{"id":610287,"date":"2026-04-16T08:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T08:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/610287\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T08:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T08:10:10","slug":"rte-radio-wanted-more-modern-jingles-now-it-sounds-like-an-illegal-rave-circa-1989-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/610287\/","title":{"rendered":"RT\u00c9 radio wanted more modern jingles. Now it sounds like an illegal rave circa 1989 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular listeners to RT\u00c9<\/a> Radio 1\u2019s Morning Ireland might have been alarmed this week to discover the soothing, Celtic-coded jingle that has for years introduced the broadcast had been replaced with something altogether more Wagnerian. Drums hammered, brass sections howled, the tension built and built. Was this the Battle of Helm\u2019s Deep stampeding from your speaker? No, it was part of a new \u201cunified audio identity\u201d for Radio 1 \u2013 corporate-speak for a revamp of the jingles across the station, from Morning Ireland at 7am to Late Debate at 11pm.<\/p>\n

It is fair to say this sonic switcheroo has proved divisive. \u201cThat jingle is awful. It hurts my head and it\u2019s hard to hear the presenters over it,\u201d wrote one social media user. \u201cBargain basement,\u201d reckoned another. Commenting on the new introduction to his midmorning slot, Oliver Callan<\/a> said he felt as if he was \u201cpresenting Euronews at three o\u2019clock in the morning.\u201d He added: \u201cIt\u2019ll take a bit of getting used to, but this is our one. It mightn\u2019t have the bombast of our previous theme tune, but I\u2019ll have to bring the oomph myself, I suppose.\u201d<\/p>\n

He needn\u2019t have worried \u2013 oomph is one thing the new \u201cunified audio identity\u201d does not lack. Inside Sport, a weeknight sports broadcast presented by Marie Crowe<\/a> and Jacqui Hurley<\/a>, now appears to be taking place in the vicinity of an illegal rave circa 1989. John Creedon\u2019s late-evening slot is bookended by a bombastic techno-pop jazz odyssey. Even the sedate Mooney Goes Wild \u2013 a Monday night broadcast about the natural world \u2013 sounds as if it\u2019s been scored by the people who brought you the latest Marvel blockbuster.<\/p>\n

RT\u00c9 in 2026 seems to exist in a state of permacrisis. This summer marks the third anniversary of the payment scandal that saw Ryan Tubridy<\/a> giving evidence before an Oireachtas committee and which raised questions about the governance of the broadcaster.<\/p>\n

Faced with the existential challenge posed by streaming services such as Netflix and the decline of terrestrial broadcasting, Montrose has emerged from that controversy on a mission to do more with less. Licence fee revenue is plummeting, and director general Kevin Bakhurst has pledged to reduce the headcount to 1,400 (from its present-day 1,800) by 2030. Amid such upheavals, the last thing it needs is further drama. Yet that is exactly what is on the cards following this jarring jingle do-over.<\/p>\n

Why change all the Radio 1 jingles at once? <\/p>\n

The goal, says RT\u00c9, is to introduce a \u201ccomprehensive, round-the-clock sound suite tailored to the station\u2019s evolving identity\u201d. The new themes, six months in the making, are the work of London agency Wisebuddah, which has previously worked with UK stations such as Magic Radio and Hits Radio, as well as Irish independents like Radio Nova. There was also input from the RT\u00c9 Concert Orchestra<\/a>, which recorded \u201ckey elements\u201d that were incorporated into the compositions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWisebuddah were chosen via a public procurement process,\u201d RT\u00c9 said in a statement to The Irish Times. The aim, says Patricia Monahan, RT\u00c9\u2019s director of audio, is to \u201censure RT\u00c9 Radio 1 is not only heard but will be instantly recognised and felt\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anything RT\u00c9 does is fair game for criticism and so it has proved with these new jingles, which have been taken to task for sounding generic and lacking a distinctly Irish quality. <\/p>\n

\u201cVery uninventive,\u201d says Greg Malocca, a composer at Dublin audio post-production studio Egoboo, who has written jingles for TV Three News (as it then was), Quote Devil, and composed music for the Irish Rugby World Cup 2023 campaign narrated by Liam Neeson. <\/p>\n

\"BroadcasterBroadcaster Oliver Callan: ‘It mightn\u2019t have the bombast of our previous theme tune, but I\u2019ll have to bring the oomph myself, I suppose.’ Photograph: Bryan Meade <\/p>\n

\u201cI was quite surprised they went to an English company. I know they\u2019re pretty good at what they do \u2013 they\u2019ve done a lot of branding for different radio stations, including Irish ones,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is very generic. Honestly, the first thing I felt was they\u2019ve totally lost their Irish identity. There\u2019s nothing Irish about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a world of constant distraction, where consumers\u2019 attention is more precious than ever, jingles have become an essential part of corporate branding. From Netflix\u2019s ta-dum to the strident countdown introduction to BBC News, corporations of every type understand that music is a critical way of communicating their identity.<\/p>\n

