Olympian feats far from a treat

Radio Review: For one hallucinatory moment I expected to hear Des Cahill interviewing GAA teams in Queens or Woodside - with so many of his colleagues in the US, it didn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility that Cahill would crop up talking about the parish and the vote of the Irish.

RTÉ did an Olympian job covering the presidential election in that the reporting team at times seemed even bigger - and that truly is saying something - than the one sent to the Athens games.

There was the station's former US correspondent, Mark Little, its current one, Carole Coleman and to complete the trio, the future incumbent, Robert Short. A couple of others popped up on TV, and on radio we also had Philip Boucher-Hayes booming away and a highly excited-sounding Áine Lawlor, both doing progressively more inconsequential feature items. The snippet most memorable for its awfulness was on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Mon-Fri) when Lawlor went to Allentown - cue a fade-in of the Billy Joel song of the same name, a crime at that hour of the morning - for yet another in a series of tedious down-home-with-the-folks interviews. Why was it assumed day after day, programme after programme, that listeners would be so deeply fascinated in the individual voting intentions of churchgoers in Florida or the workings of the electoral college or what an obscure academic in Ohio thinks about it all - half of America couldn't even be bothered voting? More talk does not necessarily mean more knowledge.

By late Wednesday morning, Boucher-Hayes (Today with Pat Kenny, RTÉ Radio 1) was commenting on "the media" getting it wrong when "they" predicted that a high turnout would mean a victory for Kerry - as if he wasn't part of it all. Though in fairness, maybe it was exhaustion speaking, he had put in rather a long shift.

Morning Ireland even broadcast most of its programme from the US on Wednesday in a pointless, because-we-can example of overkill. Its presenter, Áine Lawlor, normally a cool, measured interviewer, got so caught up in the whole thing that she was apt to say things such as "it looks like we have a president". Well yes, "we" do have a president going for second term and we'll be hearing her inauguration on radio next week.

Other stations lacking the resources to fund a big-team approach still managed to do a comprehensive, informed, nicely distanced job, most notably local station Newstalk 106. Its foreign correspondent, Karen Coleman, fed sharp, opinionated reports to the station's three main broadcasters, George Hook, Eamon Dunphy and Damien Kiberd, who then rounded out the coverage with a mix of studio discussion and down-the-phone interviews. Kiberd, who was clearly as electioned-out as I was, set the tone of his post-result analysis on Wednesday with "what right have we to tell the American people what to think?".

The most succinct explanation for the Republican victory came from Sean Quinn (Tonight with Vincent Browne, RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) who suggested that the mobilisation of the pro-Bush vote was down to the three Gs - guns, God and gays.

The election and the coverage of the bizarre horse-doping story sidelined the harrowing stories of the two Irish women, Margaret Hassan and Annetta Flanigan, being held captive in Iraq and Afghanistan - though their plight can't be far from anyone's mind. Matt Cooper (The Last Word, Today FM, Wednesday) interviewed Yvonne Ridley, the British journalist who was kidnapped some years ago in Afghanistan. It was an interesting interview because it turned in an unexpected way. It started off predictably enough with questions as to what Annetta Flanigan might be feeling as a captive and how her family is dealing with it before, in a surprising twist, Ridley revealed she had converted to Islam two years ago. During her captivity, she promised her captors that if she was released she would study the Koran - at the time, she said, she was so terrified she would have promised them anything. But she kept her word and found in the Koran a religion that, she says, is peace-loving and pro-women but one that has been "demonised". It didn't help her argument that the following item on the programme was a report on the revenge killing of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh for his depiction of the treatment of women in Islam.

And on the subject of demons, Mel Brooks, in London for the opening of the stage version of his movie, The Producers, gave advice on how to deal with them to stand-in presenter John Wilson on Front Row (BBC Radio 4, Mon-Fri). "If you manage to make them look ridiculous," said the man who wrote a musical about Hitler, "you've won."