Morning Glory

Unless you happen to be strolling home from a house party, dawn is probably the time of the day when your ears are at their most sensitive. It’s too early for hard news, too early for Tinie Tempah. In fact some people would think that it’s too early for anything that involves using more than 1% of your brain. So here’s the question that the people behind 98fm’s The Morning Crew must ask themselves every single day: what exactly do people want to hear at 6am?

“I would never dare second-guess what people want,” says Alan Metcalfe, the show’s producer, “it’s more what they wouldn’t want to hear. You don’t want to bombard them or annoy them. I know when I wake up first thing in the morning I don’t want to be shouted at, or I don’t want people to try too hard to entertain me. We’re very aware that at six o’ clock people are getting out of bed and some people are travelling to work and some people are doing the school run, and you just try to be empathetic to that.”
A Dublin institution for two decades now, The Morning Crew received an extreme makeover six months ago when Aidan Power and Claire Solan took over from long-time presenters Dermot and Dave.
“Dermot and Dave are 98fm stalwarts,” Metcalfe says, “and they’ve been hugely popular in the station, so the brief was very much take the baton and go with it. There was never any pressure to replace Dermot and Dave because they’re still here doing their thing. The brief was to provide a new morning show that was very much 98fm, but that had a new feel to it. Aidan and Claire are both Dubliners, and they’re good friends, so we were hoping that there’d be a little bit of everybody in them.”
While fans of Spin 1038 will recognise Solan’s voice, Aidan Power made his name in young people’s television – the Templeogue native has spent the last decade working on shows for RTÉ, BBC and Nickelodeon.
“It’s completely different how you interact with your audience on TV,” Power tells me. “The kind of relationship that I have with this audience is totally different. In some ways, it’s much preferable. We have a connection with quite a few listeners, we have regulars, we let them into our lives and they let us into their lives. There is a trust there, and it’s quite a nice feeling.
“I was quiet before I came here,” he admits, “very shy and private. And now I have to talk to everybody every day about things I never thought I’d tell anyone about my own life.”
That’s the thing about an interactive show like The Morning Crew. You can’t address a city for four hours every day without offering up morsels from your personal life.
Solan agrees. “Today was True Confessions Day,” she says, “and in order to get people to text in, I had to say ‘I confess that I stole someone else’s boyfriend’ or whatever. That’s what really prompts people to get in touch.”
“They very much are our friends in a sense,” Power adds, “and they’re very quick to tell us if they don’t like things. That’s the beauty of it. They don’t just nod along.”
And I’m guessing that some listeners have no qualms about telling their mouthy presenters when to shut the fuck up.
“Oh absolutely,” Power laughs, “and it’s great to have that immediacy.”
Today is Aidan, Claire and Alan’s 126th show and by some miracle, things are already running like clockwork. Aside from half a dozen regular features, they’ve just launched Mad Money – a competition which will eventually present one lucky listener with €100,000 in cold, hard cash. Then there’s Bieberwatch…
“It’s part of our job to reflect what’s going on in people’s lives,” Power tells me after the show, “and particularly what’s going on in Dublin. If there’s a gig on, if there’s a match on, we’ve got to harness that.”
The Morning Crew is now the number one breakfast show in the city, and if success has come swiftly, it’s probably because the team understands the type of humour that doesn’t fly before you’ve had your morning coffee.
“We were hoping that we’d provide something that was fun, rather than funny,” Metcalfe explains. “We didn’t want to come out of the gates trying to be comedians, we wanted to have fun in the morning and hope that people would have fun with us. And it’s worked.”
“There’s at least one thing a day that happens and you go ‘That was a good laugh!’” Power says. “If there’s always one item that really goes right, then that’s good enough for us. We’re rocking.”

The Morning Crew with Aidan and Claire is on weekdays from 6am to 10am on 98fm. You can follow the presenters on Twitter @Aidan98fm and @Claire98fm.