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I’ve been asked to do a training course in making radio. Simple you might say. Only this is a group of Chinese radio peope and the workshop is based in Tampere, Finland. I’ve been making some form of radio or another since 1988. Which is a long time. And a lot has changed. But its still a medium I love and when it works, nothing is better. When I started in RTE Radio 1 as a trainee producer in 1988 one of my mentors was Alex White, now a TD for the labour party, but who long ago was a brillant current affairs producer who had the coolest head under crisis of any producer I’d ever met. I remember doing an OB in Brussels with Marian Finucane where Alex was the senior producer and it was a complete and total disaster. Everything that could go wrong technically went wrong. if we were on ten minutes in the hour of Liveline it was a disjointed ten minutes of signal drop out and collapse. Alex remained cool and unmoved while I worried about the consequences. It was a lasting lesson. Nothing is gained by losing your head!
So what’s the point? I’ve been thinking about all the things I should include in the workshop. Technology, social media, interactivity and marketing. Yet in the end radio is still radio. Lots has changed but it remains a medium driven by story and good story-telling best told by cool heads who understand sound and seek to find the best ones to tell a story and engage an audience. At present Athena Media is making quite a bit of radio .We have High Fidelity on RTE lyric fm every Monday at 7pm. Its in week six by next Monday and its growing in momentum all the time. Which is just as well since its a 26 part series! We’re also making the final documentary for ‘An Opera for Carlow’ which goes out on RTE lyric fm on July 1. (I have still to edit it and I need that Alex cool head as the deadline is racing towards us at speed). We are in the end stages of a recording a documentary on Fighting Words, Roddy Doyle’s creative writing centre in Dublin’s inner city. Its called ‘Words of Mouth’ and hits a hard punch. it took us to New York last month and our old colleague Anita Walsh even did some recording for it in San Francisco where she has been living for the past year. We’ve also got a brand new radio series, just commissioned by Sound and Vision Fund for RTE Radio 1, called ‘Made in Ireland’ with our old colleague and friend Ella McSweeney. Its still all new and under discussion, a celebration of everything bearing the ‘made in Ireland’ brand and background and we hope to have it on air for RTE in late Autumn. Lots happening but what unites them all are great stories, some wonderful voices and a commitment to carrying people, listeners, on a journey. I hope I can share some of that with our Chinese colleagues in September as well as some of things they want to know about the digital radio sphere and re-inventing radio in a digital age.