonderful medium for intimate personal stories, and in the 1970s and 1980s those stories accumulated to present a picture of a country that was very different from its official Catholic portrait. Byrne wasn't especially radical, brilliant or even sensitive, but he was a medium for liberation. Nowadays, however, most of the old taboos have been made into reality-TV shows, and the new oppressive orthodoxies that govern our society don't have the same raw, and radio-friendly, domestic consequences in "ordinary" Irish households.

Tubridy harks back to those days with his odd demand for listeners' handwritten letters, but it's not at all apparent what he's hoping to read. It's just about possible to imagine personal letters touching on today's most pressing issues – migration, war, globalisation, environmental destruction, crime and punishment – but almost impossible to imagine Tubridy coping with them.

Similar questions hang over a broadcaster whose mastery of "human interest" material is far greater than young Tubridy's, and whose capacity for lightweight prattle is far less. Marian Finucane will have four hours every weekend, driving the likes of the Sunday Show out of the 11am to 1pm slot she'll hold on both days. It's further evidence of the demotion of news and current affairs, and given how poor and aimless Finucane's daily show was for most of the last six years, it's hard to see her as the instrument for a new agenda that can once again find the intersections of personal and political – keeping in mind that for many years her Liveline was at least as good at this, and as important, as Gaybo.

Despite the pathetic, content-free, self-promoting adverts that suggest otherwise, Radio 1 will never again be the national conversation, nor does it even seem capable of presenting us with interesting national characters. On the other hand, its place as the country's most-listened-to station is not under threat, and like other media it seems happy to behave conservatively, pleasing a mass audience with non-threatening programmes that serve as sturdy vehicles for delivering advertising.

Even a relatively low-risk strategy like promoting David McWilliams – everyone's favourite Next Big Thing – to a prominent radio slot is avoided for fear he might alienate listeners with excessively learned seriousness. Perhaps if and when a "quasi-national" licence is granted to his alma mater, NewsTalk, RTÉ will have to smarten up its act – as 5-7 Live did under threat from Eamon Dunphy. In the meantime, Radio 1 continues to produce some quality programming on the periphery of its schedule, but is abandoning any sense of 21st-century vitality at its core.

Harry Browne