Lyric fm's Breakfast show presenter - Marty Whelan.

jmcc

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/declan-lynch/save-us-from-these-niche-merchants-30201435.html


Lovely article for anyone who missed it. Really endorses the great job Mart has done for Lyric over the last few years. There really is no substitute for a true radio professional like him.

Well Marty would say that.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Poor old "I wanna hear" has been a bit quiet of late. You'd almost miss her/him. It is almost as if there is a major drop in the Martydom programme audience due to the Easter holidays. Perhaps this is due to fewer people doing a school run and having that programme on the car radio. As for that article, it is clueless waffle from someone who obviously hates Classical and thinks that it is the preserve of those with a triple digit IQ.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

There really is no substitute for a true radio professional like him.

So who replaces him when he goes off on his tour guide job? Is there a chance that RTE might repeat the manner in which it fired him from 2FM (firing him while he was on holidays)?

If what he plays is chosen by the producer and from an RTE playlist, then all he is doing is providing the chat between the music. Lyric could change to an "all music" format for that time in the morning (with news/AA/adbreaks) and probably increase the audience for the programme.

Aren't the JNLR figures for Q1 2014 due soon? If Tubridy's figures are suffering as a result of Marty's babbling (two DJs appealing mainly to an audience demographic that prefers chat to music), could Marty's Tubridy-lite show get the axe to save Tubridy?

Regards...jmcc

SaveOurLyric

pinkypinky wrote: »

Did you or Yvonne write the section of the article on MW? It sounds like your rhetoric.

I cant speak for Yvonne, but while I am very flattered by your suggestion, I can assure you that I could never write to Declan's standard. Both an excellent journalist, as evinced yet again by this article, and also a very skilled wordsmith, he would by quite above my league.

jmcc wrote: »

could Marty's Tubridy-lite show get the axe to save Tubridy?

The wrong way around surely ?
Tubs is Marty-lite more like. Mart is the man with the sophisticated and genuinely witty verbal sparkle, and the maestro spinning us the classical music and opera interspersed will all other manner of boundary expanding musical gems.
Ryan on the other hand. Well.:mad:

jmcc wrote: »

clueless waffle from someone who obviously hates Classical and thinks that it is the preserve of those with a triple digit IQ.

Hardly a preserve even if thus limited. Triple digit IQs are held by about half the population.

jmcc

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

The wrong way around surely ?
Tubs is Marty-lite more like.

More people listen to Tubridy hence he takes precedence. Unfortunately for your beloved Marty, if it comes down to numbers and cost saving, Marty will be dropped to save Tubridy as RTE have sunk more into promoting this character. Tubridy's figures were static in the last JNLR. He had been doing an nixer in the BBC but the BBC still don't want to hire him apparently. If Marty's figures are eating into those of Tubridy's show, then RTE might be faced with a decision.

Hardly a preserve even if thus limited. Triple digit IQs are held by about half the population.

Whoosh - guess that joke flew right over your head.

Regards...jmcc

Baron Scarpia

The next JNLR figures will probably confirm MITM as the most popular programme on Lyric. Expect RTE to trumpet this as a vindication of their strategy of "bringing a new audience to the station". This will be nonsense. Light entertainment is more popular than classical music and if you offer the former (even with third raters) you will get a bigger audience. Simples.

bureau2009

I can't bear to listen to Marty Whelan on the radio.

As I watch Eurovision I can't avoid him doing the commentary for the semi-finals.

My God, he's the most torturous person ever to be let near a micophone. He's deluded into thinking that if he uses a funny voice he'll be humourous and entertaining. In fact he couldn't be more cringeworthy and banal.

Thank goodness for the BBC for tomorrow's coverage of the Eurovision final.

Golden Throat

I liked Marty's show from Berlin this week. Also I saw his Eurovision show at a party and it had us all in giggles. There are different opinions and tastes in music.

SaveOurLyric

Golden Throat wrote: »

I liked Marty's show from Berlin this week. Also I saw his Eurovision show at a party and it had us all in giggles. There are different opinions and tastes in music.

Missed the Berlin.:(. I just havent been able to listen in lately.

He really is a master at the Eurovision thing. Really lets his sense of humour blossom, and is a true joy.

You are spot on about the different opinions and tastes in music, but we dont all have have his breadth and depth of knowledge! Unfortunately.

OLeary in the Grave

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

You are spot on about the different opinions and tastes in music, but we dont all have have his breadth and depth of knowledge! Unfortunately.

What breadth and depth of knowledge? When it comes to classical music in general (and opera in particular) he knows little and cares less. There was a good example of this last at 9.20 in last Wednesday's program from Berlin.

Close to the end of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, there's a piece which Marty plays quite often. Papageno is overjoyed to be reunited with his lost love Papagena, and together they sing a lovely little duet, Pa-pa-pa, where they talk of their future together and all the children they're going to have: first a little Papageno, then a little Papagena, then another Papageno and so on. In the space of two and a half minutes, they say the name Papageno or Papagena 28 times.

