IT WAS an antipodean week on radio - never a bad thing if it turns this small world of ours upside down. Kaleidoscope (BBC Radio 4 Friday) devoted its whole programme to the literary hoax concerning the Australian Ern Malley, a fictitious poet invented by two likely lads who felt that the arts scene in Australia was becoming too precious.
Ern's "sister" wrote to the editor of a leading avant garde arts journal, offering him some of the (conveniently dead) poet's work. The editor fell for the scam, brought out a special Ern Malley edition and commissioned painter Sidney Nolan to do the cover. The poetry included such memorable lines as: "We shall never be that verb perched on the sole Arabian tree." At least, I think that's what it was. When the true story emerged, those who had been taken in by it - which was just about everyone in the literary land of Oz - pulled the tattered shreds of their critics' credibility about them by maintaining that never mind who had written it, it was still great poetry.
The whole story had enormous potential for a bit of fun but the programme makers and those they interviewed treated the episode with such ponderous seriousness that the listener was given the clear impression that to actually laugh at it all would be akin to giggling at a funeral. The presenter was Fintan O'Toole and the programme was made by, appropriately enough - Fiction Factory Productions.
Seriousness of another sort was brought to us by Peter Mooney's programme Tired Horses in the Sun (RTE 1 Thursday) which took us into the fields of North Dublin to meet some of the young people - mostly boys - whose passion is horses. There's a lot of hard work involved in looking after a horse and a lot of work too to be done counteracting the received idea that these young urban cowboys don't look after their horses.
Some of them don't but James is not one of them. He's a softspoken, gentle sounding lad of 15 who dropped out of school: "School was crap. I hated it. I always just used to come round to the horses." His job as a French polisher starts at 8.30 a.m. and finishes at 5.30 p.m. which means that after he's fed and watered his horse there's little time to ride it - or jockey it, as the jargon has it. His parents help out financially. "A bag of feed costs £5.25 and you have to get stabling and there's the licence and the clip in the ear. A vet'll charge you £25 before they even look at your horse, and then they'll tell you the same as someone in the road'll tell you."
He couldn't manage at all if it weren't for the Pony Club: "We all put money in it every week to pay for vets' bills." Apart from wanting some decent stabling, James has a dream: "I'd like a nice bay mare with a nice height on her," he says, a little wistfully. For the time being, he has to make do with one of his mate's mares that comes running to him. "There's a lovely feel off her," he says, the quiet wonder still there in his boy's voice.
There was noisy wonder in the voice of Constance Hawke, the character in Peter Wolfs prizewinning play Volcano. (BBCRadio 4 Saturday) Constance, in 1850, midway into her life and her marriage, gets it into her stubborn mind to leave her mill owner husband and their eight children, and take herself off to New Zealand's North Island to climb a highly active volcano. Her husband prays, on his knees, that this humiliation might pass. It doesn't as 35 years of marriage should have taught him.
This was radio at its best - transporting us back and forwards in time, to, the volcanic depths of Constance's personality, long suppressed by an unwelcome marriage - marked by the clashing cacophony of wedding bells - to the ethereal meeting with a gallant suitor from her girlhood whose wild, romantic overtures she had not been brave enough to respond to. But it's never too late: "Live," she urges herself as she climbs to the rim of the fiery volcano, "or die in the attempt." The kind of story that might make you want to go out and climb a mountain or two yourself - real or metaphorical.
