IT'S as though the entire population of Waterford got up off their chairs at once, walked over to their radios and reached for the off button. Some 51,000 listeners said see-ya to 2FM's Gerry Ryan during 2005 and show no signs of coming back.
Some of them went from the left-hand side of the dial down to the right-hand side, where Ray D'Arcy resides (up 27,000 pairs of ears in the same period). Some went local. Some just put on a CD.
In the most recent book from the Joint National Listenership Survey (JNLR) on radio audiences, Gerry Ryan's demise stood out like a pair of baggy purple underpants on a clothesline. Ryan is supposed to be the station's ringmaster in a pair of muddy wellies, enticing audiences to roll up and enjoy the show. He may still get a crowd, but it's a crowd that is beginning to drift away in significant numbers.
The arrival of this bad news ensured there was much comment in newspaperland about Ryan's slide, in particular, and 2FM's poor showing in general. During 2005, the station lost 84,000 adult listeners. That's a full Croke Park with stragglers still sauntering down Clonliffe Road.
The station may have thought that Marty Whelan was the answer to its woes, but the general public feel otherwise. It seems that the punters have already copped what the station bosses have yet to notice: 2FM has an identity crisis.
There's absolutely nothing new about this. Discotheque first started writing about 2FM's identity crisis in 2001. Back then, though, the numbers were solid so many thought we were crying wolf. Not so.
While the station had some dance shows around the edges of the schedule featuring John Power, Mark McCabe and Mr Spring, the predominant daytime style still resembled the cominatcha sound of the 1980s.
Roll on five years and it's excellent indie jocks like Jenny Huston, Dan Hegarty and Cormac Battle who are now employed around the edges. In the middle? The same old same old. This time, however, people are hopping off the bus in droves and going elsewhere for their wireless shows.
It's a mistake, though, to blame this simply on the ageing profile of presenters like Gerry Ryan, Marty Whelan and Dave Fanning. The best jock on 2FM remains Larry Gogan, simply because he still cares about what he's playing and there's still a passion to find new music.
No, the problem is the content. Gerry Ryan's show is probably one of the best staffed and researched radio programmes in the land, but the ideas are just not good enough any more. It's a diet of the same tired topics featuring the same repetitive voices delivering the same reheated opinions in the same monotonous tone.
Even Ryan sounds bored by what he was to preside over these days. Maybe he knows too that a call to Willie O'Reilly at Today FM is not going to be much use any more, now that Ray D'Arcy is the jock on the rise.
You can see similar problems with dated, boring and unattractive content right through the 2FM schedule. Fanning's teatime chat show has become staid and unimaginative, the content stretched to its limits over five nights.
Whelan's show is a disaster, the presenter's patter unable to match or better that of Ian "I'm the king of the cornflakes chatter and don't you forget it, horse" Dempsey. It makes you almost wish Rick and Ruth were back on morning call. I did say "almost".
But the biggest impediment to change at 2FM is the fact that the station still makes a lot of money for RTÉ. He who pays the piper calls the tune and, until 2FM's advertising revenue begins to nosedive, the station can probably maintain its current shape.
It's when advertising cash and audience figures both begin to dip that the real problems begin. One of those is already sinking so the other can't be that far behind. Expect a re-run of this yarn in the papers when the next JNLR book hits the presses in three months.