Now if The Magic Flute was in Italian, the name Papageno would be pronounced PapaJAYno with a soft G. But it's not. It's in German, so the G is hard: PapaGAYno. (Think of Angela Merkel.) Marty manages not to notice this. After hearing 28 PapaGAYnos he says:

"Mozart there who happens to be German as well. That's the Vienna Philharmonic and PapaJAYno, PapaJAYna..."

Ignorant, careless and proof that he doesn't even listen to the music he plays. He's all wrong for Lyric. "Marty in the Morning" is an AM show on an FM station.


You can watch it here (in Swedish but that doesn't matter). Completely delightful. Start at 4:45:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpF6LRLGZLo

Golden Throat

Radio by Mick Heaney in the Irish Times.

Hare-brained gags and musical diversity, together at last on ‘Marty in the Morning’

Marty Whelan is an odd fit on Lyric FM, but even his wacky style is a good deal more inspirational than daytime on 2FM.

One doesn’t normally associate the patter of Marty Whelan with the classics of high modernism. But such is the ceaseless cavalcade of funny accents and headspinning nonsequiturs that make up Marty in the Morning (Lyric FM, weekdays) that it calls to mind the line from Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, about the newspaper-reading Sloppy, later used as the working title for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land: “He do the police in different voices.”

Whelan’s show is obviously not a long-form poem of shifting perspectives and challenging verse structure; nor does the presenter have a penchant for reading Victorian police reports out loud. (Well, not yet.) He is, however, seemingly unable to talk for more than five seconds without changing the pitch of his voice for dramatic or, more usually, comic effect.
Whether he is seamlessly weaving listeners’ texts into his ever-modulating spiel or piling one zany aside on top of another, the effect is of a stream-of-consciousness opus as channeled through a Smashie and Nicey-style daytime radio jock.

After a while this headlong verbal rush exerts a curiously mesmeric power. Trying to capture it accurately, however, is akin to trying to note down every passing number plate from a motorway flyover.

“Thanks to Majella – really? Yes – and the marvellous Carlow College of Music. They had a great concert yesterday, you know. My son was on the trombone, Eoin. More power to your elbow, your mouth, fair play to you. That’s Monica, wishing them all well today, which is fantastic.”

And that’s just one random 15-second passage from a show that lasts three hours. Little wonder there are times when he sounds hoarse.

To maintain this pace, no trope is too obvious nor joke too corny. Broadcasting from Berlin on Wednesday – he’s there for a performance of Tosca – he opens the show with, yes, Song of Germany (its refrain of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” familiar to many).
He enthuses at length about the city and German music, but he also declares that the weather is so warm that it’s “a mankini for Marty”, an image that is paradoxically chilling.

It is, on the face of things, perverse that someone like this should be one of the marquee names on a music station with such knowledgeable and committed presenters as John Kelly, Gerry Godley and Ellen Cranitch. But that is to do a mild disservice to the music on the show: his greatest asset.

Within his “tucker bag” is a playlist ranging from John Barry spy themes to rootsy Americana and wry Noël Coward ditties, making it the most musically adventurous morning show on Irish radio. That such an accolade should be bestowed on a man with the speech patterns of a frustrated ventriloquist and the wit of a naff, slightly batty uncle is, however, a faintly depressing comment on the state of the airwaves.

SaveOurLyric

I didn't know The Irish Times had trolls, or that they were even a genre in old style print media. I am sure 'Outraged, of the RIAM' already has pen to paper.

Sulla Felix

If that's supposed to be posted in support of MITM, may I respectively request that you actually read the article.

SaveOurLyric

Sulla Felix wrote: »

If that's supposed to be posted in support of MITM, may I respectively request that you actually read the article.

Well, he is giving a big thumbs up to the both Mart's phenomenal stream of humourous consiousness, and the music he plays.
Reads like a serious endorsement of the MITM formula to me !

Sulla Felix

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

Well, he is giving a big thumbs up to the both Mart's phenomenal stream of humourous consiousness, and the music he plays.
Reads like a serious endorsement of the MITM formula to me !

Damned by faint praise is how I read it. :P

Frank Grimes

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

Reads like a serious endorsement of the MITM formula to me !

Yeah.

That such an accolade should be bestowed on a man with the speech patterns of a frustrated ventriloquist and the wit of a naff, slightly batty uncle is, however, a faintly depressing comment on the state of the airwaves.

Onthe3rdDay

Golden Throat wrote: »

He enthuses at length about the city and German music, but he also declares that the weather is so warm that it’s “a mankini for Marty”, an image that is paradoxically chilling.

Please tell me he didn't say this on air... I suppose when he was younger he did look a little like Borat...

Golden Throat

Onthe3rdDay wrote: »

Please tell me he didn't say this on air... I suppose when he was younger he did look a little like Borat...

He's always on about mankinis. Marty has a thing about them.

