You don't need a divining rod to locate the main source for RTE Radio 1's new evening drivetime vehicle, Five Seven Live. You don't even need to have taken a term of Semiotics 101 to deconstruct its title; it's primary-school sums: just take away seven, and what's left? Five Live.
The Radio Ireland fans who reckon Myles Dungan is imitating Eamon Dunphy have, yet again, underestimated the opposition's vision. Five Seven Live has superficial similarities with The Last Word - its time-slot, and integration of extended sport and news under the control of one presenter - and it too is chasing a young, male audience. However, its would-be pacy style, cascades of voices (was that Joe Duffy doing the traffic report?) and even the jingles all draw heavily on the BBC's highly successful experiment in news-talk radio, Radio 5 Live - a station beloved by all and sundry in Montrose.
That defines the aspiration. It's very early days yet for Five Seven Live - so we can overlook the technical hitches - but could it be that smart, fast-paced current-affairs programming will prove to be the Holy Grail of Irish radio? Is it actually inimical to our conversational culture - and thus to our approach to broadcasting?
Take Myles Dungan: emerging from a whooshing barrage of sound effects that makes him sound like he's in the middle of a Hallowe'en fireworks display, he settles into an intelligent, Dunganesque interview with someone or another, with neither party rushing through the soundbites. The style is fine, as it almost always has been - but now it's at odds with the aural scenery, which makes him sound rather lackadaisical. Like it or not (mostly, I like it), an Irish broadcaster just can't ooze the sort of glibness that characterises British and US public discourse and still hope for respect in intelligent circles. So as Myles, Joe and Co meander around the issues, and the jingle enters its fourth refrain, maybe we should keep respecting the Irish way of speech and stop worrying about the neighbours.
Another element of the repositioning of Radio 1 is the way speech has pushed music out of the evening schedule. Even the earlyevening "specialist music" slot is often talk about music, supplemented by a few tunes. When that talk and those tunes are as good as in the last four weeks on Sounds Traditional (Thursday), who's complaining? Peter Browne put together a terrific series on the late, great piper Seamus Ennis, concluding with the reflections of his loving but hugely neglected grown-up children. The programmes treated both man and music with enormous sophistication and respect - including the respect of treating his personal failings with honesty. Yet again, the expectations of the uninitiated (me, anyway) about a traditional musician were shattered: Ennis could be as homespun as the next man at a session (he'd introduce a joke: "Didya ever hear this one gettin' said?") but he was really an academic of sorts, a wholly self-conscious collector of tradition and folklore, and an utter cosmopolitan. You would traditionally have used that word, cosmopolitan, to describe the music and life experience of Marianne Faithfull. Lately I'm not so sure. Interviewed on The Darkness Echoing (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday) she sounded less like the artist sans rontieres than Ireland's No 1 Luvvy. "You admire the poetry of Seamus Heaney?" Mary O'Donnell asked, leadingly.
"I greatly admire Seamus Heaney, and Marie Heaney, and all the little Heaneys," she enthused. Other literary and theatrical names peppered her conversation. No harm, I suppose; if anyone's entitled to a wee rest in the comfortable world of Irish celebrity, it's herself. FIFTEEN years ago, young Maura O'Halloran cast off such comforts as were going in Ireland at the time to become a Buddhist monk in Japan - just "one of the lads", as she wrote herself. Her enthusiasm threw up incongruities: "Nothingness, nothingness - it's like a jungle drum beating in my brain." Still, "the lads" were so impressed with her commitment that when she died in an accident, they decided she was an incarnation of the goddess of mercy and erected a statue to her in a Japanese town. Maureen Carroll's documentary, Soshin, Goddess of Mercy (RTE Radio 1, Thursday), pieced together memories of the sensuous free spirit who attended Trinity in the late 1970s with memoirs of her monastic life. It's an extraordinary story, very well told, and is repeated tomorrow evening.
Finally, to dependable Colm Keane. His Radio 1 documentaries on pop-stars-of-the-past generally answer the question "Where are they now?" with "just out of rehab, actually, and with a whole new outlook on life".
Early 1960s teen star Helen Shapiro was the subject of yesterday's excellent Walkin' Back To Happiness (a perfect Keane title); her post-stardom troubles didn't include addictions, but two divorces, financial disaster and even goitre more than compensated for that lack. And now? Keane springs the punchline with such nonchalance: she's a Jew for Jesus, duetting with Cliff Richard on spiritual little ditties. Brilliant.
