Ryan, he’s really tryin’
Day 1, Two Stations
I listened to two new radio shows this morning and it’s only Tuesday the 2nd of January.
Exciting times for radio, except, they’re the same show in two different countries, and much like watching someone trying to pat their head and rub their tummy at the same time, it wasn’t particularly successful or entertaining.
It was Ryan Tubridy’s first morning on Virgin Radio UK, but also his first morning presenting his brand new show on Dublin’s Q102.
How, I hear you cry? How can one man present two shows at the same time? Not very well is the answer.
No offence to Ryan, who did a pretty good job on his Virgin show, but serious questions remain about what exactly the half assed simulcast on Q102 in Dublin is meant to achieve.
The Background
So, let’s rewind a little before we dig into the detail of the show(s).
For clarity, I was the Launch Director for Virgin Radio UK, in the time before Chris Evans, but returned to Ireland in mid-2017. I’m currently, amongst other things, the Programme Director for Ireland’s Classic Hits Radio, and so Q102 in Dublin is one of my competitors.
I’ve listened to both shows this morning, switching between the UK and Ireland streams, so that I could get a sense of how both shows sit within their stations.
And as always, I’ve tried to review and analyse with as neutral a perspective as possible, but it’s clear to me that as things started today, this show is not destined for long term success as a dual station broadcast.
It’s mainly a Virgin Radio Show
The first impression from this morning’s show is that the primary station here is Virgin Radio UK, and that tone was set from the opening link, where Ryan discussed his appearance on the Virgin Breakfast show and his previous chat with Chris (Evans) and Vassos (Alexander, the Virgin Breakfast Sports guy). If you had been listening to Q102’s breakfast, with Liam Coburn and Venetia Quick, I can’t imagine that made a lot of sense, but I didn’t get to hear both breakfast shows.
Ryan painted a visual picture of his view across a rainy London, gave out a UK Whatsapp number and fired off U2 to start the show.
Brief technical interlude, but it appears as if Virgin and Q102 are both running the music via Zetta, but have a split set up which allows for sweepers and ad breaks to be inserted so, we got a custom Q102 / Virgin Radio sweeper between the first song and the second song, which was from Take That.
The news junctions were slightly more complicated, in that Virgin don’t appear to have News at 11am or 12 noon, so there were back to back tracks on Virgin while Q102 took ad breaks, then local news, sport and weather.
The timing into the 11am news was pretty clumsy, I clocked the news starting at 11:06 but that might have been slightly delayed by the stream I was listening on.
Ryan averaged about 8 songs per hour across the three hours, which was quite the contrast to the previous show in that time slot on Virgin, which delivered 14 or 15 songs an hour, while the show he replaced on Q102 used to play about 12 songs per hour.
Don’t mention the Station!
The main impact of the split transmission between UK and Ireland was that Ryan never mentioned either Virgin Radio UK, or Q102 directly during his three hour show. Call me old fashioned, but the occasional name check for your station from a high paid star used to be quite important, but I guess we live in different times.
The lack of station name didn’t stop Ryan repeatedly waxing lyrical about Virgin and his new colleagues though. There were frequent references to Chris Evans, mentor and breakfast host, there were references to the next presenter (on Virgin), Jayne Middlemiss. There was even a feature called Ask me Anything, in which other Virgin presenters, including Drive Time host Ricky Wilson and Weekend presenter Graham Norton asked Ryan cute questions designed to help the UK audience get to know him.
I’m not sure what the Q102 audience were supposed to do during these periods, or how they are expected to feel about the fact that their new mid-morning presenter apparently has a whole set of other friends, we wouldn’t know. They go to a different school, if you will.
I felt sorry for Andy Preston of Q102, bumped from his mid-morning slot to a new five hour 1 – 6pm position, who didn’t get any mention at all from his new colleague.
God Bless ya, Tubs
It wasn’t all plain sailing for Virgin listeners either. Ryan spent quite some time reading out messages and even playing voicenotes from Irish listeners, mostly not in Dublin, but scattered around Ireland and across the world.
Almost all were variations on “it’s great to hear you back on the radio, god bless you, you made it through the hard times”, which were charming, but utterly confusing I’d imagine for the Virgin listeners.
So far, so much confusion, but I’m sure the wise brains in Rupert Murdoch’s News UK have a big picture plan that I can’t see yet.
Well Holy God, he’s from Oireland
The sales pitch for Ryan from Virgin is frankly cringey, this is one of the social videos posted in advance of his arrival.
Virgin Radio's Introduction to Ryan
Not exactly detailed in terms of who Ryan is, or why we’d like to listen to him, it sounds more like he accidentally got swept up in a stag party and found himself in London.
Which Ryan have they hired?
And that’s the nagging question about this whole enterprise. What exactly are Virgin Radio and Q102 expecting from Ryan?
The gentleman broadcaster from RTE Radio 1, who had an audience of largely over 50 year olds for his hour show on weekday mornings? All Book Clubs and author chat?
Or, the Late Late Show host who could wrangle celebrity guests into awkward camaraderie and made a name for himself as the charming and quick witted Toy Show host?
Or have they hired the not particularly successful music jock, who had a reasonable run on 2FM’s Breakfast show before retreating into the safety of RTE’s current affairs shows?
Certainly based on today’s listen, it’s not at all clear who will emerge from Ryan’s personas, although there was a pure Partridge moment when he described walking into a bookshop and “seeing all the spines”.
Dishonourable mention too for the “Tea Time Banger”, which was a listener request, featuring a pleasant caller who wanted to hear the Rolling Stones. Cue Ryan sputtering in excitement as it turned out that was just the song he too wanted to hear. The chances!
The new (Gerry) Ryan
My understanding from the preliminary interviews and conversation was that part of Ryan’s brief for this show was to be a sort of UK version of Gerry Ryan, daring, entertaining, moving from celebrity interview to engaging content, jumping from topic to topic with ease and revolutionising the UK (and presumably Ireland’s) mid-morning radio.
That wasn’t what this first show was. But, maybe like any show it needs more time to develop.
The standout movie was the easy camaraderie with star guest Russell Crowe in the 10am hour, the two clearly knew each other and got on well. Crowe was in the middle of hosting a dinner party and preparing for quiz night, there was even audience participation on the call.
It offered a glimpse of potential and showed off some of Ryan’s strengths.
What wasn’t so great, is that they re-ran clips from the interview in the midday hour, probably not a great sign for your content planning, when you’re running a best of montages in the third hour of the first show.
Will it work?
Someone needs to decide whether this is a content show, or a music show with banter and waffle.
And they need to decide pretty quickly whether the awkward half and half version that Q102 listeners are getting is worth the effort and the potential drag on the actual Virgin show.
This has been the 27th official edition of the RAudio Newsletter.
Apart from writing newsletters, I also consult to radio stations and podcasts, so if you have a question, or a project you need help on, drop me an email – liamathompson@gmail.com
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