Harry Browne listens to the first day of Dublin's all-talk radio station and finds a local station with national ambition which might find itself stretched.
At the time of going to press, The Irish Times had not heard of any "news junkies" going to hospital with overdoses. However, Dublin's NewsTalk 106 is clearly aimed at listeners who need a fix in a hurry: "You can watch it tonight, you can read it tomorrow, but you can hear it now . . ."
Then again, you wouldn't want to take the station's promo snippets too seriously - like the one which plugged "the new radio competition that everyone's already talking about . . .". Some trick, when the relevant programme had not even aired yet.
From listening to its first-day programming yesterday, you get the feeling that NewsTalk would love to have poached Eamon Dunphy. Failing that, they've tried to clone him into three parts: David McWilliams represents the vaguely iconoclastic but basically pro-business Dunphy, Damien Kiberd is the green-leaning Dunphy, and George Hook is the jock-talking Dunphy.
And for Daire O'Brien's show, NewsTalk has managed to attract Amanda Browne, formerly The Last Word's researcher, as the programme's producer.
The level of NewsTalk's ambition (or pretensions) can be measured by the fact that hardly any item from 7 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. was a local Dublin story.
The station's on-air talent is notably male and its audience is likely to be similar. The major exception is in the afternoon, when the presenters not only lack a Y chromosome, but have also been permitted to team up.
Dublin Life, with Sue Carter and Karen Moran, is the one programme which follows a talk-radio convention which is commonplace in other countries - having two hosts who alternately bounce questions off their guests and trade banter with each other.
The result is certainly not (yet) slick, but the busy-ness, "yoof" and laughter of Dublin Life was refreshing compared to the dry sound elsewhere.
Inevitably, there were some surprises from the more isolated-sounding presenters. Agenda viewers, used to the authoritative appearance of McWilliams on TV3, may have been taken aback that his voice alone doesn't convey the same strength.
This may not be a problem - Dunphy proves, among many other things, that highly individual non-standard voices can work well on radio.
George Hook had better hope he is another case in point. His introductions were awkward, verging on fumbling. Some of his actual interviews, however, were surprisingly smooth and concise.
O'Brien has no such worries, combining reach-out-and-touch- him warmth with evident skills.
At lunchtime, Kiberd, on the other hand, didn't quite find his flow, hampered both by technical problems and by the station's programming structure, which sees too many interruptions from ads, promos and the vaunted 20/20 news service every 20 minutes.
Kiberd's programme did, at least, have a newsworthy interview with Mary Harney, though the Ansbacher-related remarks picked up from the interview by other media weren't even reported in NewsTalk's own bulletins.
The NewsTalk newsroom, even with input from Independent Network News, will clearly be stretched. The same goes for the producers of a full 10 hours a day of serious, newsy speech-based programmes, all basically chasing the same sorts of items and chats as their RTÉ and Today FM counterparts.
Even with a single strong-hand- ed editor overseeing the whole lot, how long will it be before the various shows fracture into the sort of mutual suspicion which normally fills the air at Montrose?
Early on, that old RTÉ politicker, Eoghan Harris, joined McWilliams to "review the morning's newspapers" - i.e. to hammer the IRA and praise the Queen Mum.
Harris declined to bash the Catholic Church, which he thought deserved more credit for its "decommissioning" efforts. NewsTalk followed his lead: the topic which has dominated RTÉ was conspicuous by its virtual absence.