Rickety Radio Rabble-Rousing

There’s a massive wave of protest sweeping through the blogosphere at the moment, hoping to wash radio darling Rick O’Shea back into prominence.
Rick’s show, from 2pm to 5pm weekdays, has been pared back considerably. The complainants are lamenting Rick’s reduction to mere ‘human jukebox’ status in recent weeks. His show, which fused music with a grand exercise in filtering quirky web content, enjoyed a high level of audience interaction and discussion of pop culture, but now does little more than churn out chart music.

Rick has certainly proved his nice guy status, working hard for his chosen charity, the Irish Epilepsy Association. Rick himself is an epilepsy sufferer and has done a lot to raise the profile of the condition. He’s a radio lifer, having worked for FM 104, Atlantic 252 and others before joining RTE in 2001, and has built up a loyal following online and on the airwaves, using any means possible. He’s on Facebook. He’s on Bebo. He’s on Myspace and Twitter and his daily-updated blog. He’s hosting a Blog Awards here or there, working for charity and somehow, amidst it all, he’s hosting a radio show and dealing with kids and a marriage. It is, regardless of your opinion of the show, a miracle that Rick O’Shea doesn’t collapse out of exhaustion more often. The guy is spread wafer-thin. Perhaps the decision was taken by the RTE board for health reasons, purely because Rick wouldn’t slow down.

O’Shea was best placed as part of the Breakfast Show line-up, in my opinion, but circumstance saw to it that he wouldn’t have time to get comfortable, before being moved on after six months to the graveyard shift. There he stayed for a year, before taking on the 6pm-9pm slot when Dave Fanning migrated to RTE 1, keeping up a weekend slot on 2FM. Personally, that was pretty much the last time I listened to 2FM. The station is a bit of a disaster. Perhaps I’m not their target market, but it just doesn’t press my buttons. With the emergence of Phantom, there’s little chance I’ll be back either. Phantom now fills the musical void. Newstalk chats to me. Fanning still does his thing in the evenings on RTE1, and Morning Ireland wakes me up. I want for little.

However, Rick’s show, in the format that lasted for almost two years, was a watershed. The blogosphere Rick-worship, which may have seemed like pure sycophancy, was rooted in gratitude for someone who had hacked into the traditional media mainframe and placed therein the viral matter which the web tends to unearth. Blogs, the little guys, were suddenly getting the airing they deserved. Rick was Spartacus. And a chorus of Twittering, blogging, youtubing followers were all Spartacus, too.

On that basis, it is to be hoped that he uses the time behind the veil of music to think about a re-invention. The material he was making best use of deserves to be aired, but there was room for improvement. Hopefully RTE see the value in the concept. Once the execution is right, we’ll see its like back again, stronger than ever, and Rick deserves all the credit for paving the way.

I tried hard to like Rick’s show, being, as he is, such a giving and participative friend of the blogosphere. I tuned in and hoped to enjoy it, but respectfully, it wasn’t for me. Yes, his finger was firmly on the cyber-pulse, and he made broad use of snippets, downloads, blog content and the rest, in a way that no-one else did. But for me, it didn’t work. Back to Moncrieff I went, for a daily dose of traditional chat and interaction, and the dial hasn’t moved since. I’m an old-fashioned fucker, and Moncrieff has fast-paced chat nailed, in my opinion. His show is slick, quick, and slung from the hip. If you are going to go up against him in the banter stakes on national radio, you had better bring large guns, guns which Rick doesn’t seem to holster at present. Perhaps this is the real reason the bigwigs reverted to music on 2FM. At 2pm, it’s Moncrieff chatting on Newstalk, Joe commiserating with the nation at large on RTE1, and Rick chatting on 2FM? Why not pitch him against Tony Fenton so that Today FM isn’t getting the whole non-chatting nation in the early afternoon?

Before the knives come out, I’m not saying that the cull was a good idea. Bring Rick’s format back, by all means, but why be hasty?. Allow Rick some time to have a think, strategise and plan how to make his return armed with an even better show than before. After two years of sprinting from interweb to microphone to interweb, Rick deserves a few weeks at least to kick back, think, and regroup as he sits behind a veil of chart music. Chances are, that with some thought and input from his myriad supporters online, Rick can create an entirely new genre of show, and anchor his place on the schedule for years to come.