{"id":158793,"date":"2025-11-02T13:11:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T13:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/158793\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T13:11:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T13:11:22","slug":"why-would-anyone-want-to-be-a-radio-presenter-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/158793\/","title":{"rendered":"Why would anyone want to be a radio presenter? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been a lot of melodrama in the radio business over the last couple of months: presenters leaving their job to take up a new one or \u2013 to use that great radio euphemism \u2013 \u201cgoing in a different direction\u201d with the schedule. Which means someone getting fired.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve witnessed<\/a> a lot of people getting the chop, and it\u2019s invariably brutal. No amount of corporate waffle can soften the blow: because \u2013 even though they may cling to the idea that it will be different for them \u2013 it happens to most presenters, sooner or later. To paraphrase the loathsome British politician Enoch Powell, most broadcasting careers end in failure.<\/p>\n

In Ireland, there have been only a handful of people who got to leave on their own terms. The rest don\u2019t get their contracts renewed or have them terminated or are quietly edged out. Some \u2013 the more high-profile ones \u2013 won\u2019t have any great financial worries afterwards. Others (often RT\u00c9 presenters) have a staff job anyway. But most are on a contract. Radio presenting is a well-paid job, but contrary to the popular view, it is not (in the vast majority of cases) so well paid that they can afford to give up work. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0My car is old and disgusting, but I just don\u2019t care. It gets me aroundOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

And even if they could afford it, they wouldn\u2019t want to. That\u2019s where the business can be particularly cruel: once you\u2019ve lost a radio presenting gig, be it in a local or national station, the chances are vanishingly small that you\u2019ll get another one. It tends to be a one-time deal, because those jobs are so scarce. If you tot up, for instance, the number of people who host national speech radio shows, it is a very short list.<\/p>\n

A few manage to pivot out of industry completely, but most hang around in other roles: researching, reading news bulletins. Radio has a peculiar way of infusing itself into the blood.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve met people who have managed to move past the loss, and are happy to be still working. I\u2019ve met people who, years later are still angry and baffled as to why it happened. Because when a show is axed, it\u2019s not always clear why. Audience figures can decline, or a presenter can start to sound jaded, but as often as not, they can be fired because an executive somewhere simply doesn\u2019t like their on-air persona. Like the rest of us, the people who make these decisions are listeners too, and have their own likes and dislikes. And, as with the rest of us, it\u2019s not always completely rational.<\/p>\n

Given how insecure it can be, how it can suddenly end, you\u2019d wonder why so many people want to do it. It\u2019s not glamorous. Radio presenters don\u2019t get recognised on the street. You\u2019re a voice, coming out of a box. And for all years I\u2019ve worked in it, I\u2019ve been unable to come up with a succinct sentence to express the quiddity of radio: what it is about it that gets inside you and won\u2019t leave. Even when it treats you badly.<\/p>\n

My first radio gig was It Says In The Papers on Morning Ireland. I did it for a couple of years and never lost the terror that one morning, I might sleep in. Thankfully, I never did. Mostly because I didn\u2019t sleep at all. Yet every time the red light went on in the studio, and even though I had to concentrate on reading my script, I would have a curious, out of body experience: a sense that the words were travelling across the country while people woke up, while they got their kids into cars or started up tractors or spread butter on toast. And it wasn\u2019t because they were my words people were listening to. It wasn\u2019t ego. It felt more like an invisible thread, connecting all of us. I never got over that. Never will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s been a lot of melodrama in the radio business over the last couple of months: presenters leaving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,19,17,361,63970],"class_list":{"0":"post-158793","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-magazine","13":"tag-sean-moncrieff"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115480276856489806","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}