Marty Whelan: should he be on RTÉ lyric fm?

What to say, or rather where to start with this individual's position as a presenter on Lyric FM. The fact that he has the prime drivetime slot every weekday morning makes it so much worse.

I have long since abandoned commercial radio and its tiresome predictable formulae and bland music. In particular, I find personality-based radio to be as woefully offensive as personality-based television.

In this context, I've always looked for an alternative on the radio. Lyric FM offered that in bucket loads. I barely know the names of the presenters, or at least I'd have to think about them. I do know, however, that if I turn on Lyric at a certain time I will get a mood, a theme, an atmosphere. It will almost invariably be calm and understated. The presenter will be in the background; the music will be in the foreground. That, to me, is the proper order of good radio. It will often enrich my life by playing a piece I had forgotten about. Better still, it will recurrently introduce me to new music, be it Spanish Renaissance music from Montserrat Figueras singing Este Galapaguito or Dors mon enfant or sublime music from somebody named Dustin O'Halloran, to take two of many examples. It is fresh. It's a station which enriches my musical world. The only Irish radio station which comes close to providing such a culturally stimulating alternative, albeit in linguistic terms, is RnaG when conversations are on.

Leaving aside the less frequent "star" appearances by the even more egotistical waffler Gay Byrne, the sole exception to the above culture on RTÉ lyric fm is Marty Whelan. He talks incessantly. Incessantly. His music choices have a singular lack of coherence. At one moment he could be playing, Lord save us, Phil Collins - at another he could, if we're particularly lucky, choose the sublime Una Furtiva Lacrima. Mostly, though, he chooses to talk. Always, by his thoughtless, vacuous, trite, distended waffle he destroys the beauty of any tune or song he may have just played. Silence has its own beauty, and this presenter just cannot seem to capture it. It's as if he feels he would be redundant if he didn't say something, anything. And it is, alas, anything which always triumphs over something. He could step back, use only necessary, appropriate words and let the music in front. Instead, this show is about him, not about music. As such, it might as well be on any other "star"-driven commercial station. This was not what Lyric FM was established for. It was established to cater for people interested in minority music which was not catered for in the mainstream, and in particular to cater for the classical music audience of the FM3 which it replaced in 1999.

The particularly disappointing thing about his presence is that he has made no attempt to acclimatise with the culture of Lyric FM. Culturally, he sticks out like a barely controlled blusterous child every morning, the antithesis of what this calm, reserved station is supposed to be about. He simply seems so self-absorbed, so caught up in his own ego that he has absolutely no sensitivity to Lyric's listenership and why they listen to Lyric.

Over two years since Marty Whelan began this morning slot, do you think he should be a presenter on Lyric FM?