As RT\u00c9 is discovering, listeners are also attached to their jingles. That lesson was learned by London composer Toby Jarvis when he was hired to refresh the theme to ITV soap Emmerdale 15 years ago. Viewers did not take kindly to their beloved music being tampered with.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat theme tune has been going since 1972. All the people working on it hate it \u2013 it\u2019s old-fashioned, terribly staid, very familiar. We were tasked with reimagining it, which we did in quite a seriously reimagined way. The head of ITV music said, \u2018You know, you\u2019ll get hate mail.\u2019 I said, no, that\u2019s not going to happen. She was totally right.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Cheap European Homes on RT\u00c9 One: A rare property show that doesn\u2019t feel out of touchOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The biggest gamble RT\u00c9 has taken was to completely revamp its themes rather than tweak them. These snatches of music are part of the background of our everyday lives. They are there when we are running the kids to school, as we drive home from the gym, when we\u2019re doing the housework. Switch them up completely and people will notice. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like taking away someone\u2019s best friend, giving them plastic surgery,\u201d says Toby Jarvis, who, as creative director with London agency A-MNEMONIC has worked with the BBC, Oxfam, Duracell, Ariel and others. \u201cThe risk of changing something completely is much bigger than the risk of giving it a lease of new life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the case of a national broadcaster, he says, the jingles need to be built to last, as people are going to hear them over and over. \u201cWhen you hear it coming up every hour \u2013 you might hear it four times an hour: once at the news bulletin on the hour, then a short news at half past, then the breaks at a quarter past. You\u2019re going to hear it at least four times an hour. The trick is to make it brilliant and joyous and a good experience without it being annoying \u2013 it can\u2019t get on your nerves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The added complication is that you\u2019re writing a snatch of music \u2013 an idea rather than an entire song. When ITV hired Jarvis to write the jingle for Love Island, the brief was \u201cdating and romance with an evil twist\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve taken a really extreme cubist, wacky approach from the far end, but it\u2019s also based in the familiar language of club music. It\u2019s a bonkers tune, a bit of a bonkers sound \u2013 but it does hit the audience. The Love Island sting is about seven seconds. The challenge is to get it short and succinct so its meaning is unequivocally clear. That\u2019s part of the skill and creativity. There\u2019s no formula that will help you do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

RT\u00c9 faces a challenge in that radio has to appeal to a broad audience, says Egoboo\u2019s Greg Malocca. \u201cI would think Radio 1 is for the older generation from mid-30s, early 40s up to retirees. It has to resonate with those people. It has to represent the country. It\u2019s the national broadcaster. There\u2019s an element of trust. Music should give you a feeling \u2013 with RT\u00c9, they want to be trustworthy. An element of professionalism needs to come across in the music. They definitely went for this modern vibe. There are a lot of electronic drumbeats. They\u2019re using that to try to represent a modern twist. They\u2019re merging different sounds together. Again, this has all been done before. There is nothing revolutionary about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Young Forever: The Death of Ageing? on RT\u00c9 One: An unflinching \u2013 even gory \u2013 look into the anti-ageing industryOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

A good jingle has to walk a tightrope between familiarity and novelty, says Jarvis. \u201cIf something is too familiar, it\u2019s boring, safe and repetitive. If something\u2019s too novel, it\u2019s too challenging and difficult to process. Human beings love stuff that\u2019s a little bit novel but grounded in familiarity without being too boring or too challenging. This is where creativity lives. It\u2019s the same in pop music, I guess \u2013 the same in all art. You draw from two extremes and find a sweet spot in the middle where you\u2019re comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Has RT\u00c9 found that sweet spot? Was it wise to ditch the Celtic ululations and go full Lord of the Rings with its Morning Ireland intro? Should an Irish radio station \u201csound Irish\u201d? Or is it wiser to try something different \u2013 to use the musical equivalent of a new broom to sweep away dusty, old themes? The ultimate verdict, in the end, will be up to us, the listeners. <\/p>\n

Five memorable jingles1. Nokia<\/p>\n

The sound that reverberated around the world as Nokia\u2019s mobile phones became ubiquitous in the 1990s is adapted from a guitar phrase by turn-of-the-century Spanish musician Francisco T\u00e1rrega.<\/p>\n

2. 20th Century Fox Fanfare<\/p>\n

As heard at the start of Star Wars and hundreds of other films, does anything sound more \u201ccinema\u201d than Fox\u2019s bombastic, table-setting flourish?<\/p>\n

3. McDonald\u2019s<\/p>\n

Justin Timberlake\u2019s I\u2019m Lovin\u2019 It didn\u2019t just reboot his career – when McDonald\u2019s built an entire campaign around the snippet in 2003, it boosted sales by 7.8 per cent in the first year alone.<\/p>\n

4. Windows 95<\/p>\n

Keen to give their operating system a fashionable makeover, Microsoft went to U2 producer and David Bowie collaborator Brian Eno for the ethereal boot-up sound that is seared in the cortex of several generations. Ironically, Eno had never used a PC computer in his life and so never sampled his work in action.<\/p>\n

5. Netflix<\/p>\n

Netflix\u2019s \u201cTa-dum\u201d has an almost Pavlovian effect \u2013 when it plays, you know you are settling in for a binge-watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Regular listeners to RT\u00c9 Radio 1\u2019s Morning Ireland might have been alarmed this week to discover the soothing,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136,24091],"class_list":["post-610287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-rte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}