Top of the Morning for Rachael

SHANNON’S Rachael English has formally joined the presenting team of Radio 1’s Morning Ireland, the country’s most-listened-to radio programme.

She had been providing cover for the show in recent weeks before being officially appointed. In addition to Morning Ireland, she will continue to present Saturday View.
Rachael said she was delighted with her appointment and is conscious of the programme’s standing in the Irish media.
“I think it’s one of those shows that is kind of a programme of record. People do tend to rely upon it. It is taken seriously by people and people do trust it, which in this day and age is a pretty nice thing to be able to say, that it’s perceived as trustworthy.”
Rachael was co-presenter on the morning in which Brian Cowen gave a bumbling interview that saw him make headlines all over the world.
“I suppose I thought it didn’t sound like the best interview Brian Cowen has ever done but I didn’t know what the circumstances were, or anything. I was taken aback when I went into the office and all the phones were ringing,” she says.
The audience for current affairs programmes has grown as the country’s economy has imploded but the current situation brings its own challenges, she feels.
“If you look at the figures from autumn ’08 onwards, there has been quite a sharp rise in the listenership to all talk radio. I think that has now tailed off a bit and there is a danger that there can be almost an overload now. It’s not that people don’t want to know things but they might feel ‘I really can’t take any more of this’ or ‘haven’t I heard these two fellas shouting at each other before?’”
The most common complaint about news media these days is that almost everything reported is negative. Rachael feels it is difficult but important to reflect what is happening in the country, without dragging the listener into complete despondency.
“On the one hand, you don’t want to wallow in doom and gloom but then on the other hand, you can sound incredibly patronising to people who have lost their job, or are worried about their job or are concerned about their kids emigrating to have someone with an okay job saying ‘oh cheer up, it’s not that bad’. For lots of people at the moment, there aren’t lots of reasons to be positive or the reasons to be positive are probably to do with their family or whatever but not to do with the economy or what’s going on with the country.”
She is still finding her feet on Morning Ireland and says it is quite different to other programmes she has fronted.
“I am so accustomed to doing programmes on my own and Morning Ireland is different. It’s a real team programme. Not only are there two presenters but the person who does the sport and the business and the newsreaders are also part of the team.
“It’s a very collaborative programme, you have some people working at night, other people who come in during the morning; it’s very different from any other programme I’ve worked on. I suppose at the moment I’m trying to get a handle on it more than anything else.”
Presenting Morning Ireland guarantees you a full working day. “I get up around 4.30 or 4.35 but you are finished the first phase of the day at about 10 in the morning. There’s every chance then that I might go over to the radio centre because I’m doing Saturday View as well. Say, today, I finished Morning Ireland and then went to have a chat with the producer about what we might do on Saturday.
“For the rest of the day, there tends to be a lot of listening to news and watching news programmes and the team that will be working in the morning have a conference call at about 8pm. Everybody comes on the line and we have a chat about the following morning and what we should be doing and shouldn’t be doing. The day tends to go in stages but the real hard part of the day is from 5.30 to 9pm.”
She says she loves the buzz of the busy mornings. “It’s great in one way because when you come in it’s all heads down and get on with it. There’s no hanging around, hardly time to have a cup of tea. You’ve lots to do, you’re trying to read the papers, write lead-ins for what you’re doing, you’re trying to think of a question, you’re looking at the internet and before you know it, it’s five minutes to seven and you’re running into the studio. I love that, I hate hanging around.”