Consider some of the imaginative people and programming that used to make Radio 1 worth your while: there was John Kelly, now blossoming in obscurity on Lyric FM; there was Rattlebag, which, whatever its shortcomings, at least took a wideranging and egalitarian view of the arts; and there was Val Joyce, without whom Late Date is just not Late Date, I don't care what anyone says. Val Joyce used to ramble on in a pleasingly soporific way about the saints; John Creedon falls over himself trying to be one. (It is important to be nice, John, but it's not that important. ) Now, after 11 years of some of the most eccentric, provocative, compelling and witty radio on any station anywhere, RTE in its wisdom has decided to axe Tonight with Vincent Browne.

Browne has his detractors (noticeably among those members of the fourth estate who have had the pleasure of working for him), but at least he seems to realise that the news is meaningless unless you consider the ideas it implies.

Yes, the programme was sometimes monotonous . . .

after all, you can only get so many dutiful chuckles out of a nightly tribunal re-enactment. And yes, it was also sometimes misguided . . . consider especially those awful, back-slapping, outside broadcast specials, when the whole team went to west Limerick or somewhere and people played the accordion and Browne tried to show that he could walk with kings without losing the common touch.

But generally, Tonight with Vincent Browne was the one place where you could expect to hear current affairs discussed at some distance from the pervasive mainstream, and discussed, typically, by people who actually have some philosophical conviction . . . rational or not . . . about the subject they're discussing.

And apart from all that . . . apart from the grievous loss to the armchair ideologues among us . . . what's a radio critic to do without Browne's weeknight fodder?

Are we to be reduced to regarding George Hook as a radical? Perhaps Browne will turn up on Newstalk or, wonder of wonders, on Drivetime.

Meanwhile, RTE's paragons of spectacular blandness, smugness and orthodoxy . . . the Pat Kennys, the Gerry Ryans, the Derek Mooneys . . . remain in place, hoovering up the licence money and taking perhaps mercifully long summer holidays.

In other changes to the autumn schedule, we are to have a new evening arts programme presented by poet and Aosdana member Vincent Woods. We can only hope the emphasis here will not be on poetry, in spite of the host's credentials. One programme a week in which people talk in a cringy way about "making poems" (The Poetry Programme with Pat Boran on Saturdays) is plenty.

This is to replace Paraic Breathnach's nightly arts programme, The Eleventh Hour, which is way too far up itself and will be no great loss. Breathnach is to get a weekly theatre programme instead in which presumably he will be free to bang on about the dramatic arts and wishy-washy story-telling as much as he wants.

At the time of going to press, RTE had not yet announced the details of its replacement for Browne.

There is to be a nightly politics and current affairs programme at 11pm, and it's anyone's guess who the host will be. Derek Davis? Marty Whelan? We await this announcement sulkily and bitterly and with a stubborn unwillingness to be cheered up.