Assessing the sponge-related moral threat

RadioReview: A movie called 9 Songs was screened this week during the Jameson International Film Festival, and the film censor John Kelleher (Saturday View, RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) gave an insight into why, even though it contains, in the words of Irish Times film reviewer Donald Clarke, "mind-bogglingly explicit sex scenes", it slipped on to the screens without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Last year Kelleher's office commissioned market research into what people found objectionable in movies, and the biggest concern was drugs, followed by violence, racism, underage drinking, sex and - a very long way down the list - bad language. The first film censors "took the Ten Commandments as their guide", said Kelleher; "kissing took up a lot of their attention." But it's his view that his job revolves around "classification rather than censorship", and 9 Songs received a general release certificate because "sexually explicit is not the same as pornographic". He could have added that, in the case of this movie, viewers were more likely to be bored to death long before their morals had even an outside chance of being corrupted.

The idea that adults should have the right to decide, subject to the law, what they can see couldn't be more different from the moral gatekeeper approach taken by the first literary censors. Last Saturday marked the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the Irish Free State Literary Censorship board, and John Bowman delved through the archives to look at the impact of a board that, at its height, banned most of the classics of 20th-century literature, (Bowman Saturday, RTÉ Radio 1).

"Ireland was," said novelist John McGahern, "a profoundly anti-intellectual place. It's hard to imagine the life then from now; reading was not approved of, it was something you did in school, to get you on." The most interesting clip was from an interview Bowman himself conducted in 1974 with Judge Charlie Conroy, the then-chair of the Literary Censorship Board. The young Bowman nipped at the heels of the august-sounding Conroy like a terrier, trying to tease out the workings of a board whose ability to see pornography where none existed could only be matched today by the Christian right organisation in America that recently denounced SpongeBob SquarePants. For non-viewers, Bob is a yellow cartoon sponge whose best friend Patrick, a starfish, lives next door, and you'd want to have an imagination that requires professional help if you can see any sexual message in their nautical goings-on.

The only time in the interview that Conroy faltered was when Bowman observed that the board must have an appreciation of literature in order to do its job. It was as if the idea had never struck him before. "What is literature?" he replied, sounding rattled. "Nobody can tell what contemporary books are literature - only the test of time can tell what is literature."

Placido Domingo's voice has stood the test of time for more than 40 years, and listening to it made for the most relaxing radio hour of the week. Domingo was Eamonn Lawlor's guest for an hour-long interview (The Weekend Feature, Lyric fm, Sunday). It was a programme that would have appealed not only to opera buffs, but also to listeners whose only prior knowledge of Domingo began and ended with The Three Tenors. Domingo, whose motto is "if I rest, I rust", sounded disarmingly modest about his unparalleled achievements. He described himself as "a child of the theatre" whose parents were singers. He recalled a childhood spent on stage "doing little parts, distributing music, helping with the costumes, then moving on to playing the piano in the orchestra and, finally, I started singing".

He had previously announced that he would no longer sing his signature role of Othello, but he told Lawlor, "I still believe that there is a space maybe sometime to do Othello again, I like to think I have the possibility to do it again." Now aged 64, Domingo thinks he has maybe three seasons left before retirement.

If that interview was an uplifting and energising piece of radio, Times Roman, Times Modern (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) was the exact opposite. Newspapers have never sounded so dull. The broad subject of the first programme in the new six-part series was the fine line modern newspapers tread between being entertainment-driven and news-driven. There should have been endless sound-clips and examples, but instead we heard two clips from the 1980s from PP O'Reilly's 'What it says in the Papers' slot. As a presenter, Brenda Power brings a calm, clear intelligence to any discussion but, in this unfocused programme, there was a sense of guests Conor Brady, Cathal O Shanahan and Noirin Hegarty talking at each other from positions of great certainty until the half-hour was up.

Whatever about newspapers, maybe the next programme in the series will take the idea of radio as entertainment a little bit more seriously.