Peculiar use of children in ad for adult world

RadioReview: Ever watched small children while the radio's on? Great gobs of speech can go by without causing a flicker of interest, but once there's the sound of another child's voice on the airwaves, their little ears prick up immediately.

It helps to explain nine-year-old Little Becky's success on The Morning Crew (98FM) (the pint-sized radio star has a daily "prank the public" slot), or why the Friday quiz on The Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show (Today FM), where kids take part in what has to be most rigged quiz on radio, is such a hit.

That's why the creative decision to use children in the current domestic abuse awareness campaign is so peculiar. For anyone who hasn't heard the advertisement, the scenario is two small children acting out how they have heard their parents behaving in what is an abusive relationship. The child actors are superb - the girl sounds terrified - and the script is smart, but who is this ad aimed at?

Presumably it's to make adults more aware of the impact of domestic violence on children, but arguably the greatest impact - and a disturbing one at that - has to be on kids, who are likely to feel that because children are in the ad, it's in some way talking to them. So they are given information they don't need and worries they may not have. Radio is an adult medium - so a TV-type watershed wouldn't work. In a way that I absolutely believe was never the intention of the advertiser, it seems as exploitative of children as all those toy and fast food ads that are such a scourge.

A big radio story this week was the follow-up to Prime Time's investigation into underhand practices in an estate agency. The morning after the TV programme, Pat Kenny's producer dropped in his lap what should have been radio gold - one of the estate agents featured in the programme, Mark Kelly of Mark Kelly & Associates, whose customer-relations philosophy includes referring to buyers as "scabby purchasers", was in studio (Today with Pat Kenny, RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday). In what he must have hoped would be a damage limitation exercise, Kelly talked of being a "target of RTÉ Prime Time", which pulled out "this ugliness" and that the reporter who got the story had perpetrated an "unethical invasion into our company". He was left unchallenged and, as most of it was self-serving nonsense ("there's no point flogging a dead horse here, Pat"), Kenny sounded unusually disengaged with the story. Maybe he simply hadn't seen the programme and didn't realise what a jaw-dropper it was.

However, allowing Kelly's claim that the Prime Time reporter had been the one who instigated the supply of information from Simply Mortgages - the firm shown to have given the estate agency a spreadsheet on the finances of likely purchasers - was a let-off too far. Prime Time's reporter Oonagh Smyth got on the line to halt the radio spin and to shore up the oil slick coming from the estate agent. She sounded like a woman who couldn't quite believe she had to defend things that were clear for everyone to see in the programme.

Matt Cooper had a far more robust, man-of-the-people approach (The Last Word, Today FM, Wednesday), bringing Eddie Hobbs on to make the sensible point that until the relationship between all mortgage brokers and estate agents is investigated by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority and the Data Protection Commissioner - paper trails, e-mails between the two, etc - then consumers should simply bypass them when looking for funding.

Paul Gleeson and Tori Holmes had a funny and uplifting story to tell (Drivetime Sport with Des Cahill, RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday). Last year they set off to row across the Atlantic, not letting the tiny detail that they had never rowed before put them off. Their entertainment during the three months of solid rowing was a bag of letters they brought with them from friends and family. In one, Tori's dad advised his Canadian daughter: "Be nice to the little Irish fella, you may have to eat him."

The always enlightening Am I Normal? (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) tried to get to the bottom of exactly what a binge drinker is, and came up with some sobering statistics. Technically, in the case of a woman, it's someone who drinks twice the adult daily "allowance" of two units. But, what with larger glasses and stronger wine, it turns out that your classic binge drinker isn't some young one tottering down Temple Bar half-dressed and blue with the cold, full of dayglo alcopops; it's anyone who has a gin and tonic and two glasses of wine of an evening. Cheers.