"Did he hit you?
"Where did he hit you?
"He didn't slap you on the face?
"Was there blood on your dress?
"Is it true your dress was torn in pieces?
"Do you still love him?"
Just another day in victim radio, another attempt to seduce listeners by appealing to the visceral, the violent and the sexual.
To the daily Radio listener, the aural images of human folly drift by in a sleazy haze. The overall impression is of producers and researchers combing the tabloids in panic to find the most shocking reports of those two timelessly reliable themes: sex and death. Contributing to the mayhem are the listeners, increasingly willing to drop their inhibitions and queue for their five minutes of fame on live radio. The sure route to radio exposure is a willingness to divulge every sensationalistic morsel of what it's like to be battered/ splattered/abandoned/raped/sued/kidnapped/ripped-off/ shunned or stunned. Last week on Radio 1 we heard about weddings from hell, attempted suicide, aircraft hijacking, violence in the classroom, being married to a murderer and turning him in, a 30-year-old childless man wanting a vasectomy, "the scandal in the Church of Ireland" (it turned out to be no more than a dean with individualistic opinions) and so on. None of it got us anywhere: it merely amused us for a minute or two.
For the listener, there is a constant sensation of being deliberately titillated by broadcasters who are increasingly willing to appeal our the baser instincts. The Gerry Ryan show was inundated with calls from listeners after Ryan asked a sex author for her Top 10 tips on masturbation. How far do we want to go with this?
The tyranny of the shocking confessional, which has as tenacious a hold on television as it does on radio, is being abandoned by the of the queen of the genre, Oprah Winfrey, who intends to retire from the format in two years. She started the fashion for self-disclosure 14 years ago in a confessional TV talk-show format aimed at helping participants and viewers with their emotional problems. She likes to call it "change your life television". With the advent of Jerry Springer and the wave of Oprah clones, however, Oprah's genuine desire to better humankind (a goal which made her the richest woman in the US) has been taken up by imitators who superficially vent their guests' emotional disturbances and dysfunctional relationships just for the fun of it. Winfrey fears that if we continue the current trend of increasing sensationalism for sheer entertainment, someone will be killed on air.
In radio, the energy is different because there are no primed and seething studio audiences preparing to lynch the panellists. Instead, we are the audience/ participants as we drive our salesman's routes, collect the kids from school or wash the dishes and - in mad moments - lift the phone and call Gerry, Marian, Pat or Joe.
Some of us are glued to the radio more often than others, but always under the pretence that we are being informed. But is this merely an illusion? How many of us, after hearing for more than a year what a thick, sex-mad, social-climbing bimbo Monica Lewinsky supposedly was, were surprised to see on television on Saturday that she seems an intelligent, honest human being?
Radio loves to take dramatic, real-life situations and turn them into interactive soap opera, in a kind of synergy between listeners, programme-makers and breaking news. The predicament of the "Virginia 12" air-rage "victims" was aired last week in a largely unbroken stream of consciousness by Morning Ireland, Marian Finucane, Today with Pat Kenny, the News at One and Liveline with Joe Duffy, and later on Five Seven Live. As usual, listeners were invited to phone in, the RTE Radio 1 custom being that only experts or people with first-hand experience can contribute to Finucane or Kenny's Today, while anyone with an opinion may contribute to Liveline. Marian Finucane, who covered the story exhaustively, twice discussed the Virginia 12 scenario in terms of "soap opera". As she herself pointed out, this was a reallife family catastrophe bursting onto the airwaves in conveniently spaced sound-bites everywhere you cared to listen and look, including the TV news. What should we call this new art form? Soapverite? News-soap? News-opera? We should think of something because it has become established at the core of RTE radio production values since the launch of the new schedule five weeks ago.
Meanwhile, the traditional soap operas are taking on serious current affairs issues to give their scripts more immediacy. RTE's Fair City is currently exploring mercy killing, in-vitro fertilisation and adoption in a series of socially aware plotlines. It won't be long before the only difference between soap opera and "human interest" will be that the first is performed by actors and the second by real people. There may be even some confusion about this, as Channel 4 recently found to its cost when it admitted to being duped by a documentary-making "father and daughter" who, it emerged, had invented their story. That's the kind of mistake that happens when the "human interest" approach takes over. Humans are only so interesting. A handful of humanity's stories has been told over and over again since the Greeks. RTE radio - and many other radio and TV organisations - is counteracting the repetitiveness of the human condition by not just getting the story, but getting it first, hyping the listener into a state of anticipation. The editorial line in Radio 1 is this: Morning Ireland sets the agenda, Marian Finucane gets the first bite of the "human interest" cherry, Kenny stirs the pot with his "current affairs" brief and Duffy reaps listener reaction after lunch. Often, one theme dominates all the programmes - as did the outcome of the trial for the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe last week. The coverage can be enlightening, as it was with Today with Pat Kenny's excellent analysis of the McCabe trial last week, or it can be monotonous, as it was with the saturation coverage of the air-rage story. One school of thought in the Radio Centre is that Marian Finucane's brief of "human interest" is too vague. The original intention, as some understood it, was for Finucane's show to be a "light" break between Morning Ireland and Today with Pat Kenny.
