RADIO / Maggie Kenneally

For talk radio to work the talk has to be about something. Ideally something substantial, by which I don't mean ne...cessarily “serious” and certainly not “important”, but about something. A lot of Radio One talk is about nothing at all.
A gentleman called Henry Kelly sat in for Marian Finucane on Saturday and Sunday (15 and 16 April) and had with him an assembly of guests: Tim Pat Coogan, Olivia O'Leary, Declan Kiberd, Dana and Patsy McGarry of the Irish Times. Some of these often have something to say. Olivia O'Leary does a delightfully crafted radio essay on Five-Seven-Live. Declan Kiberd can be illuminating on literature and history. Patsy McGarry writes well on religion and has become an authoritative broadcaster. Three out of five isn't bad or three out of six rather. But they managed to say nothing at all for almost an hour on Sunday morning. Just blather, blather, blather – arising from the Sunday newspapers, which are themselves mostly blather. I caught just one fact in the discussion: something about Latvians here being undocumented. What documents do nationals of EU member states require to be here? Answer: none. There is such a thing as the free movement of persons in the EU, which none of the blatherers alluded to apparently.
I hadn't heard of Henry Kelly before. A Google search about him revealed the following: “Respected journalist for the Irish Times during the 1970s. It was only after he conquered his fear of flying that he came to Britain to pursue his TV and radio career. To us, he was pretty much unknown until Game For a Laugh. In the 1990s he was a regular fixture on Classic FM, and currently presents on BBC Radio Berkshire. On anarchic BBC2 sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience, David Baddiel and Rob Newman were investigated by the Broadcasting Standards Council when they called Kelly a ‘w***er'. The complaint was rejected because the accusation wasn't unfair!” (the website, by the way, is www.ukgameshows.com/
index.php/Henry_Kelly and the asterisks are the website's).
Ryan Tubridy is a nice young man. A bit on the emaciated side for my liking, but clearly he was well brought up, speaks well. Somewhere along the way he must have acquired some knowledge about something, which presumably equips him to talk about that something. But so far on his morning radio programme, The Tubridy Show, that something has been missed out on. For he doesn't just blather, he twitters. On and on, twitter, twitter, twitter, starting with “great to have you with us”, which is directed at his listeners, I presume. Same on his TV programme, Tubridy Tonight: twitter, twitter, twitter.
We had a babysitter like that, good-looking, but a twitterer. Even the Senor de Casa couldn't take it anymore, although that was after six months of ogling and engagement with her, as though she were a latter-day Nietzsche.
Is there no twitter control at RTÉ, some system which sets off an alarm if the twitter or blather quotient goes over, say, 80 per cent, that is 80 per cent of total chat in any half hour? Come to think of it, the same alarm should go off if any presenter talks for more than 20 seconds him/herself in any one segment. π