Now summer has finished, radio can begin

Radio ReviewWas it really necessary for radio this summer to be so in tune with the weather? Dreary, enervating and, for the most part, relentlessly grey. What made it even worse was listening to the many presenter stand-ins and suspecting that the powers-that-be in the various stations couldn't be bothered to come up with new voices and were just looking for someone, anyone, to fill the spaces between the ad breaks.

How else do you explain Derek Davis sitting in for both Pat Kenny and Mary Wilson on RTÉ and, even stranger, Anton Savage moving between stations - in for Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ and this week for Matt Cooper on Today FM. Sure, Savage is a particularly bland broadcaster, but you'd still (just about) notice he was there, and anyway aren't these stations supposed to be rivals, nurturing their own stable of presenters to give their broadcasts a particular identity?

There were some imaginative stand-in choices over the months, however, particularly the roster of writers and performers who filled in for Tom Dunne on Pet Sounds on Today FM, and Twink for Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk.

In any case, the summer is over and autumn is here - we know this because the schoolbags are out, AA Roadwatch is once again talking about congestion and tailbacks, and Pat Kenny said it on Monday. Back in studio after his teacher-length hols, he opened his programme by thanking Tom McGurk for "holding the fort" (no mention of Derek? nuff said), and then launched directly into a scoop, with Brendan Howlin ending the weekend's speculation by announcing that he wouldn't be going for the Labour Party leadership. But that was the high point of the week's show.

The low point of Damien O'Reilly's seriously downbeat Liveline(RTÉ Radio 1) stint - no call too trivial or miserable to go on air - was on Tuesday, when he asked a blind caller if he was driving.

The only summer series that has really delivered has been Myles Dungan's Highway 101(RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday), his weekly interview with a fascinating roster of people who live in California, from ex-CIA operative Bob Baer to the inspirational restaurateur Alice Waters. This week, the penultimate show in the series, he talked to Inez Fung, a world expert on global warming, and the conversation was a fine example of how a good interview with an interesting person will always be engaging - even if you have never heard of that person before. She explained one of her own eureka moments, when maths suddenly made sense. She was a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), bored and discouraged by the tedium of learning long and apparently meaningless equations, when her teacher, with a few paper cups, a wheel and a jug of water, created a simple model and then showed that each action - from the hole in the cup, to the flow of the water - could be expressed in a mathematical equation. Once Fung could see how maths could be applied to the everyday, her interest was fuelled, and she has gone on to have a stellar career in science. Hopefully some of our maths educators, worried at the national slump in maths grades and looking for a way to engage students, were listening in.

A pure joy was Aedín Gormley's interview with Ava Astaire-McKenzie ( Green Room Cinema, Lyric FM, Saturday). Fred Astaire's daughter talked in a gentle, reflective, unstarry way about her father's career, growing up in Hollywood, and her long relationship with Ireland.

She has owned a house in west Cork for more than 30 years and her dad's favourite place to buy shoes was Cork - that's some endorsement from one of the world's legendary hoofers. Gormley recalled the famous audition that Fred did at RKO studios when he was trying to break out of a dying vaudeville and into movies. "Can't sing, can't act, slightly balding but can dance a little," was the famous verdict and he was dismissed - an anecdote that has given hope to many a would-be actor for decades. Ava had a small correction. It was, she said, "also dances" - but the put-down, which didn't faze Astaire at all, could still have been devastating.

The interview was punctuated with songs from Astaire's many movies, each one more familiar than the next, including the classic Fred and Ginger song and dance routine Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, which includes a lengthy tap-dancing sequence. Tap-dancing on the radio? In a weird way more listenable than most of this summer's offerings.