IT MUST be hard on the poor old cigarette companies, being the culture's official repository all corporate evil. Sure, other capitalists get complained about like, say, when they abandon Tallaght but they are presumed human, approachable, if perhaps a bit single minded in their adherence to the bottom line.

The purveyors of the cancer ticks, however, can't buy a friend, ok at the response to the big Phillip Morris adverts in Wednesday's newspapers, which argued that the data on passive smoking indicate its risk is so tiny as to be meaningless.

Morning Ireland and the Pat Kenny Show (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) didn't see this as a spur for debate. No, the predictable Cancer Society and health board types were hauled in for some soft questions and a chance to hurl scorn at the fag merchants' cynicism.

Now, their points about cigarette smoking around small kids are well worth making. But I still haven't heard a word (or a figure) to convince me that there is real danger to adults from other people's smoke unlike, just for example, the health risk from pesticides, food additives, many legal drugs and vehicle emissions. If I step into Fleet Street for a chat with one of my smoking colleagues who are prevented from lighting up in most of this building the 46A bus is doing me far more damage than his cigarette (and note that US cities are considering a smoking ban in public parks).

I've no time for Phillip Morris in spite of its small contribution to my salary but let's save our concern, and spare some sympathy, for its real victims the nicotine addicts who are being damaged by the product it pushes. And let's have the courage, too, to spread our anger to targets that aren't so easy.

But enough of these heavy, choking doses of the everyday. Two programmes last week from two of RTE's old masters reminded us that radio can be and often is so very, very much more.

A serious argument could be made that the medium is a uniquely powerful, startling vehicle of transcendence, precisely because it appears to make relatively limited demands on our attention. Drive the car, wash the dishes, do your homework, walk in the park, close your eyes to sleep no book, film, TV programme, Web page or newspaper is going to slip in at the margins of your activity.

Ah, but if the radio is on, you can be instantly, often surprisingly lifted to a different place all of you, from your tingling scalp or tear filled eyes to your tapping feet or curling toes. Even a nerd like me who takes notes while listening to tapes of programmes can be stopped in my tracks, a painful or joyous memory suddenly jogged, a crazy story evoked.

Or maybe, with the two programmes we're considering, you find yourself thinking about the meaning of life or the nature of God and you put away the dishes without drying them properly.

John Quinn's A String of Pearls (RTE Radio 1 Thursday) is a new series with a distinct advantage, having been some 20 years in the making. You might say that a veteran producer's pick of his best material has a definite ring of summer radio about it and you'd be right. Still, this is such good stuff, and apparently the making of the series has forced Quinn to do vital archiving of his work, so there is really not a lot of point in complaining.

Especially when he starts the show with an excerpt from his fine series of interviews with folk musicians Ewan McColl and Peggy, Seeger people with such a quiet dignity and respect for the genuine pains and pleasures of this world that Quinn's interviews should be part of a recovery programme for post modernists stuck in the numbing cycle of image and irony. It could begin with McColl's beautiful, not a dry eye in the house song, The Joy of Living.

Somehow, A String of Pearls was able to follow that, not least with Sean O Faolain reading from his memoirs and Anne Marie Horan doing an inch perfect April Fool's, Day piss take, as a US educational, theorist calling for a return to Spartan pedagogy.

The only thing that didn't quite achieve lift off here was a few minutes from the splendid Final Day, Quinn's fly on many walls documentary about the atmosphere at the 1988 All Ireland football final a programme that needs more time than it got here to accumulate its effect.

Another All Ireland final figured in John McKenna's Taking photographs of God (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). Apparently there is no commentary to explain the choice of material in this series, Donegal's victory over Dublin in 1992 and/or Micheal O Muircheartaigh's commentary on same, constitutes a glimpse of the divine Ditto Gabriel Egan in Genoa for the World (up shoot out. (Or is this some radio in joke, since both occasions saw these normally spot on commentators lose themselves to the moment?)

Anyway, we'll give MacKenna's programme the benefit of the doubt, since it ties together some pretty good music and other wordless sounds with a range of comments by unnamed people about how they imagine God. For many listeners it's bound to provide a few moments of transcendence.