SaveOurLyric

Golden Throat wrote: »

He's always on about mankinis. Marty has a thing about them.

Maybe he misheard (or just not up to spead with Mart's (express)train of thought) and it was just more bad Italian pronunciation, and instead it was something about Mancini, former Italy and Sampdoria striker and now Galatasaray coach ?

Golden Throat

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

Maybe he misheard (or just not up to spead with Mart's train of thought) and it was just more bad Italian pronunciation, and instead it was something about Mancini, former Italy and Sampdoria striker and now Galatasaray coach ?

Funnily enough the Pink Panther was written by Henri Mancini and that is correctly pronounced like mankini!

Henri Mankini!

SaveOurLyric

Golden Throat wrote: »

Funnily enough the Pink Panther was written by Henri Mancini and that is correctly pronounced like mankini!

Henri Mankini!

???

He used to pronounce it Man-cee-nee. Not the Italian pronunciation.
Pink Panther theme this week would be nice on MITM!

Expunge

The American composer of Italian origin is Henry 'Man-see-nee'.
In Italian, it is pronounced 'man-chee-nee'.
CH and CCH are always pronounced 'k'. CI is pronounced 'chee'.
(Don't remember how Irish international footballer, Terry Mancini, pronounced it.)


These small things do not take away from the awfulness of the 2 infomercial broadcasts from Berlin.
Almost every link that I heard (and I made myself listen to quite a few) name checked Berlin and The Travel Department. It was constant and relentless.
Any insight to Tosca came from the always pleasant and knowlegable Ian Fox - not Marty Whelan.
Every bit of the programme screamed 'We're on a huge lig here, we have to justify it every minute'.

It reminded me of the the three hour blowjob Neven Maguire once received from the same show for the launch of one of his books a while back. That was another lig.

Did RTE actually make any money from this latest load of crap because the Travel Department got 2 three hour commercials in a row from a national state run network.
Fair play to the Travel Department. They played Marty and the other clowns in Lyric perfectly to their advantage.

Golden Throat

He's going to be in Bloom in the Phoenix Park tomorrow and I think I'd like to go up there and see what he's like in person. He said that Mary Kennedy from television would be there too with Neven Maguire and some of the people from the "Travel Department." They offering lawnmowers and hedge strimmers as well as tastings from Neven. It's an early start for 8.30 for Bloom but there will be the Full Irish available at Neven Maguire's tent from opening time. That would be a good bit of ballast for the day. And then look at a few plants afterwards.

They're also going to have live music up there with the RTE Big Band and the Concert Orchestra and some other celebs from Lyric and other channels. I hope it keeps fine for them.

HeidiHeidi

Golden Throat wrote: »

He's going to be in Bloom in the Phoenix Park tomorrow and I think I'd like to go up there and see what he's like in person. He said that Mary Kennedy from television would be there too with Neven Maguire and some of the people from the "Travel Department." They offering lawnmowers and hedge strimmers as well as tastings from Neven. It's an early start for 8.30 for Bloom but there will be the Full Irish available at Neven Maguire's tent from opening time. That would be a good bit of ballast for the day. And then look at a few plants afterwards.

They're also going to have live music up there with the RTE Big Band and the Concert Orchestra and some other celebs from Lyric and other channels. I hope it keeps fine for them.

Oh look, another advertising slot for Marty and his cronies :mad:

Pardon my cynicism, but I smell a Marty-shaped rat here.

SaveOurLyric

Sounds terrific, but unfortunately wont be able to head along.
Enjoy !

SaveOurLyric

It seems Neven is becoming quite the classical music afficionado himself. Himself and Mart really have such a great rapport that makes for great radio.

When did we last hear The Teddy Bear's Picnic on MITM. Seems a long time to me. Anyone fancy getting the request in ? Would be appropriate to the lawns and food theme.

SaveOurLyric

IDEA:)

Travel Department trip to Italy with Neven! Italian food explained to us by Nev. Italian opera elucidated for us by Mart. All with the expert organisation of The Travel Department. Heaven on earth!

HeidiHeidi

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

IDEA:)

Travel Department trip to Italy with Neven! Italian food explained to us by Nev. Italian opera elucidated for us by Mart. All with the expert organisation of The Travel Department. Heaven on earth!

My idea of hell, actually.

How about this for an idea ? Marty sticks to playing music (any music will do, just music) in the mornings, Neven sticks to cooking in his kitchen and not clogging up "music programmes" all over the airwaves, and the Travel Department stick to advertising in the Irish Times?

SaveOurLyric

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

My idea of hell, actually.

How about this for an idea ? Marty sticks to playing music (any music will do, just music) in the mornings, Neven sticks to cooking in his kitchen and not clogging up "music programmes" all over the airwaves, and the Travel Department stick to advertising in the Irish Times?

Ooofff!

Someone in need of a little magical Marty bonhomie to raise the spirits. Tune in tomorrow morning!
Sleep tight!.

pinkypinky

Yvonne's been quiet for a while.