Big Apple bargains in the mid-term break

RadioReview:  The standardised school year kicked in as usual on RTÉ with several top presenters invoking the kiddie-friendly part of their massive contracts and legging it for the mid-term break.

So more pillaging of the subs bench in Montrose - which is obviously getting a little bare because to find a replacement for Ryan Tubridy, RTÉ Radio 1 poached from Today FM's stand-ins. Is this a small island or what?

Two weeks ago, Anton Savage sat in for Matt Cooper on Today FM's drivetime show. This week he took Tubridy's place and he wasn't so much a replacement as an I-can't-believe-it's-not-Tubridy Doppelgänger. Their voices are so alike (though Savage sometimes lapses into the distinctive voice inflection of his mother, Terry Prone, which is downright spooky); they both exude the same slick self-confidence and both share a penchant for old-fogey faux naivety. He didn't sound right for Today FM's drivetime offering - with its pacey, current affairs-driven, less predictable structure - but it's no mean feat being able to step in effortlessly to such a key daytime slot as Tubridy's, so expect to hear a lot more of Savage on RTÉ.

It's also the week for raking over old chestnuts and even presenter Brenda Power sounded bored (Your Call, Newstalk 106-108, Wednesday) fielding calls from women who go to New York on pre-Christmas shopping trips. Caller after caller talked of cut-price outlet stores in New Jersey as nirvana - Tommy Hilfiger runners for toddlers for only $14 (€11), Brenda, you couldn't leave them behind. My personal favourite was the woman boasting that she spent her entire three-day trip to New York - the most exciting city on the planet - in Macy's department store. If ever there was a case for advising someone to get out more, this was it. By the time she and her friends left Macys, thousands of dollars lighter and laden down with "designer" brands, they were on first-name terms with several shop assistants. Power, a skilled and intelligent presenter must have been wondering how she ended up in such a vacuous programme and managed to mask her exasperation only partially as she asked the woman if, having gone all the way to New York, she wasn't tempted by that city's cultural offerings.

Last week when I tuned into Power's programme, the calls were from women telling their experiences of childbirth, and on Thursday the subject was "the great cleaning debate". When it was a Dublin station, Newstalk had a blokish image - but as women control the purse strings, advertisers are looking for female listeners in prime daytime slots. But with programmes like this, the now national Newstalk is wearing its desperation on its sleeve.

The highlight of the week was Private Passions (BBC Radio 3, Sunday), in which Michael Berkeley talks to a guest (in this case Colm Tóibín) about how music has influenced their work. Tóibín gently corrected Berkeley, who started with the cliche that Irish people must be musical because of our lilting voices.

"I'm not sure I notice a lilt," said Tóibín, who quickly steered the conversation out of begorrah territory and into literature with a brief but learned account of how music has been important to Irish writers from Joyce to Banville. He talked fluently of his own work, in which he strives to "find a rhythm for the inaction at the end, just to leave something there". The pieces of classical music Tóibín chose included Bizet's Au fond du temple saint from The Pearl Fishers, sung in all its scratchy, emotionally raw glory by John McCormack. It was a song he first heard as a schoolboy at the Wexford Festival Opera. When he was a teenager he met "doomed composer" Frederick May in a Dublin pub and was amazed to find when listening to his music that that such a wizened little old man could have produced such confident and beautiful work. He also talked, of course, about Henry James, who he discovered while temping as a file clerk in Wexford and who he first read while listening to his Joni Mitchell and Rolling Stones records. He soon tired of them and changed to a soundtrack of his mother's classical music.

Ronan Kelly, who this week picked up an international award for a programme in his Flux series, began a new observational, slice-of-life series, The Terrace (Wednesday, RTÉ Radio 1), in which he goes around neighbourhoods asking people about their experience of living there. He started on Dublin's Church Street with a gas bunch of women, one happily telling Kelly, "She's getting posh, she's getting a porch; she'll be charging admission next." It's a world away from transatlantic shopping trips.