Instead, the content and approach are so similar that we seem to have "Today with Marian Finucane", then Today with Pat Kenny, with very little change in tone. E Radio One's 1's programmes to scoop each other, raising questions about why resources from so many programmes should be focused on the one, tabloid story. There was even a day when Finucane's team programme and Kenny's team programme were both staking out Gatwick, each competing to see who would be first to report the return of the "Virginia 12" to British soil. Finucane's Gatwick contact was a local UK radio reporter with a bad line, but she nevertheless delivered the scoop shortly before 10 a.m., upstaging Kenny's team - who had taken the trouble to go to Gatwick their own RTE reporter, but who had been waiting in the wings to report after the 10 a.m. headlines.
There seems to be an air of panic about post-Gay Byrne radio. There was a time in this State when merely airing social and personal relationship problems was in itself a socially revolutionary activity. What was needed at the time was to get people to stop brushing reality under the carpet and start talking about issues such as domestic violence, rape, single parenthood, adoption, bad marriages, separation, divorce, sexuality, infidelity, abortion, religion and hypocrisy. Shock value had value, but today it's a cheap currency. John Caden, a former RTE Radio producer on the Gay Byrne show, now an RTE presenter and a radio critic, believes it's early days yet and that listeners have to give Radio 1's schedule time to develop. He has nothing but admiration for the station's new director of radio, Helen Shaw, who he sees as having bravely grasped the nettle nobody else would touch by agreeing to usher Radio 1 to the post-Gay Byrne area. For 10 years, RTE Radio has been dreading Byrne's departure - but Shaw has managed the transition very well, in his view. What we are now hearing on Radio 1 during the day is, he believes, merely a stop-gap - and the stop-gap is characterised by heavy reliance on RTE's traditional failsafe - "some of the best presenters in the business".
"They are competent, talented, creative and - what's more - have real authority and style," he says. But "there's an over-reliance on the presenter that is unfair to them".
"The major weakness is the material the presenters are getting," Caden believes. "There's an over-reliance on the story of the day (known in the business as the `sod'). The result is that listeners are not benefiting from the depth of research necessary to put the kind of production-stamp on a story which makes it not just a two-minute wonder, but the equivalent of an audio version of The Irish Times. "There is no sense of an editorial agenda and of a serious perspective. There's no investigative, current-affairs programming . . . and the inability to uncover new material or to provide serious analysis is a drawback." Any thoughtful analysis which does take place on RTE radio seems to be reserved for Saturday View. The rest of the time, the presenter is relied upon to place items in context. Whether or not this works depends on how well the presenter has been briefed by the researchers and producers.
We need - probably more than ever before - an approach to programme-making in which we are genuinely informed by people who know that they are talking about, rather than roused by anyone with an opinion or an axe to grind. (Isn't public broadcasting supposed to be about education, inspiration and enlightenment?) Otherwise, if you do not cast light on a subject, you trivialise it. If you merely pick trivial subjects, you are underestimating your listeners.
Pat Kenny disagrees with the view that producers are seeking out the sensational and the superficial, insisting that he'll battle against the tabloidisation of radio all the way. He defends his programme's commitment to "current affairs" - which he admits is a wide brief, including politics as well as last week's story about a priest and his race-winning dog. He sees himself as a news-maker as well as reacting to the day's events, citing for example his interview last week with the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, who admitted to scepticism about the comp culture in the Army - his comments were covered in the newspapers the following day.
Kenny admits to putting a "zanier spin" on a current affairs story if it will keep people listening because "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down". ?
Just 18 months into the job of director of programmes, Helen Shaw insists it would be unfair to assess Radio 1's direction so soon after its schedule re-launch in January. E Radio does not cave in completely to the radio victim mentality.
She rejects the idea that RTE is encouraging "victim radio" and instead defends the policy of "getting as close as possible to the listener through interactive radio", particularly on Marian Finucane and Joe Duffy's programmes. It's early, but feedback so far is that the listeners are happy, she asserts: "There has been no change in the overall attitude, ethos or editorial line of what we do. Our editorial lines is to provide strong information, current affairs and good, relevant radio for a national audience of 1.6 million people a day. If there's a brief - and this is the same as it was prior to the schedule change in January - what we try to do is to remain as close to our listeners as possible and to try to bring them forward through live interactive radio in a changing environment."
She strongly disagrees that the production teams are carrying on items from the morning newspapers and insists that the "Virginia 12" was an interesting, complex story which deserved the coverage it got because the audience was intrigued by it. "What we try to do is to get as close as possible to the story. We're not interviewing experts about the story, but talking to people right at the heart of the story."
Shaw defends her producers and researchers against the charge that stories concentrate too much on objective experience of interviewees, and not enough on research and analysis. "Marian has three producers and two researchers and they are doing an incredible amount of research." Morning radio is by nature fast, she says, but the afternoon Life and Living strand balances this through "well-considered programmes on health and personal issues". As for Gerry Ryan's discussion of masturbation last week, Shaw replies: "Why not?" If people are talking about it, it's going to end up on Gerry Ryan and vice versa. Gerry and his team, she says, know just how far they can go.
Just how far will radio go? If Shaw is right, it's up to the listeners.
