Throwing punches as the feathers fly

RadioReview: Irish chef Richard Corrigan would rather chew his own arm off than eat a battery-farmed chicken. I didn't see his interview on Friday's Late Late Show but I know from listening to the radio that he said as much, at length and in great detail.

Such is the weird crossover nature of Irish broadcast media that all the points he raised were refuted, not to his face on the TV programme, but on the radio on Monday with Pat Kenny being the common denominator.

An Irish chicken producer did a good job of defending his operation and his produce on Kenny's radio programme (Today with Pat Kenny, RTÉ Radio 1, Monday) but a head-to-head between Corrigan and the chicken producer, with the two men in one studio, would have made more sense.

For Corrigan, the Parma area of northern Italy must be a kind of nirvana - it's certainly an example for Irish artisan food producers. The first in a new series, One Planet: Small is Beautiful, (BBC World Service, Thursday), visited the area in which small producers are big business. The real Parma ham - air-dried pork known as prosciutto - is made by only 200 producers who have been using the same techniques for generations.

The only additive is salt and the massive pig legs are hung for two years in vast hangar-type buildings so that the air can dry them. Collectively, these mountainy artisans have enough muscle to employ teams of inspectors and legal eagles to ensure that no other ham producer can label their meat "prosciutto di Parma". They've fought for their premium brand and blue crown trademark, right up through the courts including a landmark case in the European Court where they succeeded in stopping a British supermarket chain slicing and packaging their ham.

The series, which is going to feature small-scale producers with big success stories to tell, takes its name from Small is Beautiful by German economist EF Schumacher, a 1973 book whose subtitle, "Economics as if people mattered", is so sweet and un-Celtic Tigerish, it could be filed away in an Irish library in the fairytale section.

Imagine Richard Corrigan's face if he was presented with a chicken tikka baguette from the local petrol station and you get an idea of how sick-making Jimmy McGee's performance was on The Tubridy Show, (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday). He had, as we heard on Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) signed up for what he described himself as "a gig" involving an interview with ex-boxer Mike Tyson in front of an audience who had each paid €200 for the privilege.

To put everyone in the picture, a spokesperson from the Rape Crisis Network reminded us that the boxer, a convicted rapist, once said that the "best punch he ever threw was at his wife". McGee, apparently caught unawares that there should be any furore at all about the Tyson gig in a Dublin hotel - and his participation in it - sounded a little abashed.

All that had changed by the time he came into the Tubridy studio on Monday where the veteran sports commentator, while claiming he wasn't an apologist for the ear-muncher, gushed about the man. Tyson is "extraordinarily bright" he said, and he seemed thrilled - in that toe-curling, parochial way - that the American boxer actually said "céad míle fáilte".

"That's the thing about us as a nation," puffed McGee, "we realise there's two sides to every story". The programme gave him 10 minutes of airtime to talk about one of his earners - and maybe try to take back the ground he had lost in the face of Finucane's questioning on Saturday. Tubridy at least sounded uncomfortable with his colleague's take on Tyson and he tried to interrupt with the other wife-beater/rapist/thug side, but he was too lightweight to land even the softest punch.

An ambitious new 240-part series, A Short History of Ireland (Radio Ulster), began on Monday with the five-minute programmes broadcast daily. Historian Dr Jonathan Bardon of Queen's University Belfast is the scriptwriter and he started at the beginning with the arrival of the first plants and animals, and the ice age. The performers, Frances Tomelty, James Greene and Richard Dormer, have a wonderful way of shoehorning facts into the short programmes and of making history seem alive and accessible.

A bit like Bono's performance at the launch of the Beckett Centenary Festival in Dublin this week. Snatches of what he called his homage to Beckett were heard on several programmes but Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday) played it in full. It's worth a listen to hear his hilarious delivery and fantastic wordplay, including the bit where Ryanair trolley dollies neatly segue into people living and dying on trolleys. It wasn't Waiting for Godot, but for most of us it was a darn sight funnier.