Radio Review:A difference of 3,000 listeners doesn't at first appear to be something to get overly excited about, but Matt Cooper and his team at Today FM would be justified in going overboard in the celebrations, having edged RTÉ's Drivetime off the top teatime slot.
The Last Wordwith Matt Cooper has 192,000 listeners (according to the latest JNLR/TNSmrbi survey for 2006) compared with 189,000 for RTÉ's Drivetime. It's the first time that an independent radio station has overtaken RTÉ Radio 1 in a time slot - so seen in that context, those 3,000 pairs of ears aren't just a valuable lure to advertisers - they're a psychological trump card. It's one thing for Today FM to beat RTÉ's 2FM in attracting 15-35 year olds - you'd expect an independent station to have the maverick appeal to lure a younger age group - but when it starts muscling in on news and current affairs, well, that's when it has to start to get worrying for RTÉ.
Drivetime, after all, has enormous, licence fee-sponsored resources to draw on, from foreign correspondents to specialist reporters, so it should out-do any other station in the current affairs arena. Cooper, by the sound of it, has a tiny production team, armed only with a well-thumbed address book and driven by an economic imperative to be creative.
The easiest thing would be to blame the messenger and aim for Mary Wilson, Drivetime's presenter from 5pm to 6.30pm. In her previous role as legal affairs correspondent she had to be all the things that a magazine programme presenter absolutely cannot be. She had to be concise, keep her opinions to herself and be super-serious at all times. Even in these days when news is "infotainment", no one wants a joke in a murder report.
Last September, when she took on Drivetime, she had to turn her approach around completely. Now she also has to interview a wide range of people and she still hasn't relaxed enough to have the conversational touch that's vital if listeners are to feel engaged rather than lectured to. As a presenter, it's okay for her to give a little of her own opinion, to let her personality shine through.
Cooper does this, and he also regularly lobs in questions that have come in from listeners' texts. It's an appealing informality that's missing from Drivetime.
So while Wilson is having to go through a very public learning curve it's worth remembering that Cooper had to do the same thing - and it was just as painful at times to listen to. He took over the teatime slot from Eamon Dunphy and for the first year he sounded like a buttoned-up, high-pitched know-it-all compared with the gravel-voiced predictably unpredictable Dunphy.
Of course Cooper has made the programme his own now and he's been helped enormously by the tight structure and longer running time. He has the space to be more easy-going, to give individual items a good airing and to have a mixed line-up where political items can be followed by giddy pop culture features. In RTÉ's format, the fun stuff gets shunted off to the last hour of the programme, to Dave Fanning's section of Drivetime, just when listeners have either arrived home from a hellish commute and are happy to switch off the radio or have left the kitchen and are sitting in front of Coronation Street.
The whole structure of Wilson's Drivetimeis pitted with dull spots that she has to work around. On Wednesday the business news was as usual, read out like a Powerpoint presentation and it was followed by farm news - rather too much information on artificial insemination for me, I'm afraid - nearly 10 minutes of radio that was too easy to switch off. And that's not Wilson's fault.
There are regular feature highlights, such as Olivia O'Leary's political column (Tuesday) which never fails to throw a different light on a well-aired subject. This week she called it "You've lost that lovin' feeling" and she explored, with enough wit to draw in even politically uninterested listeners, how Brian Cowehas given Michael McDowell the kiss-off over his stamp duty proposals. Fergal Keane's daily reports from Iraq brought an own-reporter dimension that Today FM can't match.
Drivetime's listenership figures are going south but it's not entirely Mary Wilson's problem - she is lightening up, slowly. The problem was caused by whoever dreamed up the plodding, sectional editorial shape of the entire Drivetime programme - stern Mary, sporty Des, funster Fanning - that makes switching over to Cooper far too easy.
