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Radio review: Liveline – teaching the TV women how to stand properly

David McCullagh and Caitríona Perry on the RTÉ Six One News

Declan Lynch Twitter

July 10 2022 02:30 AM

Of the many public services supplied by Liveline on RTÉ Radio 1, one of the biggest is the warning it brings that the world is stranger than you think – that people are walking around out there with ideas in their heads that you would never imagine, if you just passed them in the street.

Liveline
RTÉ1, Weekdays, 1.45pm

Sarah from Tipperary, for example, was telling Katie Hannon – sitting in for Joe – about this deep interest she has in “the nuances of visual presentation”. And particularly the way that TV presenters tend to stand – even more particularly, the way that female TV presenters on current affairs programmes tend to stand.

She’d come to the right place, given that Katie Hannon herself just happens to be a female presenter of current affairs programme – who, for all her standing, was probably hearing some of these things for the first time.

Things like the “unladylike” way that such women stand, and the vulgarity of their posture – with their feet “maybe two feet apart” and sometimes a “swivel on their left hip”.

Not only does such a stance lack “decorum”, according to Sarah, it can even be construed as “slightly sexually provocative”. It says “I’m powerful, I’m sexy, I’m attractive”, which is not the message Sarah needs when she is watching the tanks rolling over Ukraine.

Instead she looks for some refinement – for what she calls “the buttons and bows on the garment of behaviour”.

Wisely, Hannon did not argue and she did not judge. Rather, she warmly encouraged Sarah to develop a more granular analysis of these convictions, which she had clearly been formulating for a long time.

Thus Sarah went on to describe a more correct way of standing on TV, whereby you have “maybe one foot slightly in front of the other.”

And she did not exclude male presenters from her critique either, pointing out how they tend to swivel a bit too, with “one foot going west, one going north” – which can be as “contrived” as the women, and looks “unmanly”.

There was an intervention from a caller, Ger, who disagreed strongly with Sarah. “Has she not got a life?” was the core of Ger’s argument.

But another caller, Noreen, was more supportive of Sarah – proving not only that life is stranger than you think, but that even if you accept that it is stranger, it is actually a bit stranger still.

Noreen had also noted a decline in standards, particularly in the case of a certain female presenter of sports who has “a tendency to have her legs crossed”.

Video of the Day

She too believes that the TV studio is a formal place, where the least a woman can do is to have one foot slightly behind the other and her knees together – the men, by contrast, are “normally very, very well behaved.”

Then there was Helen, elaborating on Sarah’s tips about posture, instructing Katie Hannon about “the left foot pointing straight forward and the right foot maybe four inches apart from it, pointing forward and ahead of the left foot…”

Cleavage – it will come as little surprise – is “a no no”. After all, she wouldn’t expect a man to be reading the news with four or five buttons of his shirt undone, it is not a disco.

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this is the Nine O’ Clock News,” might be a useful slogan for RTÉ to adopt, you felt. Or they could wave it all away as just another Tuesday on Liveline.

Drivetime
RTÉ1, Weekdays, 4.30pm

Unlike the totally focused Sarah, golf’s Graeme McDowell “has never hyper-analysed the morals and ethics behind the dollar bills” he’s made.

He was speaking on Drivetime to RTÉ golf reporter Greg Allen – the man who has probably the best job in the world.

Though it’s not quite as well paid as McDowell, now that G-Mac has gone over to the money-for-nothing-and-your-chips-for-free LIV tour.

What bugs me about G-Mac is not necessarily interviews like this – in which he patrols the streets of Self-Pity City – but his inability and that of the other LIVers to make a more convincing defence.

They could plausibly state that we are currently being deprived of the World Cup itself – one of the jewels of civilisation – by a sportswashing regime in Qatar. And nobody is complaining about that.

Well, almost nobody...

Instead they seem stuck in corporate clichés about “all the negativity that’s being spun”. Some might even say that G-Mac’s “stance” is not what it was.

Radio review: Liveline – teaching the TV women how to stand properly

Liveline
RTÉ1, Weekdays, 1.45pm

Video of the Day

Drivetime
RTÉ1, Weekdays, 4.30pm

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Radio review: Liveline – teaching the TV women how to stand properly

Liveline RTÉ1, Weekdays, 1.45pm

Video of the Day

Drivetime RTÉ1, Weekdays, 4.30pm

Related topics

More On RTÉ

Letters to the Editor Opinion To limit food production now would be an act of sheer insanity

Taxpayer may end up footing bill in RTÉ settlements for ‘self-employed’ staff

How sun-kissed Neighbours became our good friends in ‘one TV set per house’ Ireland

Dr Eva Orsmond speaks about marriage breakdown: ‘I actually think I’m the saddest woman in the world’

Steve Dempsey Opinion How RTÉ could take a leaf out of Netflix’s playbook – if given the chance

Most Watched

TikToker's proposal goes viral with over 20m views

Eiffel Tower lift stops suddenly and bounces with tourists on board

Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi delight Dubliners with Grafton Street busking session

Today's News in 90 seconds

93-year-old Betty completes incredible airplane wing walk for charity

Latest Radio

Most Read

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Liveline
RTÉ1, Weekdays, 1.45pm

Drivetime
RTÉ1, Weekdays, 4.30pm